And the two green eyes disappeared. The dogs, who had been sitting on their haunches looking up with every nerve tense, all of a sudden whimpered and trembled, waiting to see what would happen.
The next thing I knew there was a crashing among the tree limbs. Then there was the sound of more crashing and still more. And down through the branches of that thousand-limbed giant maple tree came a brownish-gray object that for an instant looked half big enough to be a bear. And then it stopped falling. It must have caught hold of a branch and held on.
Big Jim’s dad’s hired man’s flashlight was shining right square on it, and I got my first glimpse of a wild coon when it is scared and mad at the same time. Its large ears were as big as Mixy’s. Its face was lighter than its furry gray-brown body, and I could see the white marking on its frightened face. Its nose was pointed, and its stomach was light colored. Above its eyes it was dark white, and below them it was light black. Just for a minute I had that glimpse of its face, for then it tried to scramble back up the tree, and that’s when I got a good look at its tail.
Poetry, who is good in oral problems in arithmetic, said, “Oh, boy! Look! It’s got—one, two, three, four, five, six, seven rings on its tail!” Of course, he couldn’t have counted them that fast. Rings on a coon’s tail are black fur rings that run all around its tail. The tail, except for the rings, is all a pale yellowish-gray-brown color, like the coon itself.
I wondered if it had been shot. Then I thought maybe it had been, because it seemed to lose its grip on the limb. It slipped and came down the tree trunk to the ground right in the middle of the excitement of barking dogs and jabbering boys and hollering men, who were scolding the dogs fiercely to keep them from leaping in and tearing the coon’s beautiful fur to shreds so that it wouldn’t be worth a cent to a furrier.
But you can’t always get a dog—or a boy—to obey you right on the second, so those dogs, including Jeep, leaped into the fight. But old Mr. Coon—or Mrs. Coon, whichever it was—certainly was very much alive. It backed itself up against that tree and scratched out with both front feet the way Mixy does when she’s mad. It hissed and spit and bit. It snapped at the dogs, and the next thing I knew I saw that the end of one of Old Bawler’s dark, gray-blue ears was bleeding. Evidently the coon had caught her ear in its teeth, and Old Bawler, jerking away, had had her ear torn.
I tell you, the fight was on for good. There was a lot of noise—very, very fast noise—of men and boys shouting to each other and to the dogs and differently pitched and very excited dog voices barking at the coon and at the excitement.
But a fight like that never lasts long. Anyway, this one didn’t because something happened that Circus’s dad said hardly ever happens. That crazy coon—or wise coon, I don’t know which—did something that only one out of a hundred coons ever do. It all of a sudden curled up into a ball, just like a possum—just as the possum we had caught had done—and pretended to be asleep or dead, maybe waiting for us all to leave it alone so it could run lickety-sizzle to get someplace and get away.
The dogs were surprised. They backed off and stood looking down at that silent bunch of gray-brown fur and panted. Their tongues hung out. Spittle ran out of their mouths, and their sides heaved fast.
Then Circus’s dad and the hired man scolded them hard, and for a minute they obeyed.
“Aw, shucks,” Poetry said. “It’s another possum!”
“It is not!” Circus said. “It’s just pretending to be dead.”
And it was.
Circus’s dad had his dogs trained pretty well, or they would have spoiled the coon’s fur. But he used his fiercest, very gruff voice on them, and they slunk back behind him as if they’d been licked, the way dogs do when they feel sad. Circus’s dad then caught them by their collars, and they behaved themselves, although they were still like racehorses waiting for a chance to dive in there and make short work of that coon. But it isn’t any fun fighting somebody that won’t fight.
Anyway, the rest of what happened right then isn’t very interesting, only sad. Little Jim looked away, and I even did myself because I didn’t want to see the coon killed.
Afterward, when we were all sitting in the shelter of a bluff with a nice friendly fire crackling and the flames leaping up toward the black sky, I sat beside Little Jim on a dry log we’d found under a ledge and watched the men skin the coon. I felt sad inside, but at the same time I remembered that Circus’s family would have some money now to spend for food and clothes and things they needed.
Little Jim caught at my arm again, the way he always does when he wants to tell me something, so I leaned toward him, and this is what he said: “There’s a verse in the Bible which tells about after Adam and Eve had sinned that the Lord Himself made coats of skins and clothed them.”
I remembered reading about that in my Bible storybook, but I had forgotten it.
Dragonfly, who was sitting on a knot on the log on the other side of me, said, “What made Him do that? Didn’t Adam and Eve have any other clothes?”
I’d never thought about that, so I said, “I guess not.”
Poetry, who also had been listening and whose parents studied the Bible a lot, said, “If He dressed them in coats of skins, then some animal had to be killed.”
I sat there thinking, watching the fire with its long, hurrying flames, and the sparks that were shooting up like yellow raindrops falling up instead of down. I kept watching the men skin the coon and wondered why animals had to be killed at all and why anybody had to have pain and such things as toothaches, and why there were such things as dentists in the world who wanted to fill people’s teeth on Saturday morning at eight o’clock.
Thinking of the dentist and of my teeth reminded me of my lunch, which I’d managed to carry all that time without eating any of it and without dropping it, and I was very hungry.
Pretty soon the coon was skinned, and its beautiful fur pelt was folded into the big pocket of Dan Browne’s hunting coat. And then Circus’s dad said to all of us, “And now, boys, we are ready for the surprise—or are you ready?”
That word surprise was one I had always liked. I was ready for whatever was coming next. I was also hungry.
Then Mr. Browne picked up the carcass of the coon and walked over to the fire with it. “Anybody hungry?” he asked.
What? I thought. He isn’t going to cook—
I was wrong, though, in what I had been thinking, and I saw something then that made me like Circus’s dad a lot better. He stood there by the fire only a few seconds. Then he walked over to a little, bare, wild rosebush, which in the summertime would have had beautiful red roses on it, and I watched him.
He stood there with his back to us, and I could hear him sort of mumble, “Little old coon, I’m sorry, but you really had been eating too many of our chickens. Thank you, anyway, for your nice warm fur, which I’ve taken away from you. It will help me support my large family …”
I couldn’t hear any more just then. But when I saw that great big strong man lay the coon’s body beside the rosebush and turn around, I knew that he was a kind person.
There wasn’t any smile on his face for a minute. Then he turned away quick and called out to all of us, “Everybody ready?”
We all were, and said so.
“Follow me,” Dan Browne said, “and I’ll show you.”
I could hardly wait to see what the surprise was going to be.
5
I always had a hard time waiting for things to happen when I wanted them to happen right away. It wasn’t very long, though, until all of us were walking along happily through the woods, following Sugar Creek, following the path that leads toward the old sycamore tree.
You’ll remember that a lot of important things had happened around that sycamore tree. You’ll remember that while the Sugar Creek Gang had been away on an airplane trip there had been a very bad electrical storm. We were up in the plane at the time, riding above the storm on our way to Chicago. When we came back from
our trip and were playing around in the woods one sunny afternoon, Dragonfly, who is always seeing things first, had seen a big, ragged, jagged hole in the side of the hill right at the roots of the old sycamore tree.
Lightning had struck that tree and ripped its way right down the trunk, leaving a large, long, ugly, splintered white gash all the way to the roots and into the ground, where it opened up a cave. Well, you know the rest of that story—how we went into the cave entrance and found that it was shaped something like the inside of the mouth of a large catfish. You maybe remember also that one dark night we saw a ghost—or something—there.
There was a rock that was a hidden door, and when it was moved we had seen a black opening into the hill, which looked as if maybe it didn’t have any end at all. That cave turned out to be a very long one.
We all went inside and—but that’s another story, which I’ve already written, and I want to tell you now about what happened when all of us, including Jeep, the picayune, went inside.
Pretty soon we were beside the base of the sycamore tree, not far from the famous Sugar Creek swamp, looking at a big canvas curtain hanging in front of the cave’s entrance.
“Looks like somebody’s been here,” Dragonfly said to me.
Somebody had, for there was an envelope pinned onto the curtain.
Everybody stopped, and Big Jim, being the leader of our gang, was delegated to see what the envelope had in it. He stood there with all our eyes fastened on him and unpinned the envelope, which had written on the outside “To the Sugar Creek Gang.”
“Go ahead and read it!” Circus’s dad said.
Big Jim opened the envelope and, with me holding a flashlight for him so he could see, he read. While he was reading, I noticed that the downy fuzz was on his upper lip again. I remembered he had just shaved it off less than two months before.
“Read it out loud,” Dan Browne said.
And Big Jim did. His half-man’s voice read:
“Members of the Sugar Creek Gang: Attention! A special sassafras tea party has been planned for you tonight at the Nest. Come in the back way!”
When I looked over Big Jim’s elbow, I noticed that the note was written in Old Man Paddler’s trembly handwriting, and he had signed his name, “Seneth Paddler.”
“Whoopee!” Poetry cried. He was always hungry and always in for a good time. But we all felt the same way. We could hardly wait till we got inside that cave and were on our way along its narrow passageway up to Old Man Paddler’s cabin.
We had our lanterns and flashlights, which would make it easy for us to see. In a jiffy we were inside the catfish-shaped mouth and looking through the hole where the big stone used to be. The inside of the cave was lined with rock as far back as we could see.
We started moving along Indian style, one at a time. The passage was too narrow most of the way for two of us to walk beside each other. Poetry, all by himself, had a hard time getting through one narrow place.
The dogs were following along behind. They had strange expressions on their faces as if they didn’t know what in the world was happening and were going to follow us to see if it was safe. Jeep was acting sort of scared. Maybe he’d never been in a cave before in all his dog life.
I noticed that each dog wore a leather collar with a brass plate with “County Dog License” printed on it and also a number. Nobody in Sugar Creek County could keep a dog without a license. If any dog was found running loose without a license, it could be picked up by an officer and put into a dog jail, which is called a dog “pound.” And unless somebody came and claimed it and paid for a license for it, that would be the end of that dog.
Well, we were walking along, walking along, walking along. Gravel and sand covered the solid rock floor. Now and then we had to stoop to get under a low place. Once we had to squeeze through a very narrow place between two rocks that jutted out.
All this time, though, in spite of the surprise, I kept remembering that I was supposed to stay at Old Man Paddler’s cabin when we got there. I had to be there by eleven o’clock, whether the night of hunting was over or not. But it wasn’t anywhere near eleven yet, so I joined in and had a good time.
Picayune Jeep stayed so close to Dragonfly, as though he was afraid, that it reminded Poetry of a poem by Robert Louis Stevenson. He quoted it:
“I have a little shadow
that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him
is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from my heels
up to my head,
And I see him jump before me
as I jump into my bed.”
Then Poetry, in a mischievous mood, started all over again and said, so that Dragonfly could hear him,
“I have a little picayune
that goes in and out with me,
And what can be the use of him
is more than I can see.
He is very, very like me from my heels
up to my head—”
And that was the end of the poem, on account of Dragonfly and Poetry’s getting into a scuffle.
We kept walking along, everybody feeling fine, until pretty soon we came to a heavy wooden door.
Big Jim knocked while the rest of us waited. None of us were scared, because we’d been there before. I was thinking of that kind old man who liked kids so well and knew how to make them happy and how to make them better. He knew how to make a boy want to be a better boy.
I felt something tugging at my arm, and it was Little Jim again, wanting to tell me something. I leaned down and listened. And do you know what that short-legged guy with his little mouselike voice said? All this time he must have been thinking about the coon back there and the story in the Bible about Adam and Eve and how God had put coats of skins on them. Do you know what he said?
He said, “Bill, when we get upstairs into Old Man Paddler’s cabin and are all sitting around his fireplace drinking sassafras tea and eating lunch, do you care if I ask him to tell us—” He stopped.
“Ask him to tell us what?” I said, looking down into his face, while Big Jim knocked again on the wooden door, trying to make somebody in the house hear us.
Little Jim finished his sentence. “Do you care if I ask Old Man Paddler why Adam and Eve had to have clothes made out of the skins of an animal?”
Just then we heard a sound as if somebody was coming down a stairway, and then a trembling, old, kind voice asked, “Who’s there?”
Big Jim called through the door, “It’s the Sugar Creek Gang!”
Wow! Those words sent a thrill through me. I liked the Sugar Creek Gang and was proud to be a member of such a great gang of boys, even if I wasn’t so very much myself.
All the time I was waiting for the old man to answer and for him to open the door, I was trying to remember something, something I was supposed to do or say.
What is it? I asked myself.
I searched every corner of my mind, but I couldn’t remember.
Then I heard a sound on the other side of the door, like a steel bar being slid out of its place. Next I heard the sliding of a bolt and the turning of a doorknob. The big oak door swung open, and there we were, all of us looking into the cellar of the old man’s cabin.
It didn’t take us long to get inside and up the wooden stairway and into his warm house, where there was a roaring fire in the fireplace and hot water on the little wood-burning stove, with the teakettle singing and steam streaming out its spout.
Big Jim put the trapdoor down again, and we all sat on chairs or on the floor, wherever we wanted to.
I guess I never realized how cold I was until I got inside that warm cabin and felt the heat on my face and hands. Dragonfly was sitting beside me on the other half of a cane-bottomed chair. The fire was crackling, making a very friendly noise. The fire and the singing teakettle were almost like music. I looked down at Little Jim, sitting close to Big Jim, who was leaning against a log beside the fireplace. It looked as if
Little Jim was listening to the teakettle and the fire. He was also watching the hungry flames eat up the logs. Everybody was talking to everybody, with nobody listening to the rest of us, like the women of our church do sometimes when they come to our house to sew.
I didn’t have much of a chance to get in any of the words I wanted to say, so I just looked around the room at the different things. On the stove beside the teakettle was a large steaming kettle holding some red woody roots of the sassafras shrub, which grew in special places along Sugar Creek. The hot water was already red, and I knew the tea was ready for us to drink—maybe had been for a long time.
I looked around at all of us. Remembering that Old Man Paddler had named his cabin “The Nest,” a brand-new name that he’d just lately decided to give it, I got to thinking about all of us crowded into that one room, sitting or lying down in every direction. We were a strange-looking nestful of birds, all right. Poetry with his barrel-shaped body in its light-brown leather jacket still had on his green corduroy cap and high leather boots with rubbers on them. Right beside me—so close to me, in fact, that I had to hold onto the back of the chair with my right hand to keep from falling off—was Dragonfly with his spindly legs and his crooked nose, which I could see as plain as day in the mirror above the table right in front of me. He was grinning all around at things, and his two big incisors were shining, reminding me of eight o’clock tomorrow morning. There was also Little Jim, who had taken his cap off—he always remembered to do that when he was in a house, without being told to. There were mittens of different sizes and kinds lying all around everywhere—sixteen of them, in fact—and with Circus’s dad and Big Jim’s dad’s hired man and Old Man Paddler himself, we certainly made a crowded nestful of hungry birds.
Some of the other things I saw as I looked around were very interesting. On the wall above Old Man Paddler’s clean-looking bed at the farther end of the cabin near the narrow stairs that led up to the loft—where I had never been but wished I could go sometime—was an ancient flintlock with a very long barrel—the kind of rifle they used in the days when America had its Civil War. Hanging beside it was a cow’s horn, called a powder horn, which was what they used it for—to carry gunpowder.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 4