So I started to the barn to help him, still thinking about the camping trip we’d all been invited to take and wondering if I would get to go.
“Don’t you feel well?” Dad asked me as I was moving slowly around in the barn, doing different things.
“Kind of worn out,” I said, and the dust which I’d been stirring up with a pitchfork over our corn elevator made me sneeze twice. “Maybe I’ve got hay fever,” I said.
“That’s the straw dust you’re stirring up there,” Dad answered.
“Stirring up?” I asked, but I knew he was right. You just couldn’t fool Dad, I thought.
He stopped what he had been doing, which was something or other way up at the other end of the barn, and called to me, “Next week, we’ll take you to the doctor and have him give you a test to see what makes you sneeze so much.”
“Some people sneeze a lot because the rainy weather makes so many different kinds of flowers and weeds grow and so much pollen, maybe,” I yelled back in a tired voice.
Dad ignored my educational remark and sent me up in the haymow to throw down some alfalfa for our brindle cow. While I was up there, I stirred up the dust in the hay and sneezed three or four times real loud.
Dad called up to me and said, “What’s the matter, Bill? Are you hurt?”—which made me feel foolish.
The sun was shining through a crack in the barn. I peeped out, as I nearly always do when I’m up there, and looked around at different things such as the rows of newly hoed potatoes in the garden. I could hardly believe my eyes when I noticed that it was only three rows I’d hoed. It had seemed like at least seven.
Then I heard voices downstairs, and my heart almost jumped into my mouth. One of them was Barry Boyland’s laughing voice. He and Dad were talking and saying they were glad to see each other.
I listened for all I was worth, and this is what I heard: “Well, Barry, we have to do something for him—he’s getting the hay fever so badly. Maybe a trip North would be good for him.”
And then Barry laughed the funniest laugh I’d heard in a long time. He said, “Sure, I understand. It’s the same story wherever I go—the boys of the Sugar Creek Gang are all sneezing pretty bad—all except Dragonfly, who is better this year than last. But his parents said he could go too.”
Then Dad and Barry laughed long and loud at each other as if it was funny or something.
But I didn’t care at all. I was so tickled inside that a loud scream of happiness jumped up into my throat, and if I hadn’t stopped it, I’d have yelled even louder than I do when I’m yelling for our baseball team. Oh boy, oh boy—another trip up North, with all the gang going along!
4
As you know, when we were thinking about going North, we didn’t have any idea we’d run into an exciting and dangerous mystery. But when a gang of boys gets together on a camping trip in the wild North, something is nearly always bound to happen.
On the way we went through a city that advertised itself as the “Capital of the Paul Bunyan Playground.” Paul Bunyan is the mythical lumberman of the North and was supposed to have been very big, like the giant in “Jack and the Beanstalk,” which is a fairy story every boy ought to know—only instead of Paul Bunyan’s being a bad giant, he was a good one and was always doing kind things for people.
We stopped to get some gas for Barry Boy-land’s station wagon, right across from a tourist camp called “Green Gables,” and Little Jim gasped and said, “Look! Who and what is that?”
I looked out at what he was looking at and saw a huge statue of a man with a beard and a mustache, standing with one hand upraised and the other on the back of a statue of a great blue cow.
Poetry spoke up and said, “That’s Paul and Babe.”
“Paul and Babe who?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
And Poetry, who, as I’ve told you, had a lot of books in his library, all of a sudden reached down into the backpack he had with him and pulled out a book and said, “That’s Paul Bunyan and his big blue ox, whose name is Babe. It was the blue ox whose footprints were so large that when it walked around they sank deep into the ground, and everywhere it went it left big holes. Then when it rained, the rainwater filled up the holes, and that made all the eleven thousand great big blue-water lakes in Minnesota.”
Little Jim, who likes fairy stories and legends, grinned and said, “What made the water blue then? How come?” You see, nearly all the water in the hundred lakes we’d already seen on our trip was as blue as the hair ribbon that Circus’s sister wore to school at Sugar Creek.
“What made the lakes blue?” asked Poetry with a question mark in his voice. He puckered his wide forehead and said, “Blue—oh, that!” He thumbed his way through the Paul Bunyan book quickly to see if there was anything in the book to explain it, but there wasn’t. So he said, “Old Babe, the ox, was blue, you know. One day when he was out swimming in the headwaters of the Mississippi, the blue began to come off, and pretty soon the Mississippi, which flows through a lot of lakes up here, was all blue. The water flowed all around from lake to lake and pretty soon the lakes’ waters were all blue too!”
Well, it was as good an untrue story as any of the rest of the exaggerated ones in the Paul Bunyan book, so we added it to the list and decided to tell it to our folks when we got back to Sugar Creek.
Soon we were driving on, straight through the pretty little modern-looking city, where there were lots of people walking the streets in vacation clothes.
We passed a tourist information place on the right side of the road, where there was a tall cement water tower that was shaped exactly like my dad’s long six-battery flashlight back home. It was a lot larger at the top than the bottom. Little Jim squinted his blue eyes up at it as though he was thinking about something.
Then we went on, and Poetry read to us different crazy things the mythical Paul Bunyan was supposed to have done. He had been such a big baby that when he was born it took six large storks to carry him to his parents. Paul’s pet mosquitoes dug the wells up here where we were. And his soup bowl was so large it was like a lake, and the cook had to use a boat to get across it. His pancake griddle was so big that they greased it by tying greasy griddle cakes on the bottom of some men’s shoes, and they skated around over its surface to grease it for Paul. Stories like that.
Little Jim surprised us all of a sudden by saying, “Anybody want to hear how all the people decided to move up into this country and stay here? How Paul Bunyan and I working together got them to come when nobody wanted to?”
“How?” Dragonfly wanted to know. “And what do you mean, you and Paul Bunyan worked it? Paul used to live here long before you were born. You never even saw him!”
“Oh, I didn’t, didn’t I?” Little Jim said and had a very mischievous grin on his innocent face. “Want to hear the story?”
“Sure,” Poetry and I said.
“No,” Dragonfly said.
Little Jim said, “All right, I won’t. Anyway, it’s too important a story to tell to such a small, unappreciative audience.” He sighed as if he was sleepy and curled up with his head on my lap and sighed again. Almost before I knew it, he was actually asleep.
It felt good having Little Jim lying with his head in my lap. He was my almost best friend, except Poetry, and also was a really wonderful guy and the best Christian in the whole Sugar Creek Gang. He was always thinking and saying important things about the Bible and heaven and the One who had made the world—and also about His Son who had come to this world once and died on a cross made out of a tree, just to save anybody who would repent of his sins and believe on Him.
I looked down at that curly head and thought of Sugar Creek and my parents and little Charlotte Ann and was lonesome for a minute. Then pretty soon I was sleepy myself, and the flying tires of the station wagon sort of sang me to sleep too. Once I half woke up because Little Jim wiggled and I heard him mumbling something. I was too sleepy to listen, but it sounded as if he thought he was at home getting ready to crawl
into bed.
I bent my ear down a little and listened, and I heard some pretty words. They were,
“Now I lay me down to sleep.
I pray the Lord my soul to keep.
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to take.”
I’d heard the poem before—in fact my folks had taught it to me, and, when I was smaller, I’d said it at night myself.
Little Jim said something else I couldn’t quite make out, but it sounded like this: “Please also bless little Snow-in-the-Face and help him to get well …”
Then I felt Little Jim’s shoulder relax against my stomach, and I knew he was sound asleep. In another jiffy I was asleep myself.
When I woke up, we were still flying along with Barry at the wheel, and most of us were lying back, getting a great afternoon nap. It was wonderful to ride along that fast and also wonderful to see all the things we saw as the road wound itself around and around like the barefoot-boy paths through the woods along Sugar Creek.
At the town of Pass Lake most of us got out, stretched ourselves, bought postcards at a drugstore, and sent them to our folks. I sent a cartoon card that showed some men climbing a tree. Some big fish were at the bottom, looking up the way hungry bears look at boys.
I wrote to my folks, “Pretty soon we’ll be making camp,” which we did about a quarter of a mile from the place we’d been the year before on Santa’s lakefront property. Santa, as you know, is the big laughing man who likes kids almost as much as Old Man Paddler does.
“Where’s Mrs. Santa?” Poetry asked, maybe remembering the blackberry pie she’d given us and maybe missing her very friendly and extra special giggle, which we’d all liked to hear so well. I had looked forward to seeing her laugh with her eyes as well as hearing her laugh with her birdlike voice.
Santa was sitting in his big white boat, which was beached near where we were making camp, and was helping Tom Till get his fishing pole and line ready for a fishing trip in the morning. He said to Poetry, “She’s gone to California, but she’ll be back early next week, before you boys will have to go back to Sugar Creek.”
Well, it was almost time for the sun to go down, and we would have to get busy pitching our tents. Barry called to us from the station wagon, which was parked close by, “Hey, gang! Let’s get the tents up! You, Bill! Poetry! Tom!”
We all came running and pretty soon were working like Boy Scouts, doing what is called “making camp.” Barry’d picked a site not far from the lake and also not too far from a woodpile,
so that a gang of boys who were lazy only when there was work to do wouldn’t have to carry wood too far. Also he chose a place where there wouldn’t be too much shade. It wouldn’t be too damp, and we would have sunshine every day if there was any.
“Why don’t we put the tents under this big tree right here?” Circus asked.
And Barry said, looking up at the tree, “See that great big half-dead limb there?”
Dragonfly looked up and saw it. “Sure, what of it?”
Little Jim said, “The wind might blow some night,” and then he turned and ran to where Big Jim was, who with his jackknife was cutting green sticks of different sizes to help us make what Barry called an outdoor kitchen. He said it was going to be like the kind the Chippewa Indians used to use.
All of us were either giving or obeying orders, and soon our tents were up, and the outdoor kitchen was nearly finished.
“OK, you guys—you and Poetry,” Barry ordered Poetry and me, “roll up two of those big round rocks over there, get a couple of forked sticks, and push them right into the fire.”
We already had a roaring fire going in a place where it was safe to have one. No boy or anybody else ought to start a fire in any forest anytime unless it is in a place where there is supposed to be one and where it can’t spread, or a whole forest might get burned up.
“What for?” I said, as Poetry and I, grunting, each pushed a round rock up as close to the hot fire as we could. Then we pushed them the rest of the way with sticks so that we wouldn’t get burned.
“Wait and see,” Barry said, and we did but kept wondering, Why on earth?
We brought two other rocks also, while the rest of the gang helped put up the tents and made things ready for our first night’s sleep. I had a tingling feeling inside of me and just knew we were going to have the most wonderful time of our lives.
It didn’t take us long to get supper over, which we cooked on a little two-burner pressure gas stove that Barry had brought along. He didn’t want us to take time to cook in real Indian style, which we would most of the time.
“Ouch!” we said to each other and all of a sudden started slapping at mosquitoes.
“Here—rub this on,” Barry said, “and be careful not to get any too near your eyes and lips.”
He handed us a couple of bottles of mosquito lotion, and we smeared our bare hands and ankles and necks and ears and faces with the sickening sweet-smelling stuff. And right away it was just as if there wasn’t a mosquito in the world.
Santa came over, and we all sat around the campfire. While the pretty sparks and flames played above the bed of coals and the four large round rocks in the middle of it, Barry told us a thrilling and very interesting Bible story, which maybe I ought to tell you here myself, because it was one of the best stories a real red-blooded gang of boys ever heard.
All of us were on blankets in a sort of half circle around the campfire, some of us leaning up against each other. Right that minute I was against Poetry.
“Get over,” Poetry said to me. “Don’t crowd so close.”
“I’m trying to get warm,” I said. “It’s cold. I’m using you for a windbreak.”
And Circus said to Poetry, “You’re a good windbreak when it’s cold, and when it’s hot we lie behind you in the shade.”
Poetry, as you know, is not small. Most of us giggled—except Poetry.
“It happened like this …” Barry began.
I noticed that Little Jim reached into his vest pocket and pulled out his New Testament to look up the place where Barry was reading the story. I did the same. So did most of the gang, except for Tom Till, who had forgotten to bring his.
I looked at Tom, and he swallowed as though he was embarrassed, so I reached out mine to him, and he sort of looked on, although I knew he couldn’t see very well and wasn’t good at reading the Bible anyway. Besides it was more interesting to watch Barry’s brown face in the firelight when he talked.
It was one of my very favorite Bible stories and was about some fishermen who lived near a great blue-water lake that was thirteen miles long and seven miles wide and had thousands of fish in it. Two brothers named Peter and Andrew were fishing, not with poles but with nets, and two other brothers, whose names were James and John and whose dad’s name was Zebedee, were using another boat. I was feeling sorry for the double brothers, because they hadn’t caught any fish, and I was wondering what their moms would say when they got home.
Then Barry started talking about a big crowd of people coming along and listening to Someone tell wonderful stories and also tell them about the Father in heaven and how to live right and things like that. The crowd got so close to the speaker that He might have been crowded into the water.
He turned and asked Peter to let Him borrow his boat, so that He could get into it and push out from shore a little. Then He could talk to the crowd and not get trampled on, and also the crowd would be able to see Him.
It was a bright idea, I thought. I wished I had been there, because if it was wonderful to hear our minister at Sugar Creek tell about Him in his very interesting sermons, it would have been even more wonderful to have been beside that pretty blue lake that day and listening to the Savior right while He was talking.
Pretty soon the speaker’s sermon was over, Barry said, and then, just as if He wanted to pay Peter for being so courteous as to let Him make a pulpit out of his boat, He told Peter to shove the boat into the dee
p water and let down the nets for some fish.
Well, Peter didn’t want to do it. He said he had been fishing around there all night and hadn’t caught anything, and he might have wondered, Why do it again and make a fool of myself?
“But,” said Barry—and even though he was smiling, his face was very serious—“it is better to obey the Lord, boys—even if it does seem foolish to the world for you to do it—than to disobey Him. Besides, He has a right to give us orders, since He is the Son of God.”
He kept on talking, but for a minute I looked at Circus, who I noticed had his fists doubled up and was lying on his stomach and his elbows, looking up and across the fire at Barry. Also he had his chin resting on his doubled-up fists, and the muscles of his jaw were working. I thought maybe he was imagining himself to be Peter, and his thoughts were right out in that pretty lake, and he was seeing the whole thing with his mind’s eye the way I was.
When my thoughts got back to Barry again, he was farther along in the story to where the net was suddenly jammed full of big bouncing, swishing, lunging, splashing fish, and Peter and Andrew had to have help to pull the net in. And the big strong net began to break in places, and some of the fish were getting away! So Peter let out a yell for James and John to bring their boat. They did, quick, and the boats soon were so filled with fish that both started to sink.
That scared Peter, for all of a sudden Peter realized that the Man he’d been listening to was more than a man. He was also the Lord. He suddenly realized, too, what a terrible sinner he was, and he forgot all about the bouncing, swishing, lunging, splashing fish and dropped down on his knees and cried, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man, O Lord!” He was so ashamed of himself for being sinful that he didn’t think he was good enough to be anywhere near the Lord.
But Jesus had done all this on purpose—to get Peter to believe in Him—and He told him not to be afraid any longer. He said, “Do not fear, from now on you will be catching men.”
When Barry said that, Circus’s bright eyes lit up, and he interrupted the story to say, “What’d He mean by that?”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 7-12 Page 44