Circus spoke up then and said, “It was taken when she was a little smaller. She’s bigger than that now.”
There were other pictures of different people in the billfold. Little Jim noticed there was money in the bill compartment—in fact, three fives and a ten and several ones, each of the ones having on it a picture of George Washington, the first president of the United States; the fives, a picture of Abraham Lincoln; and the ten, one of Andrew Jackson.
Well, we brought it to a quick vote, and the decision was to take the billfold up the path and start looking for the tent the man and the woman were camping in and ask them if they had lost it.
As we moved along in a sort of half-worried hurry up the path toward the spring, I couldn’t for the life of me think how on earth the barefoot woman could have gotten a picture of my baby sister. What would she want with it, anyway?
Well, maybe in the next fifteen minutes or so I would find out. But I was worried a little because, even as I followed along behind Poetry—all of us had to walk single file because the path through the tall weeds was just wide enough for one barefoot boy at a time—I was remembering that the woman was probably the same person who last night had been digging a hole in the old cemetery under the big pine tree beside Sarah Paddler’s tombstone. I wondered what she had been digging in the earth for.
6
It was a terribly hot, sultry day, and over in the southwest a great big yellowish cumulus cloud was building up into a thunderhead. I knew from having lived around Sugar Creek for years and years that maybe before the day was over we would find ourselves in the middle of a whopper of a thunderstorm. That is the way the southwest part of the sky looks when it is getting ready to pour out about a million gallons of nice clean rainwater all over the farms around Sugar Creek.
Because Charlotte Ann’s picture was in the pretty brown billfold, which Big Jim had zipped shut again, he let me carry it, which I did in the pocket of my overalls.
Whew! It was hot and sultry on the footpath to the spring, even though it was mostly shaded. Pretty soon we came to the spring itself, which is at the bottom of an incline and has an old linden tree leaning out over it and shading it. Dad had made a cement reservoir there, which was always full of the clearest water you ever saw. The water itself came singing out of an iron pipe, the other end of which Dad had driven way back into the rocky hillside.
“Here are a woman’s tracks again!” Dragonfly said, looking down at the mud on the west side of the spring.
My eyes followed his, expecting to see the print of a woman’s high-heeled shoes. Instead, I saw the print of a very small, bare foot with a narrow heel and five small toes, which meant that the woman had still been carrying her shoes when she had walked along here on the way back to her tent.
I also noticed there was a closed glass fruit jar in the spring reservoir with what looked like maybe a pound of yellow butter in it! It was like the kind we churned ourselves at our house, using an old-fashioned dasher churn, which I nearly always had to churn myself. I was even a better churner than Dad. Sometimes Dad would churn for twenty minutes and not get any butter, and I could come in and churn for five minutes and it would be done fast.
That butter in the fruit jar meant that the man and woman were using our spring to get their drinking water and also to keep their butter from getting too soft. Mom does that at our house, except that we keep ours in a fruit jar or a crock in the cellar instead.
Anyway, I thought, they wouldn’t have to come to our house to get their drinking water out of our iron pitcher pump.
From the spring we went up the incline past the elm sapling, where Circus always likes to swing, and past the linden tree and the friendly, lazy drone of the honeybees getting nectar from its sweet-smelling flowers. A linden tree is the same as a basswood, and honeybees have the time of their lives when the clusters of creamy yellow flowers scatter their perfume all up and down the creek.
Going west from the tree, we followed a well-worn path toward the Sugar Creek bridge. Somewhere along that path, off to the left, we would probably find the tent. Old Man Paddler sometimes let people camp there for a few nights, or a week if they wanted to, under one of the spreading beech trees near the pawpaw bushes.
I kept my eyes peeled for the sight of a brown tent. As soon as we saw it, we would go bashfully up to it and ask if anybody had lost a billfold. Then we would have them describe it to us, and if it was like the one we had, we would give it to them. While we were there, we would get a closer look at the small-footed woman who had been wearing overalls last night and had been digging in the cemetery. There would probably be a car also, since there had been one last night.
But when we got to the bridge, there wasn’t even a sign of a tent anywhere.
Poetry got an idea then. “Let’s go down to the old sycamore tree and up through the cave to Old Man Paddler’s cabin and ask him. He’ll know where their camp is. They couldn’t camp here anyway without his permission.”
So away we went on across the north road and along the creek till we came to the sycamore tree, which, as you know, is at the edge of the swamp not far from the cave. Pretty soon we were all standing in front of the cave’s big wooden door, which Old Man Paddler keeps unlocked when he is at home, because the cave is a shortcut to his cabin. The other end of the cave is the basement of his house.
Big Jim seized the white doorknob as different ones of us had done hundreds of times. In a jiffy we would be in the cave and on our way through the long, narrow passage to the cabin itself.
“Hey!” Big Jim exclaimed in a disappointed voice. “It’s locked!”
I remembered that sometimes the old man kept the door closed and locked for quite a while when he was going to be away, or when he was on a vacation, or maybe when he was writing something or other and didn’t want any company.
We turned and went back to the spring again and on up the creek in the other direction to see if we could find the tent we were looking for.
After walking and looking for maybe ten minutes without finding any tent, we came to another of Circus’s favorite elm saplings near the rail fence that leads to Strawberry Hill. On the other side of the fence was Dragonfly’s dad’s pasture, where there were nearly always a dozen cows grazing.
While we were waiting for Circus to get up the tree and down again, I heard a rumbling noise a little like thunder mixed with the sound of wind blowing. I looked up quick to the southwest sky, expecting to see a rain cloud already formed and a storm getting itself ready to come pouring down upon us. But the big, yellow cumulus cloud was still where it had been. It did seem a lot bigger, and some other odd-shaped clouds had come from somewhere to hang themselves up there beside it to keep it company. Those other clouds probably carried a lot of their own rainwater to give to it so it would have enough to give our Sugar Creek farms a “real soaker,” as Mom always called a big rain.
Then I looked over the rail fence into Dragonfly’s dad’s pasture and saw what looked like twenty scared cows racing furiously across the field. Their tails were up over their backs and switching fiercely as though the cows were terribly excited.
“It’s a stampede!” Dragonfly cried.
Those cows acted blind and deaf and dumb and scared out of what few wits a cow has. They were all running wildly to get away from something—but I couldn’t see anything for them to run away from.
Then I said, “I’ll bet it’s a lot of warble flies after them,” remembering what Dad and I had been studying that week while we were looking up June beetles.
“What’s a warble fly?” Little Tom Till wanted to know. His folks didn’t have any cows. They always got the milk they drank at their house from Dragonfly’s folks or mine.
Well, anybody who knows anything about a warble fly knows that it is a noisy, buzzing fly about half as big as a big black horsefly, and it lives only six days after it is born.
“A warble fly doesn’t have any mouth and can’t sting or bite a cow or anything,” I sa
id, feeling all of a sudden quite proud that I had learned so much about a lot of important things such as flies and beetles and other insects.
“Then why are cows scared of them?” Poetry asked. Even he didn’t know that.
“They just make a fierce, buzzing sound and dive in and lay their eggs on the hair of the cows. Even as fast as the cows run, the warbles fly just that fast and flit in and out, laying eggs on them. Then, after six days of that kind of life, they die. They probably starve to death,” I said, “not being able to eat.”
“And cows are scared of an innocent egg?” Circus asked. But just then he seemed to get a little scared himself, as did all of us, because those twenty milk cows were making a beeline for our fence.
“They’re coming for the shade,” I said. “Warble flies don’t like shade.”
And I was right. In a cloud of whirling dust, those twenty cows came to an excited halt under the maple tree just over the fence from us. They didn’t stay stopped but kept milling around, stamping their front feet, switching their tails madly, and doing the same kind of stamping with their back feet.
It seemed there were a lot of warble flies. I saw and heard some of them diving in and out under the cows, which kept on switching their tails fiercely and stamping their feet. And that meant that if a boy had been there trying to milk one of them, he would have gotten the living daylights kicked out of him and his pail of milk spilled all over the ground or all over his clothes—and his parents would wonder what on earth had happened, if they saw him like that.
Not getting any peace, the excited cows, still pestered by the flies, started on another stampede. This time it was toward the bayou. And I knew that if they came to the weak place in the rail fence where we sometimes climbed over, they would dive through it and plow through the bushes and down the hill and right away would be in one of the sluggish ends of the bayou in the shade, which flies don’t like. If the cows would stand up to their sides in the shady water, the warble flies would leave them alone, because warble flies always lay their eggs on the legs and underparts of a cow.
“Hey!” Dragonfly exclaimed excitedly, being as worried as his dad probably would have been. “They’re going straight for the bayou!”
I knew if they did break through that fence and get into the water, they could also wade across and get into the cornfield on the other side, and they might eat themselves to death as cows sometimes do.
Dragonfly grabbed up a stick and started out after the cows as fast as his spindly legs could carry him, which wasn’t too fast. Circus, who was faster, was already dashing fiercely down the other side of the fence to get to the place the cows were headed for.
I was running as fast as I could, following some of the gang and some of the gang following me, when I stepped into a brand-new groundhog den, which I had never seen before. Down I went ker-plop onto the ground. I was certainly surprised, because there hadn’t been any hole there before. I knew every groundhog den there was for a mile in every direction from our house.
Then I noticed that the hole wasn’t a groundhog den at all. It was another kind of hole. You could tell it hadn’t been dug by any heavy-bodied, short-tailed, blunt-nosed, short-haired, short-legged, grizzly brown animal with four toes and a stubby thumb on its two front feet and five toes on its two hind feet—which is what a groundhog is. Besides, there wasn’t any groundhog odor coming out of the hole, which my freckled nose was very close to right that second. And also there were the marks of a shovel and a woman’s high-heeled shoes in the freshly dug soil.
7
I couldn’t let myself stay there on the ground all sprawled out in five different directions, wondering what had happened to me. The gang had already gone and left me, running as fast as they could to catch up with and head off Dragonfly’s dad’s cows and keep them from breaking through the fence into the bayou. So I unscrambled myself, rolled over and up onto my feet, and soon was helping the gang by running and yelling and screaming to the cows to obey us—which they didn’t.
Even as I ran, I was remembering what Dad and I had learned about warble flies—heel flies, some folks call them—and I thought, what if I was a real cow instead of merely being part of the time as awkward as one? If I were a cow and had my own brain knowing what it knew about warble flies, I would have the living daylights scared out of me.
Even though a warble fly doesn’t have a mouth, so never eats, during the six days of its short life, it does lay eggs all over the legs and lower part of the cow. When a warble fly egg hatches, which it does in four or five days after it is laid, the thing that hatches out isn’t a fly at all but a grub, which quick starts to bore its grubby way right through the cow’s skin and into the cow. Once it gets inside, it starts on a chewing journey through the cow’s inside, making its own path as it goes and making the cow itch like everything, which is maybe why some cows are not as friendly as other cows at certain times of the year.
I’ll bet, if I were a cow, I wouldn’t be worth a whoop to a farmer or anybody else who owned me, because I would probably feel the grub and maybe a half dozen or more of his grubby relatives working their way all through me, some of them stopping, as grubs do, right in my throat and staying a while just above where I would be chewing my cud.
During the whole five or six months a grub is inside a cow, it travels all around and finally chews a tunnel along the edges of the cow’s spine until at last it stops and makes its home right under the skin of the back. There it chews a small hole through the cowhide so that it can breathe, which it does with its tail, getting good fresh country air through the hole and staying there nearly through the winter.
While still there, the grub develops into a wiggling, twisting, squirming warble. Finally it works its way out through its airhole and tumbles off to the ground. And if it is spring, and it doesn’t get eaten up by a cowbird or a grackle or some other bird, it gets hard and black and finally changes into a fly. Then it makes a dive for the first cow it can find and starts to lay eggs as fast as it can before its six short days of noisy, buzzing life are over.
I was remembering all that as I galloped along after Dragonfly’s dad’s stampeding cows. I also remembered that in the wintertime in some parts of America, starlings and even magpies light on the backs of cows and start pecking away on them, trying to dig out the warbles with their sharp bills.
Well, if I were a cow and one of those high-voiced, buzzing flies was trying to lay her eggs on me, and I knew what would happen if it did, I would most certainly beat it for the shade, which warble flies don’t like. Or if I could, I would find somebody’s bayou or a little stream somewhere, splash myself out into it, and stand in the water up to my sides as I had seen cows do all around Sugar Creek for years without knowing before why they did it.
You should have seen Dragonfly’s dad’s cows ignore the few rails on the fence when they got to it. They broke right through without stopping and disappeared in a tail-swishing hurry into the brush. By the time we got to the fence ourselves, those cows were down in the sluggish water of the pond at the east end of the bayou.
Maybe I’d better tell you that Dad says American meat packers throw away enough grubby meat every year to have fed 83,000 people for a whole year—all because of the crazy warble flies. Also, Dad says a lot of cowhides have holes in them and people lose money that way too, because that part of the cow is where the leather is generally best—and what good is a piece of leather for making shoes or other leather goods if it has a hole in it? So a boy ought never to drive a bunch of cows out of a creek or a pond on a hot summer day but should let them stay there in the shade if they want to.
Cows don’t give as much milk while they are worrying about noisy, whining flies either, and beef cattle don’t get fat as fast. It’s not easy to get fat if you worry a lot, which is maybe why some people are too thin.
Anyway, that is why we didn’t get to look for the tent of the “turtledove” and the “bobwhite” until quite a while later. It took us almost
an hour to get Dragonfly’s dad’s cows out of the bayou. We had to drive them out because the cornfield was on the other side, and you can’t trust a cow with a cornfield any more than you can trust a boy or a girl with an open cookie jar.
If one of Dragonfly’s dad’s red heifers hadn’t gotten a stubborn streak and decided she wanted to go on a wild run through the woods, we might not have found the tent for a long time. But while we were chasing her all around the brush and up and down the creek, she accidentally took us right to it.
“It was nice of that old red heifer to show us where the tent is, wasn’t it?” Dragonfly said, after we had finally gotten her and the other cows back in Dragonfly’s dad’s dark cattle shed away from the flies. We were back again, not more than a hundred yards from the tent.
“Maybe the heifer smelled the calfskin in the billfold in Bill’s pocket, and it scared her. Maybe she thought Bill wanted to make a lot of billfolds out of her hide,” Little Tom Till said, trying to be funny.
Circus said, “I don’t think heifers think.”
One of the first things we noticed about the camp when we got close to it was that they had picked one of the worst campsites in the whole woods. It was in the middle of the woods, halfway between our house and the spring, away back from the barefoot boys’ path. So I couldn’t have seen it when I had gone galloping to the spring a couple of hours ago. It was under one of the biggest, widest-spreading oak trees around there anywhere and would have shade all day, which would mean it wouldn’t get a chance to dry out after a damp night. Nights often are damp in any territory where there is a river or a creek or a lake. And it wouldn’t have any morning sun on it at all, as tents are supposed to have.
Any Scout knows that nobody should ever pitch a tent under an oak tree because the droppings from an oak will make the canvas rot quicker. Before you know it, you will have little holes scattered all over your roof, which will make it leak like everything when it rains.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 4