While I was still working off my temper, I spotted another book, and the very second I saw its title, I wanted it. It was All Kinds of Dogs and How to Train Them. A picture on the book’s jacket was of a laughing, friendly faced collie.
I made a grab for the book, but Poetry beat me to it. Before I could stop him, he had tossed the book into the box, where it landed with a ker-plop.
That, I thought, was one book I really wanted. If I was going to have to live a whole week with an uneducated city dog, I at least ought to know something about how an educated dog ought to behave itself.
So, before Mom or Dad could have stopped me if either one of them had been there, I rolled up my overall pant legs to my knees and stepped into the narrow, fast-running, singing riffle, wading as fast as I could toward the Sugar Creek island where the box with the book in it was lodged against the overhanging willow.
I figured that the box boat would soon sink with all the weight of the stones we had thrown into it. So I hurried as fast as a boy can who has orders from his parents not to get his new overalls wet. The water was knee-deep, and the stones and stuff on the bottom made it hard to keep my balance.
“Hurry up,” Poetry yelled to me. “It might sink!”
But how could I? My bare feet kept slipping on round stones and bottles and different things that some dumb boys had thrown into the creek. Soon I would be there, though, and would have the book, if only-
Then Poetry yelled, “Quick! It’s breaking away from the willow! It’ll be gone downstream in a minute!”
I took a fast worried look and saw that Poetry was right. In seconds, the box boat would be out in the center of the riffle, swirling down the creek, where before long it would get water-soaked and sink, and my book would be both spoiled and lost.
So forgetting my new overalls and my parents’ orders not to get them wet, I took several fast steps, took a wild lunge toward the box and the book, stepped on another bottle, lost my balance, and landed ker-splash beside the box.
3
There I was, a red-haired, freckle-faced, wet boy, as dumb as Wally’s copper-colored dog. I was both happy and unhappy—happy because I had the book and unhappy because of my very wet overalls.
I stood for a minute balancing myself in the riffle. About thirty feet downstream, riding cheerfully along, was our box boat, sailing merrily as if it didn’t have a care in the world. Certainly it didn’t have to worry about how to explain to its mother how it happened to get all wet.
In my mind’s eye I imagined Mom looking me over from red head to bare feet but especially at my overalls, saying, as she nearly always does when she is surprised, “For land’s sakes!”
I’d heard her say that once before when I came home all wet, and Dad, who had been there at the time, said, “Not for land’s sakes, but for the water’s sake.” Then when I had explained, Dad had said, “I’m afraid that explanation is all wet, too, Bill.”
I hurried back across Sugar Creek to the shore and scrambled up the bank to where Poetry was. He had found a tall utility can with a handle on each side, which some lady had thrown away because rust had eaten a little hole in the bottom, and he was filling it with our collection.
We also found a lid for the can, put it on, and pretty soon were up the hill and carrying our treasures down the dusty lane toward his house. One of the first things he said as we plopped along showed that he was a real pal. “We’ll stop at our house and get your clothes dried and ironed, and they’ll be as good as new.”
That made me feel better—so good in fact, especially now that I had the book, that I began to enjoy being alive again.
And that was the way I happened to get started really getting ready for Wally’s visit. That book I’d found was packed with the best ideas you ever heard of about how to stop a dog from chasing cars and cats and even how to stop him from barking at night.
Boy oh boy, I thought, as Poetry and I trudged along the lane toward his house. We were swinging the can between us, letting our bare feet go plop, plop, plop in the dust and enjoying the feel of the nice warm dirt squishing up between our toes.
I used my left hand to carry my side of the can, and with the other I held the dog book open and read parts of it aloud to Poetry. Poetry carried his side of the can with his right hand and held his book in his left and read different poems to me.
“Listen to this,” I said:
“Once a dog has the bad habit of chasing chickens, it is almost impossible to break him of it. The only sure way is to show him a chicken when he is still a pup and let him make friends with it. If your dog has more courage than good sense and rushes blindly into a fight with other dogs, sometimes the best thing for him is to allow him to get a good trouncing by the other, perhaps larger, dog. The only thing is, he may in turn seek satisfaction by attacking dogs smaller than himself so that his sense of importance won’t be completely thwarted. A dog likes to feel important.”
And Poetry answered,
“When the days get hickey-dickey
And your clothes get sort-o sticky
And you want to pull your shoes off—
Then it’s spring!”
“And this,” I said, stumbling over a stone in the road and saying, “Ouch!”
“If your dog is a car chaser, have a friend drive past your house and have someone in the car squirt in the dog’s face with a water pistol loaded with three parts of water and one part of household ammonia. This will sting, but will not do any permanent harm.”
But Poetry hadn’t heard a word. The very second I stopped long enough for him to shove in a word or two, he hurried on with another poem, one of the verses being:
“There’s a queer uneasy feelin’
Casts a shedder over me,
And I long to be a-stealin’
Where the wind blows cool and free;
I’m as restless as a rabbit.
Nothin’ satisfies me quite—
Fer I feel that rovin’ habit
When the fish begin to bite.”
“Hey!” I interrupted, suddenly smelling a strong obnoxious odor coming from somewhere.
We both stopped stock-still and smelled.
“It’s a skunk!” I exclaimed. “There’s a skunk somewhere around here!”
A light breeze was blowing from the direction of an old toolshed in the woods not far from Poetry’s dad’s barn.
But Poetry didn’t seem interested. With his eyes on his book, he only grunted and said, “Oh, didn’t you know that? A nice new polecat mother has moved her family from somewhere or other to our toolshed. They live underneath it. But my father says to leave them alone. They won’t do any harm unless they get too hungry and feel like they have to eat a few chickens to satisfy their appetites.”
“I know that,” I said. I also knew that skunks had a very choice diet of grasshoppers and beetles, especially june beetles, or june bugs, and crickets. Grasshoppers are one of the farmer’s worst enemies. In the summertime, skunks also eat centipedes and sawflies and locusts and cutworms and sphinx moths and, for variety, a few berries. It is in the winter, when they can’t find june bugs and cutworms and grubs, that they get so hungry they sometimes raid a farmer’s chicken yard.
“Some of the skunk kids must have gotten into a fight,” I said, remembering that a skunk carries a spray gun of his own, filled with a mixture that is a lot stronger than three parts of water and one part of ammonia. He carries it in a musk pouch somewhere on his body, and with it he protects himself from his enemies. He very seldom uses it on members of his own family, unless he gets into a fierce fight or plays too hard and gets too excited or mad or scared.
All of a sudden from beside a wild gooseberry bush, just off to the right of the lane we were walking in, I saw a flash of a boy’s faded overalls, a shock of curly hair, and a monkey face. I knew it was Circus—the acrobat of our gang, the one who is the brother of a whole family of nearly all girls.
Also, at that same second, Circus hissed to Poetry an
d me, saying, “Sh! Keep still, you guys. There’s a pretty little kitten over there, and I want to catch him for a pet. Don’t scare him! I want to sneak up on him and grab him.”
I looked in the direction Circus was looking, and what to my wondering eyes should appear but a cute little black and white child skunk. Not knowing we were anywhere around and not being able to smell us because the wind was blowing from his direction to us, he was digging and rooting in the ground beside a fallen log. He was probably looking for a nice grub for his afternoon lunch.
“Look,” Circus whispered, “he’s dug something up.”
The pretty kitty had stopped digging and was chewing away on something. Then, almost right away, he began nosing along the side of the log, stopping every now and then and standing on his haunches the way bears do, listening.
While we were watching, Poetry was reminded of a poem that I had heard him quote before. He started in before Circus could shush him:
“See that little black and white animal
out in the woods?
Say, isn’t that little cat pretty?
I went right over to pick it up—
But it wasn’t that kind of a kitty!”
In a second Circus was gone, running like a deer toward that innocent-looking skunk, saying just before he left, “I know how to do it without getting shot.” He ran toward the fallen log and the wild animal he wanted to catch and make a pet of. Imagine that! Make a pet of a skunk!
As I watched Circus, who usually had very good sense, running pell-mell toward a live polecat that had a very bad scent, it seemed the most ridiculous thing a boy could do. If he should get sprayed with skunk perfume, he would smell like a skunk himself for a week. Of all the idiotic things, anyway!
Circus hadn’t galloped more than a few feet before I was imagining what his mother and his six sisters would say when he came home with his clothes all saturated with skunk perfume. Not a one of the rest of the gang’s mothers would like the idea either, because we all played with Circus and got into wrestling and tumbling matches with him. And what Sugar Creek Gang mother would want her boy sleeping on a nice clean sheet in her house after he had had a wrestling match with another boy that had a skunk for a pet?
There wasn’t time to do any more worrying right then, because things were getting ready to happen. Circus was within ten feet of the little animal before the skunk spied him. Quick as a flash, his bushy black and white tail swished straight up in the air like the beautiful plume on Little Jim’s mom’s new hat, which she wears on Sunday morning in the Sugar Creek church. At the same time, the kitty started doing a two-legged dance, stamping his front feet as if he was as mad as a hornet.
Boy oh boy, I never saw Circus stop so suddenly and stand so still in my life. He didn’t move a muscle for maybe two whole minutes, which seemed like an hour, and that is very hard for a boy to do. Circus and his hoped-for pet now were looking straight at each other the way two strange dogs sometimes do when they meet for the first time and are trying to decide whether to fight or not. Pretty soon one of the dogs decides not to fight, and the other one is glad of it.
I knew from what I had read about skunks that they nearly always swish their tails straight up and dance awhile with their front feet as a warning before they spray you, just as a rattlesnake rattles the rattle on his tail before he strikes.
Circus kept on not moving, and his hoped-for pet kept on keeping his pretty furry tail straight up like a statue of George Washington. He also kept on stamping his front feet as if to say, “One move out of you, Circus Browne, and your name is mud.”
After that tense minute was over, the pretty little kitty must have decided Circus wasn’t going to hurt him after all. He stopped stamping his feet, he pulled his flag down, and he walked off along the side of the log, going toward Poetry’s dad’s log cabin toolshed, with Circus trotting along beside him.
It was the most interesting sight and was a good education. What on earth? I thought. What if Alexander the Coppersmith had been here? Alexander would not have used his head at all but, barking, would have made a headfirst dive straight for the black and white animal, only to find that “it wasn’t that kind of a kitty.”
“It looks like they are friends already!” Poetry said.
It was unbelievable.
It was still unbelievable a moment later, when the kitty stopped stock-still and hoisted his flag again. Almost at that same second, Circus went into lightninglike action. He made a quick swooping dive straight for the kitty, grabbed him up by his straight-up bushy tail, and a second later was holding him out at arms’ length.
“Come on, you guys!” he yelled to us. “I’ve got him. He’s as harmless as a hornet without a stinger unless his back feet are on the ground.”
I happened to know that was the truth from having read it, but I had sort of forgotten.
“Come on! Hurry up! Bring that can, and we’ll put him in it!” And Circus started to run straight toward us carrying a handful of black and white dynamite that nobody in his right mind would want to get anywhere near.
At any second, the skunk might wriggle out of Circus’s hand. And that would be just too bad, because a skunk can spray at least six times like a six-shooter automatic revolver. And instead of there being a Circus Browne whose name would be mud, there would be Poetry Thompson Mud and William Jasper Collins Mud. And what would Mom say, with my overalls already all wet with Sugar Creek water?
Poetry let out a yell to Circus. “Get away from here with that atomic bomb!” Then he quick hissed to me, “Let’s run,” which we started to do as fast as we could, carrying our can of treasures up the lane toward Poetry’s house, with Circus and his wriggling squirming kitty racing along behind us.
“Stop, you guys!” Circus puffed. “This little rascal will bite me, and I don’t dare let him go or he will—Bill!” Circus’s worried voice almost screamed, not more than twenty feet behind us. “I’ll give you half the money I get for him!”
Money, for some reason, didn’t look good to me just then. In fact, nothing did. Ordinarily when I am walking or running along that lane, I have the greatest feeling because of the pretty flowers that border it, such as black-eyed Susans with their dark purple centers and long yellow rays that radiate out like the sunflowers in our garden. There are also nearly always violets and ground ivy and sometimes bluebells and asters.
One of the prettiest sights a boy can see is a lot of green grass dotted with white clover, with patches of shade here and there under the maples and elms. It’s wonderful to be alive and live most of your life out-of-doors in the fresh air and the Sugar Creek sunshine and be able to go barefoot and feel fine all the time even when you have to work.
But Circus, with a wild animal in one hand, was racing after us, so it was no time to enjoy life. I still had my book on dog education in my right hand, and I noticed Poetry still had his book of poems in his left. All of us were carrying something we didn’t want to drop.
I don’t know what would have happened if right that second Poetry hadn’t stumbled on a tuft of grass in the center of the path. He also caught one of his extralarge big toes in the cuff of his overall leg. Down he went ker-plop-ker-sizzle with our can of books and bottles and stuff.
I fell on top of him, the two of us landing in a bangety-wham crash and scattering everything in every direction.
Before we could have done anything to stop him, Circus went after our empty can. He quickly grabbed it, plopped his skunk inside, and, putting the lid on tight to be sure his prize didn’t get away, sat down on the lid.
“Whew!” he exclaimed.
Poetry and I started to unscramble ourselves and to gather up the things that had been in the can but would never be again. Poetry and I had lost, and Circus had won! While Circus rested, and while his wild animal made a lot of angry noises inside the can, and while for some reason the can didn’t have the same smell it had had when we found it, Poetry and I hurried to gather up our treasures. And then we found
out we had lost part of our collection.
“Hey!” I said in a disturbed voice. “Where’s my alarm clock?” I looked all around and on each side of the lane, behind the wild gooseberry bushes on one side and the chokecherry shrubs on the other. I also looked in the tall grass and among the black-eyed Susans and in the tangle of ground ivy and wild morning glories and still didn’t find it.
“You sure you put it in the can?” Poetry asked.
“Of course, I’m sure! That’s the most important thing we found—except this book.”
“Come and sit here awhile,” Circus said, grinning, “and I’ll help you look for it.”
“Nothing doing!”
Poetry volunteered and started toward Circus, but Circus stopped him. “Oh, no, you don’t. You’d squash the can into an accordion.”
When I couldn’t find my alarm clock anywhere, I began to want it more than anything else, which is how a person feels about something after he has lost it.
And then, unexpectedly, I heard it! The alarm was going off! It was the first time in my life I had heard an alarm clock in the middle of a lane in the middle of a woods. Right away it reminded me of home and of five o’clock in the morning, which is the time Dad’s alarm clock goes off every day.
But where was the excited jingling sound coming from? For a second my mind was like a whirlwind. I quickly looked around in a fast circle, trying to focus my eyes in the right direction, and I couldn’t. For a few seconds, the ringing had a muffled sound as if it was under a pillow, and then it was a lot louder—as though someone had taken the pillow off and put the clock under a dishpan.
Then all of a sudden I knew where it was. “It’s inside the can!” I exclaimed. “It’s in there with the skunk!”
My eyes met Poetry’s, and we both knew what had happened. When we had had our upset, everything had fallen out of the can except the alarm clock, and Circus had plopped his black and white kitty in and clamped on the lid without looking. That kitty, by scrambling and struggling to find a way out, had accidentally set off the alarm.
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 11