Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  The dappled sunlight on the pond, made by the sun shining through the leaves of the big sycamore tree, was still a pretty sight. Only a little while before, the whole place had been alive with trilling frogs and the musical notes of red-winged blackbirds, which, along with all the other happy noises, had made the swamp sound like a big out-of-doors orchestra playing just for us. But now the music was stopped.

  The whole gang came to life. Wally started screaming, “Where’s Alexander the Coppersmith?” Dragonfly got allergic to the water Wally splashed on his bare feet, and he sneezed three times in quick succession. Circus, who had more presence of mind than any of the rest of us right that second, half jumped and half skidded down the slippery bank on the way to grab Wally, who was yelling, “He’s gone down! He’ll drown!”

  Before anybody could even begin to stop Wally, he had started out into the water to where Alexander had last been seen. That really brought Circus to life. He plunged in after Wally, caught him by the shirttail, and started to drag him back.

  Well, I don’t know what went on under the surface of that pond or how fierce a fight was going on between a hungry turtle who was trying to keep from losing a live afternoon lunch and a dog that was trying to keep from losing his life.

  But while Wally was half crying and struggling to get away from Circus so that he could save his dog, all of a sudden there was more splashing out there, and Alexander came shooting up through the surface into the sunlight. A moment later he was swimming toward the shore where we were, leaving the stick floating behind him on the nervous water, Alexander not remembering what he had gone out there for in the first place.

  We were really having excitement! As much as I hadn’t wanted Wally to come to Sugar Creek, I thought for a second that if he hadn’t come we wouldn’t have had all these interesting experiences, which were certainly different from any we had had before in all our lives.

  And then Wally was back on shore. He and Alexander got there about the same time, both of them all wet and shaking. Wally was shaking because he was probably worried and scared, and Alexander was shaking because he was a dog and dogs always do that when they come out of the water.

  Then for a minute that proud dog acted very humble. He made a wet beeline for Wally, like a very small boy hurries to his mother for comfort when he has hurt himself by stubbing his toe or bumping his nose.

  And for a minute Wally was one of the happiest boys I ever saw. He dropped down on his knees and hugged Alexander around his wet neck and crooned to him as though he thought he was the best dog in the world.

  And Alexander liked it and acted as if he was saying to Wally, “Poor little scared boy, did you get hurt, too? Well, don’t you worry. I’ll protect you.” And he licked Wally’s freckled face with his long tongue, which broke up their little love talk right away—Wally not liking to be kissed by a dog.

  I stooped down and gave Alexander a quick examination to see how many wounds he had received in his battle with that fierce underwater quadruped.

  But he wasn’t badly hurt at all. He did have a one-inch-long slash just above the elbow of his right hind leg, where the snapper had probably grabbed him first. Also, the tip of one of Alexander’s toes on his other foot was missing. He let me examine him without trying to jump all over me with excitement, the way he usually does.

  Because not a one of us had any first-aid material with us, we decided we had better go home. Alexander’s leg had to be sewed up so that it could heal better and faster.

  It took us all the way home to finish talking about what had happened. By the time Wally and I got to our mailbox, the big snapping turtle was twice as big as it had been, Wally would have drowned in the shallow water if Circus hadn’t jumped in and rescued him, and we had saved the life of a beautiful wild duck by scaring it away from the open jaws of the huge snapping turtle. Anyway, that’s how Wally stretched the story to Mom and Dad. I helped him a little by keeping still—sort of hating to interrupt him when the turtle, which he hadn’t seen at all but I had, got bigger and bigger as he talked.

  It took my dad only a few minutes to give Alexander first aid. He had a lot of first-aid equipment such as a special needle and thread and antiseptics, which he kept in the cupboard in the barn to use on our horses and cows when they got hurt. It was as easy as pie for him to take care of a dog that had had a fight underwater with a vicious, web-footed, flesh-eating, half-as-big-as-a-bull snapping turtle!

  9

  The days dragged past, and my little black and white polecat alarm clock ticked off the minutes for me as fast as it could, day and night. There were a lot of things Wally and I actually had fun doing, such as stalking bullfrogs with a lantern at night, catching a lot of them and having fried frogs’ legs for breakfast next morning, and catching pigeons in the haymow of Little Jim’s dad’s barn and selling them to a poultry man in town. Wally saved his share of the money to put in the bank when he got home.

  We got our “red lips redder still, kissed by strawberries on the hill.” We went swimming at least once a day so we wouldn’t have to take so many baths. Also we went fishing for chubs in the riffles and for sunfish and goggle-eyes near the mouth of the branch. Sometimes at night my dad went fishing with us, and we caught catfish down by the Sugar Creek bridge.

  Nearly always when we went fishing at night, we left Alexander at home, tied to the grape-arbor post, so he wouldn’t scare the fish away.

  Several times we went past Old Man Paddler’s orchard to see if it would be safe to get any apples, and it always wasn’t. When Alexander was with us, he acted as if he was still disappointed we didn’t let him have a fight with the bull the first time we were there. “After all,” his face seemed to say, “didn’t I half kill a savage mud turtle that was almost as big as a bull?”

  His leg wound healed fast, and he didn’t seem to mind having the tip of one toe missing. I expected him to calm down a little as the minutes dragged along, because I thought maybe in the city he hadn’t had enough exercise and he was just running wild in the country to work off all his nervous energy. But I must have been wrong, because he kept right on being as excitable as ever, day and night—the nights getting worse as the week got nearer to Sunday. I had managed to teach him a few lessons, but only a few.

  Then one night he ran into trouble for sure with nearly three thousand minutes left, and I was getting to be almost as nervous as he was.

  Some of his trouble was because of his curiosity, which was worse than a cat’s. He still ate his no-odor dog biscuits three times a day, and naturally he wasn’t supposed to smell like a dog, which naturally he did. And those dog biscuits didn’t keep him from using his long cold nose to smell everything under the Sugar Creek sun, in order to find out what it was and why.

  Dad tried to defend him to me by saying, “How else can he learn what a thing is, if he can’t smell it? That’s the way dogs figure things out—with their noses.”

  “You mean they have their brains in their noses?” I asked. And because Dad didn’t laugh, maybe that wasn’t very funny.

  He and I were out by the grape arbor at the time, watching that wriggling copper-colored quadruped sniffing and zigzagging his way along the garden fence.

  “I hope he doesn’t take a notion to jump over the fence into the garden,” I said, which, right that second, Alexander did. Up and over he went, before you could have said “Jack Robinson Crusoe.”

  Wally himself was in the house at the time. He and Mom were visiting together about something. That was another thing I couldn’t understand. For some reason, my mother had seemed to take a fancy to Wally, and nearly every one of the four or five days he had been here, he had gone into the house while she was making a pie or something. He would sit on the wooden bench behind the table and eat cookies, and they would talk and talk—about what, I didn’t know. They always stopped when I came in, and right away Wally would shove the last of his cooky into his mouth and be ready to go somewhere to do or see something.

  W
ell, Alexander hadn’t any sooner landed in the garden, probably on two or three of Mom’s cabbage plants, than she came to the door to call Dad to the telephone.

  “Who is it?” he asked, as he always does.

  Mom answered, “I don’t know. Some man. He sounded a little impatient.”

  Dad started toward the house, and then turned around to me and said, “Run on out to the garden and explain to Alexander that gardens are not for dogs to play in. And show him the gate.”

  I was glad to do it. I not only showed him the gate, but I went into the garden and explained to him in no uncertain terms that he was not to jump the fence again, not ever.

  That was another thing. So far, there wasn’t a fence around the farm or up and down the creek or anywhere that could keep the animal out. He would either go through it or under it or over it.

  By using a very friendly voice, I managed to coax him out of the garden and up to the grape arbor where his leash was.

  In spite of my not liking him very much at first, I’d felt sorry for him ever since he’d gotten the tip of his toe snapped off. Once or twice I had a feeling that he and I could become friends, but he didn’t seem to be interested. It was just as if he had had a hard enough time learning to like one freckle-faced boy and couldn’t stand the thought of taking the trouble to learn to like another.

  If only he wouldn’t keep on acting as if he owned the place—not only our farm but the whole neighborhood! What right had a dog to act like that anyway? The only actual owner of the woods and the trees and everything in his neighborhood is the boy who lives there, who likes them better than almost anything in the world, and who uses them for his playground without tearing them all to pieces with his teeth and scaring the living daylights out of everything that is alive.

  Like the rest of the Sugar Creek Gang, I had always sort of felt that all the birds’ nests and the tiny, fuzzy baby birds that were hatched in them and all the cute little rabbits that hippety-hopped around the farm and all the walnut-eating, walnut-burying, tree-climbing, bushytailed squirrels and all the fish in Sugar Creek and the wildflowers and everything were all mine. Even the big lazy white clouds that sailed across the sky like ships up where the fork-tailed, black-throated barn swallows darted swiftly around catching insects—everything belonged to me.

  So naturally I resented having a dog move into the neighborhood and take over, even if only for ten thousand eighty minutes.

  Alexander even acted as if he owned the caterpillars, and that they hadn’t any right to live. Just one hour ago, when I’d been sitting on the board platform beside the iron pitcher pump, watching a fuzzy red-brown and black caterpillar as it crawled innocently along, and wondering what kind of butterfly or moth it would someday become, Alexander, who had been fooling around by the walnut tree and the mailbox, got tired of what he was doing and came nosing up to where I was to see if I was having any fun he was missing out on. He stopped about three feet from me.

  “Come here a minute, old pal,” I said. “You’re a nice doggie. Come on.”

  Well, he came. For a small minute he let me put my hand on his withers, which is the back of a dog’s neck, and he acted as if he was fascinated with the caterpillar, too.

  “Look,” I said to him, “see that cute little fuzzy caterpillar? Well, one of these days it will get tired of being just a worm crawling around on the ground and on people’s board walks and will wrap itself up in a cocoon. Then, after it has slept awhile, maybe through the winter, it will come out. And when it does, it won’t be a caterpillar anymore. It will be a pretty butterfly of some kind and will fly all round over the neighborhood. Now, don’t you think that’s nice?” And I patted Alexander on his poll, which is the top of his head.

  For a minute longer he let me hug him. I began to explain to him that there was a very wonderful God up in heaven and also everywhere, who had made all the things in nature, even dogs.

  But Alexander didn’t care who made him. All of a sudden, when the caterpillar started crawling in his direction, he got a gruff growl in his throat. Then his right front paw shot out and scratched at it. And that was the last of his lesson in nature and also the last of the caterpillar, which was supposed to be the second stage of a butterfly. It was squished into a little blob of yellowish and greenish jelly on the pump platform.

  One other lesson I had tried hard to teach him was not to bark at night. I had tried it last night, in fact, and for the first time he had seemed to understand what being quiet meant. I had learned how to do it from the book I’d gotten myself all wet for.

  About midnight, as usual, he started barking at the moon or something else he saw or smelled, or thought he saw or smelled, and he wouldn’t stop. Wally wakened and came stumbling into my room to scold him through the screened window. I also scolded him, but he still kept on barking.

  Then I remembered the book and said to Wally, “I’ll go down and ask him to please let us sleep.”

  Wally, being used to Alexander’s barking, went back to bed.

  I pushed my feet into my slippers and felt my way down the dark, long room under my dad’s seed corn, around the corner of the banister, and down the stairs.

  Pretty soon, I was outdoors in the moonlight beside Alexander, saying to him in my kindest voice, “What’s the matter, pal? Nervous? That’s too bad. Now, don’t you be scared. That old man in the moon is as kind as Old Man Paddler.”

  That’s what the book said—a dog that barks at night is a nervous dog and needs to be reassured. So I used my reassuring voice on him, and he let me come up to him and pet him.

  I kept on crooning to him, stooped low and hugged him and said, “You’re an awful nice doggie, awful nice. But don’t you know there are human beings in the house behind me who have to get up early in the morning and work hard all day? And we have to have some sleep.”

  He seemed to appreciate my getting up out of a cozy bed with clean sheets on it to hug a dog that slept on a no-odor cedar-treated mattress. He gave his cold nose a quick turn, touched my face with it, and a second later his long tongue licked me on the cheek, as much as to say, “I guess I can stand another freckle-faced boy after all.” And in that very second I thought I liked him pretty well.

  Then I noticed that his leather collar was awfully tight, and I remembered that every time my dad lay down anywhere in the daytime to take a snooze, he would unbutton the top button of his shirt to let his throat relax. He could breathe better, he said.

  “Poor little dog,” I comforted Alexander, “your collar is too tight. No wonder you can’t sleep.” So I loosened the collar just one notch, patted him on his poll again, told him again what a wonderful dog he was, and coaxed him to lie down on his cedar-treated mattress, which he did. Then I went back into the house and upstairs to bed. I took a look at my alarm clock and noticed it was about five minutes after twelve, which meant I still could get a lot of good sleep.

  But it seemed I hadn’t any sooner dropped off to sleep than I was awakened again by Alexander’s barking. I was disgusted. I didn’t want to wake up. Even worse, I didn’t want to get up, but I knew that, with a dog barking outside my window, I would be awakened all the rest of the night, over and over and over again, and be a wreck in the morning and feel grumpy all day.

  I looked at my clock once more and was surprised to notice it was three o’clock already. Alexander had been quiet three whole hours. But, “Bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark, bark!” Alexander the Coppersmith was all nervous again.

  I dragged myself out of bed and fumbled my way down the room to the banister and downstairs again, through the kitchen and out into the moonlight, hardly noticing that it was one of the prettiest moonlit nights I’d ever seen or smelled. The new-mown hay in Dragonfly’s dad’s hayfield smelled like a million dollars.

  But when I got out on the board walk and started toward the cedar-treated mattress, I saw that Alexander the Coppersmith wasn’t there. I knew right away what had happened. He had been so nervous that he had pulled a
nd tugged and worried his head out of his loosened collar.

  He was out by the plum tree, barking in the direction of Old Man Paddler’s pasture. He probably smelled the cattle or maybe the sheep, and it was hard for him to sleep with an odor like that, especially when he wasn’t used to it.

  As mad as I was for having to wake up, I still wanted to prove to myself that I was a good dog trainer. So I coaxed him back to his bed, talked nicely to him, and in a few minutes had him calmed down so that he wasn’t trembling.

  “Now,” I said to him, “you stay here. And just for slipping your collar, you have to have it tight the rest of the night.”

  He licked my hand and, before I could get away, my face also.

  After crooning over him a little longer, I stroked his withers and patted his poll and stumbled my still sleepy way back up the stairs to my room, where I went to sleep on Mom’s clean pillowcase without washing my dog-kissed face.

  The next thing I knew it was a bright sunshiny morning with a whole day ahead of me to have fun in and also probably to work in. I looked out the window at Alexander. He was still there, standing up in his bed and barking again at something or other. But it was all right then, because it was time for all of us to be awake anyway.

  I certainly felt proud of myself for being such a good dog trainer and helping Alexander—and all the rest of us—to get a lot of needed sleep. All except Wally, who didn’t need any help.

  Being kind to Alexander had worked twice last night, and it also had worked this morning. While Dad was in the house answering the phone, I had talked Alexander out of the garden and all the way across the barnyard to the grape arbor. I was just snapping the leash onto his tight enough collar when Dad came out the back door to where I was.