Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  And there wasn’t, except for a few scattered houses, maybe six or seven, along what could have been Main Street if there had been one. Squaw Lake was only a grocery store that sold everything inside and gas outside at two red pumps.

  As soon as we were inside, a heavyset lady with a smile as broad as her large, friendly face came waddling toward us, saying, “How do you do? What can I do for you?”

  “We’re part of the Sugar Creek Gang,” Poetry’s ducklike voice answered her ducklike waddle and her question.

  “Well, I am glad to see you. The Everards told us all about you.” She beamed at Poetry. “You just bring your luggage into the back. You may have to wait a spell. We’ve had a phone call from down the line, and the rest of your party is hung up with car trouble. You boys hungry?”

  Before Poetry could say, “Certainly,” as he always does in answer to a question like that, the phone rang somewhere in the store. The woman bustled her way down the narrow aisle between shelves of groceries and all kinds of stuff to the back of the store. Then I noticed the phone on the wall by a sign that read General Delivery.

  I was worried about the rest of the gang. “What’ll they do out on some country road in the cold with a broken-down car? What if they’re miles and miles from a town?” I asked Poetry.

  “Goose! Snow Goose!” he answered. “Where do you think they telephoned from? A snowdrift?”

  I sighed with relief, sorry I had been so dumb. “But what if they don’t get here before night? Where’ll we spend the night?”

  “Snow Goose,” he answered again.

  While we’d been talking, the lady at the phone had been exclaiming and oh-ing and ah-ing, which was probably the same as saying, “What on earth?” She was also saying, “You don’t say!” and “Oh, dear!” She would make a good Sugar Creek mother, I thought. I was wondering if the phone was a “party line” and how many Squaw Lake mothers were listening in.

  Poetry brought my thoughts back to Squaw Lake by saying, “We’ll have the time of our lives—just the two of us. We’ll pretend we’re hunters or explorers lost in the woods, and we’ll accidentally happen onto an abandoned lodge in the forest and—”

  He was interrupted by a little bell tinkling above the front door of the store. The door was whisked open, letting in a rush of cold air and a short, wiry, long-whiskered little old man. His movements were as nervous as a frisky dog’s and as friendly as a puppy that comes wriggling all over the place up to you, wagging a friendly tail as much as to say, “Hi, everybody! I hope you like me as well as I like you.”

  The energetic little man didn’t see us at first but took off his steamed-up glasses and called, “Marthy! Where are you? That sun’s sure bright! Enough to blind a feller!”

  From the telephone “Marthy” called back, saying, “Where’ve you been all afternoon?”

  “Where’ve I been?” the little man said, cleaning his glasses with a tissue he had taken from a box on the counter. “I been out to the Snow Goose. I got the fire looked after and finished the road out to the fishing shanty. Seen anything of them Sugar Creek fellers?”

  Marthy was still jabbering into the phone. I was hearing her say, “I never saw such weather for the middle of the winter—day after day after day of it. You never can tell. How’s that? You don’t say! Well, I swan.”

  Poetry beside me said, “Not swan! Snow Goose!”

  The frisky little man had his glasses dry now and on again. He noticed Poetry and me for the first time and asked, “You the Sugar Creek boys that was a-coming up to stay at the Snow Goose?”

  I felt a grin running up and down my spine, hearing the lively little man talk like that, because it was the way quite a few of the old-timers around Sugar Creek talked.

  “I’m shore glad to see you young’uns,” the bewhiskered, sawed-off, talkative man said, as soon as he found out we were two of the boys he’d been looking for.

  Poetry grinned at me and I at him as he answered the little man in old-timer language. “The two of us young’uns came on the bus. The rest of the gang got hung up with car trouble down the road a piece and won’t get here for quite a spell. I reckon we’d better get on out to the Snow Goose and get supper ready for them.”

  I knew Poetry wasn’t joking when he talked about getting supper. He was the best cook of the whole gang and could even bake pies.

  I certainly didn’t expect the little man to take us up on the idea, though. I’d supposed that we’d have to stay at the Wimbish Grocery and Post Office and Service Station till Barry and the rest arrived, however long it might be, depending on whatever was wrong with the car.

  But the frisky little man said he had a little more to do to get the Snow Goose ready. He was the caretaker for the Everards while they were gone. And Marthy didn’t see anything against letting us go along for the ride, and “maybe they could do a mite of chores theirselves.”

  In a short while the little man was driving us out onto the snowplowed, pine-bordered highway and down it toward the place where pretty soon we’d see the first Snow Goose sign showing us where to turn to go to the lodge.

  Riding beside the bewhiskered old man in the rattling Jeep, Poetry not only watched the scenery with me but was busy with pencil and paper, writing or drawing something. “Just in case we have to make the trip all by ourselves someday,” he said, “I’m drawing a map.”

  Every time we came to a big Snow Goose sign, Poetry would quickly draw one on his map. The sign painter had certainly done a good job, I thought. Each sign had a large flying white goose having black-tipped wings and a reddish-pink beak pointing the way.

  Finally we swung into a narrow lane wide enough for only one car at a time and winding through high drifts. After about a hundred yards the Jeep came to an abrupt halt, and our driver came to the quickest life a man his size ever came to. “Look, boys! There in the evergreens! That’s him! That’s Old Timber! The ghost wolf!”

  I looked straight ahead to where Mr. Wimbish was pointing. First, I saw a little wooden house standing on four large, perpendicular, bark-covered logs. Then, at the foot of a narrow ladder leading up to the door, was what looked like the biggest police dog I ever saw.

  “The ornery critter’d like to get his teeth into that quarter of venison I cached up there yesterday,” Ed Wimbish exclaimed.

  I felt my heart beating excitedly as I remembered the “P.S.” in the Everards’ letter. I wished right that second that I had the hunting rifle Barry would have with him in the car when he came. The animal was long-nosed, pointy-eared, blackish-gray, and doglike with a gray face and whitish underparts and sides. He was standing erect, and the fur on his back bristled like a dog’s at Sugar Creek when it’s angry about something.

  “Look at that, would you!” the little man exclaimed. “It’s pretty nigh two feet long and bushy as a fox’s tail!”

  Then Ed Wimbish startled me by blowing a long hard blast on his horn and yelling, “Go on! Get away from that there ladder! You can’t climb up there nohow! Go on! Get goin’!” He honked the horn two more short sharp blasts.

  For a second, even that far away, I thought I saw the fierce-looking wolf’s eyes smolder with resentment. He looked like a stubborn boy who’s been interrupted by one of his parents stopping him from doing something he wanted to do and ordering him to do something he didn’t want to do.

  Then that big savage-looking monster of a timber wolf bared his fangs with his lips curled and just glared at us, as much as to say, “I hate people that interfere with what is my own business!”

  When our driver raced the engine and steered us on up the lane toward the cache house, Old Timber swung himself around, looking up just once toward the top of the ladder, then trotted away lazily, as if saying, “That deer meat is not fit for a fine wolf like me.” He faded away into a row of new pine like a sullen gray shadow.

  My heart was still racing with excitement and maybe with a little of what Mom or Dad would call fear, but which I hoped was just plain enjoyment mixed
with a little worry.

  “Old Timber’s been a-coming back every winter for nigh onto seven years,” Ed Wimbish said. “I’ve tried every way possible to trap him, but he’s as wary as a fox. I coulda shot him a dozen times, but Marthy won’t let me do it. She wants his fur without a bullet hole in it, and she says she can’t stand having him outsmart us. She says we’ll get him by trap or we’ll let him live. Marthy’s stubborn thataway. That there’s one request I want to make of you boys, and the rest of your club: don’t ever shoot Old Timber! I’ve been having trouble with some of the farmers, and he’s been shot at a half-dozen times by some of the new ranchers and hunters. But as soon as they learn how Marthy feels about it, they quit shootin’. I reckon one of these days or nights, though, Old Timber will go on a calf-killin’ spree—or sheep—and he’ll get a bullet.”

  I knew if Little Jim had been with us, or maybe Dragonfly, one of the first things he’d have said would be, “Will he eat people?” So I asked the question myself.

  Old Ed answered, “Wolves around here find all they want to eat without botherin’ human beings. There’s plenty of deer and moose, and it’s their nature to run away when approached by man. Notice how he turned tail when we got close to him?”

  Right that minute our Jeep came to a jerky stop not far from a rustic lodge. A painting of a giant snow goose was above its entrance, along with large letters made from short logs of white birch, spelling out the words THE SNOW GOOSE.

  Poetry and I swung into action, showing the little old-timer what good training we’d had at home. We helped him make up the beds —I remembered exactly how I’d seen Mom do it and felt fine inside that I had learned to do it myself. Mom had seen to it that I did.

  “This here’s the thermostat,” the trapper told us, touching it with his right forefinger. “You can have the temperature any degree you want by adjusting this. You won’t need the fireplace, but it’s fun to have it for roasting wieners and just to sit around with the lights off. The Everards kept it going every night. Marthy and me could look out across the lake from our house and see the flickerin’ flames. Shore miss ’em a lot. But she always wanted to see Californy, so they up and left, come December.”

  Old Ed was gazing out across the lake toward the town of Squaw Lake, which, judging from the way it looked wasn’t more than two miles away.

  “It’s further than four miles by the road we come on,” he explained. “But in the summer, it’s a shortcut to go by boat, shooting out past that neck of land that juts out and straight for our dock over there. Once in a while in the winter, when the road was blocked, me and Marthy used to snowshoe across.”

  Poetry’s curiosity made him ask, “What’s the row of evergreens doing out there in the middle of the lake? That’s lake on both sides of them, isn’t it?”

  “That’s the ‘road’ I was a-telling Marthy I was a-making all afternoon. I just got it finished afore I come into town to see if you’d come yet.

  “That there row of evergreens runs all the way out to the bobhouse—shanty, as I call it. See it away out there? That’s where you catch the big’uns—great northern, muskies, and giant perch. The row of trees is just in case you get caught out there in a blizzard or a fog, or if you want to go out at night or come home after fishing late. You just follow the row of trees. Marthy and me pretty nigh froze once one winter when a blizzard come up while we was out there and couldn’t find our way back.”

  My eyes followed the row of small evergreens out and out and out till they came to focus on the shanty he was talking about. I could hardly wait till we could get there and catch some of the “big’uns.”

  “But you can catch plenty of perch right out there, just a few feet from the second tree. Here’s where the Everards keep the bait.” Mr. Wimbish led us into a side room, lifted a trapdoor, and led us down an old stairway, lighting the way with his flashlight and saying as he went, “Don’t know why they didn’t run wires down here, but they didn’t. You have to use a flashlight or a lantern or candle to see anything.

  “Here’s the bait box,” he finished. “You’ll find plenty of worms for all the perch you can catch.”

  “Perch?” I asked. And my tone of voice showed I thought perch were hardly worth sneezing at.

  “Perch,” Ed said, “is the mainstay of fishermen in the winter. Cold water doesn’t bother ’em like it does bluegills and bass and crappies. Course, now and then you’ll hook onto a big’un. A walleye or pickerel will bite anything, too, if you can coax ’em into it.”

  Back upstairs and outdoors again, old Ed, his whiskers bobbing with every word he said, pointed a long arm toward the lake. “That second tree there. That’s where you’ll do most of your fishing, I reckon. No use to go plumb out to the shanty in weather like this. Weather’s not cold enough to need a fire or a wind shelter.

  “The snow’s pretty deep all around here, but it’s crusted over, and you won’t break through if you walk mostly in the sheltered places. That old sun’s been a-bearin’ down, though, last few days. Most a week now since there’s been any real cold weather.”

  For some reason I thought then of the Everards’ letter, saying Ed Wimbish himself was quite an exaggerator and to take what he said with several grains of salt. He might be a big exaggerator sometimes, I thought, but he certainly was a likeable old gentleman.

  “Gotta run my trapline tomorry,” he said. “Fact is, I gotta run down to the Rum River Crossin’ afore dark and see if my marten traps have got anything in ’em.”

  Poetry and I were standing just outside the lodge door by the twin pines that sort of guarded the entrance, watching the little man buzz about, doing different things. “He’s cute,” Poetry’s gooselike voice honked in my ear. “Look at the way he swings along.”

  I was watching old Ed’s surefooted way of stepping. I also admired the rifle he was carrying. When he came to the cache, where he had gone to get the ladder, he stooped as if studying the tracks Old Timber had made. Then he squinted up at the heavy door and, turning around, motioned us to come out to where he was.

  “I may decide to set a trap for him right here one of these days. If I do, I’ll let you boys know exactly where. I wouldn’t want to catch a boy. Man, look at the size of those tracks!”

  Poetry was walking around, squinting up at the little house and studying the tracks made in the snow by the monster wolf. He had a very serious expression on his face. “I’ve read lots of stories about wolves, and they didn’t always run away when they saw a man or boy. Sometimes they trailed ’em and—”

  “Rubbish,” Ed Wimbish scoffed. “Whoever wrote them stories never saw a wolf. Whoever wrote ’em maybe had read too many wolf stories by other writers who never saw a wolf, either, but had read stories by some other writer who never saw one. I’ve lived in these here parts for nigh onto twenty-seven years, and every wolf I ever saw was scared of me.”

  With that the old-timer sighed, swung his rifle into the crotch of his arm, and said, “I sure hope that Barry feller gets here tonight. If he wants to study honest-to-goodness wildlife, following the trapline with old Ed is a sure way to learn somethin’.”

  I knew who else would like to follow the line with him. In fact, I’d almost rather do that than catch a monster fish. Back at Sugar Creek, I’d followed Circus’s trapline with him a few times, but about all he ever caught was muskrat in the fall and spring and a raccoon or a skunk now and then. Remembering that I’d always wanted to kill a bear, I asked, “Are there any bears around here?” I remembered what the Everards’ letter had also said—that the bears would all be in hibernation this time of year.

  “Bears?” Ed Wimbish exclaimed raspily. “That’s the main reason we cache our meat up there—to keep the bears from getting it. Why, man, there’s bears around here everywhere.”

  3

  I felt a tingling sensation in my spine. My eyes looked in a quick half-worried circle of directions, expecting to see a two- or three- hundred-pound, short-legged, short-tailed, long-hair
ed quadruped with erect ears standing on his haunches and studying us or getting ready to charge, as I’d read happening in stories.

  I guess the old-timer must have thought I was really scared, because he quickly explained, “You don’t need to worry. Most of ’em are asleep this time of year.”

  “Most of them!” I exclaimed. “I thought they all went into hibernation in the fall and didn’t come out till spring!”

  “Most of ’em do. But with the weather being warmer up here this winter, they might get restless in their beds. Last week the snow melted a little. And when it does that, sometimes water drips in on the ones that picked a log under the snow, and they come out and hunt up another hibernatin’ place.”

  Then, because Poetry and I showed so much interest, and because there was quite a lot of firewood that had to be carried in, and we were helping him, the little trapper talked and talked and talked.

  “Once last winter Marthy was a-runnin’ my trapline with me. Marthy’s awful good on a trap-line—outwalks any man I ever saw and don’t lose nary a pound, neither. Fact is, she gains weight just walking through drifts for a day. She carries candy along to munch on, that’s why. Well, that day Marthy accidently broke through an ice-crusted drift and plunged into a hollow under a fallen tree and landed with all her two-hundred-twenty-five-odd pounds right on a bear! And he didn’t even wake up.

  “She was half mad at having scratched her shins on the bark of the tree, so she whams the sleeping bruin on the nose. But he just yawned and grunted and didn’t even bother to turn over. Fact is, you can turn ’em over yourself if they’re really asleep—and if you’re strong enough, of course—and they’ll keep right on snoring.

  “No, you don’t need to be afraid. They wouldn’t even be hungry—not till they’ve been out a while. Nature calls for almost nothing to eat for the first few days after they’ve waked up.

  “Come spring, though, and the young’uns are with ’em, and you make ’em think they’re cornered, then look out! And you can never tell when a bear thinks he’s cornered.