Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Barry shushed us all and quick got his flash camera ready, just in case there would be a chance for a picture of a real-life wild animal for the paper he was going to write.

  Again there was the scratching at the door, and then a bumping noise against the window just above the sink where Poetry and I were cleaning the fish. And then my hair did start to do strange things under my cap. For the length of a firefly’s fleeting flash I’d seen—not a few yards away on the snowy ground but right on the windowsill itself—a moving blur of grayish-brown, tigerlike fur and sharp claws clinging to the sill. And then it was gone.

  Quick as a flash, Barry was at the door. “I want a shot at whatever it is,” he exclaimed.

  The very second that door was open, there was a streak of grayish-brown, and something that at first looked three feet long dashed in. It leaped onto the worktable, where there were three yellow perch lying waiting to be cleaned. It seized one of them in its mouth, jumped down onto the floor, scooted under the writing desk by the window, and started eating that perch headfirst.

  “It’s a house cat!” Little Jim cried excitedly, his eyes shining. “A great big tomcat house cat!”

  It was disappointing. Even though I’d been startled into a scared feeling, afraid it was some kind of fierce wild animal, and was glad it wasn’t, yet I was sorry it wasn’t.

  That big beautiful tiger cat wasn’t going to get by with eating my perch, I thought. As I’d done many a time back home when Mixy had stolen one of my smaller sunfish or chubs, I started toward the writing desk.

  “Stop!” Poetry cried to me, seizing my arm. “Let him have it. That’s the one I caught. It was just before the walleye on the stringer.”

  I don’t know how I happened to be as bright as I was right then, but for some reason I thought to say, “OK, chum, your choice. That’s two of yours stolen—one for the kingfisher, one for the cat, and none for the little boy who’s already too fat.”

  Little Jim, who was always ready to help anybody have fun, piped up with a few lines of a poem.

  “Baa, baa, black sheep, have you any wool?

  Yes sir, yes sir, three bags full—

  One for my master, and one for my dame,

  And one for the little boy who lives in the lane.”

  Everybody was in a good humor, even the big tiger house cat, still under the writing desk, still eating Poetry’s perch.

  Dragonfly, who was over by the window looking out through a place in the frosted glass, spoke then, saying, “How’d anybody get a row of evergreens to grow in the middle of that lake, if that is a lake out there?”

  I knew he was wondering as I had wondered when I’d first seen the row of evergreens—spruce or fir, I wasn’t sure which—starting at the place where we’d caught our fish and stretching away into the distance like a row of green soldiers marching.

  “That,” I said loftily to Dragonfly, “is a ‘road.’”

  “A road?” he asked, astonished.

  “Yes, a road. Of course, if you were good in grammar, you’d know the word ‘road’ has quotation marks around it. Mr. Wimbish set the evergreens there in the ice and snow to mark the way out to the shanty where the fishing is best. If there’s a fog or a blizzard, or if you go at night, all you have to do is follow the row of trees and you can find it. Or if you’re out there when it’s foggy or blizzardy, you can find your way back.”

  It had been fun for Poetry and me to spud our own fishing hole in the afternoon. It’d be still more fun tomorrow to go out to the shanty—the “bobhouse,” as Mr. Wimbish had called it—to try for my whopper walleye or great northern. Or maybe I’d catch a monster muskie to have mounted and placed on the wall of my room back home, where everybody could see it and be reminded of what a good fisherman I was. “I wanted to go fishing tonight!” Dragonfly said.

  And so did several of the rest of us.

  “It’s early to bed tonight,” Barry ordered from the stove, where he and Poetry—Poetry wearing a high, white chef’s hat to make him look like a cook—were busy with the fish fillets and other things we had to eat.

  “I won’t be sleepy,” Dragonfly whined.

  “You will be in the morning,” Barry said. And his tone of voice said that was the end of the argument. And it was, because he added in the same tone of voice, “We’ll make our first trip out in the daytime.”

  “Dinner’s ready,” Poetry sang out.

  He was answered by Circus, who hardly ever made any cute remarks but this time did, saying, “Little Tommy Tucker sang for his supper, not his dinner. Imagine the poem going: ‘Little Tommy Tinner sang for his dinner.’”

  But it didn’t matter which it was, supper or dinner. It was something for six hungry boys and their camp director to eat. In a little while we were seated around the table under the big light hanging from the rafter. Little Jim, in a mischievous mood, looked at the six fish on the large platter in the center of the table and said, “One for the kingfisher, one for the cat, and none for the little boy who is already too fat.”

  It was time for the blessing, which we always had, even when we were out in the woods. We never knew which kind it would be, though—somebody being called on to actually pray with his voice, or if it would be what at our house we call a “Quaker blessing,” when each one bows his head and thinks his prayer to God, instead of speaking it in a whisper or an actual voice.

  My own thoughts were about Mom and Dad and Charlotte Ann, who right that very minute were probably at the table in our kitchen, and Dad was saying, “Bless our son up there in the frozen North. Protect him from harm. Help him to remember whose boy he is—ours. Help him to think and help him grow into a strong, fine, clean young man who will be an honor to Your name and to the family name …”

  I knew he would pray a prayer something like that, because I’d heard him pray it every time just before I’d gone on a vacation anywhere without him and Mom.

  While not a one of us was saying a word, and all we could hear was tomcat chewing perch bones under the writing desk, all of a sudden there was the sound of a car engine not far from the lodge. It backfired every few seconds, and I knew it was the old-timer himself come back from looking at his marten traps.

  Right away there was a wild honking of his horn, reminding me of the time I’d heard him honk it to scare Old Timber away from the cache ladder.

  Then I heard Ed Wimbish’s raspy voice coming through the twilight, saying, “I told you before! Get away from that ladder!”

  And then I heard another explosive noise—and it wasn’t from his oldish Jeep backfiring. It was like a gun firing!

  Had Old Ed lost his patience? Had he changed his mind about catching the big bad wolf in a trap and had shot him instead?

  4

  Imagine that! Just when you are in the middle of the beginning of your vacation in the frozen North, where you are going to help your camp director study wildlife, while you are sitting quietly at the supper table asking a Quaker blessing on the fish and other food you’re going to have—and while you are getting hungrier every second—imagine what an explosion there is in your mind when, right in the middle of all that quiet, you are half-scared out of what few wits you have by an ear-deafening blast from a gun just outside the big oak door behind you! Then you hear running steps and know that, any second, whoever is out there will come bursting into the lodge!

  I jumped as if I had been shot at and missed. Then I felt excitement whirling all around me as there was a whamming against the door itself and a voice—the rasping, excited voice of Ed Wimbish—calling, “Let me in, quick!”

  The word “quick” was a squeaky cry like that of an animal caught in a trap and badly hurt.

  Since the door was directly behind me, I not only jumped as if I had been shot at and missed but also as if I had been hit. I was up and starting to shove my chair back out of the way so I could get to the door.

  At the same time, several of the rest of the gang were doing the same thing. In a fourth of a minute,
three of us were in a football pileup in front of the door. It took Barry a little while to get us out of the way and finally open the door.

  With the wiry, excited little man as he whizzed in came the odor of gun smoke and another odor a little like that of polecat, only not nearly so strong. Ed carried a game sack with something inside. I’d seen a sack like that many a time back home when we’d been hunting and had shot a rabbit or several and were carrying them home.

  Mr. Wimbish started talking the minute he got in, his eyes blinking a little at the light. “The ornery critter’s a-gettin’ more daring every day. Must thought I was a-bringin’ him his supper. Why, the varmint wasn’t more’n twenty feet from me when I opened the car door! One of these days or nights I’m a-gonna lose my temper and my good sense and shoot straight at him. If I don’t quit shootin’ over his head, he’ll get a notion I cain’t shoot straight and there aren’t nothin’ to be afraid of, and I’ll come home some night and find him with my grandmother’s nightgown on in bed a-waitin’ to eat me up!”

  There was plenty of excitement for a while as old Ed told his story. He’d stopped at two of his marten traps, and both had had the triggers pulled. One of them also had a marten in it, dead as a doornail under the deadfall log.

  “The other trap had been sprung, too, but there weren’t a thing under it. Fact is, there weren’t any log anywhere near the place. Some ornery varmint had helped himself to my fish-head bait. The slickest critter I ever smelt. And I mean smelt! And he musta had a temper a mile long. My stake enclosure was like a house after a tornado had struck it. The log was scratched and gnawed and dragged a dozen feet through the trees, and there was a musky odor all over everything. I reckon we’re goin’ to have half our traps throwed or broken tomorry. Once a wolverine gets started, he never knows when to quit.”

  Our tiger house cat had finished his perch quite a while ago and acted still hungry. He was sniffing around Ed’s gunnysack now.

  We were all talking, asking questions and making remarks, and I was enjoying a whole new boys’ world I’d never been in before, listening and learning and feeling fine. But I was also feeling sorry for the beautiful glossy-black marten old Ed very proudly brought from the gunnysack and stretched out on the floor for us to see.

  “Here, Tiger,” he said to the tomcat. “Want to see a black cat?”

  It seemed Tiger did, but, as cats do, he only sniffed at it a little and turned away. Then he mewed lazily and rubbed his sleek fat sides against Little Jim’s legs.

  Ed explained, as we crowded around with a lot more curiosity than the cat had, “This is a rare marten or a ‘fisher’ as some folks call ’em. This one’s all black and worth a lot of money. A lot of it. You hardly ever get one that’s all black. We call ’em ‘black cats’ or, sometimes, ‘black foxes.’”

  All of a sudden, old Ed looked up from admiring the very beautiful long-bodied, black-tailed, short-legged, pointy-muzzled “black cat” and exclaimed, “Marthy’ll be worried to death. I forgot to tell her I was a-gonna run them two traps afore supper. You be ready at four in the morning, and we’ll take off for the whole line. How many of you a-goin’?” he finished.

  Barry didn’t know how many or which ones of us were going to go on the first trapline trip, but we’d decide before four in the morning, he told the little old gentleman.

  Right away, as happy with his marten as Charlotte Ann with a new doll, Ed was out the door and gone with his gunnysack with the high-priced marten, or “black cat,” or fisher in it. He said as he left, and as the light from our cabin cast a shadow ahead of him in the snow, “Sure’s a warm night for January. Never seen it so warm in the winter afore.”

  A few seconds later, his Jeep came to clattering life, and he was off in a noisy hurry up the lane on his way to his Marthy—Marthy, who was good at following traplines, too, and who once had stepped on a live sleeping bear, when she had broken through a drift into his hibernating place.

  Barry was getting quite a lot of material for his important paper. Already he could write about seven perch, one walleye, a rattling-voiced kingfisher that made his home in the bank up the lake, a nest of partridges, a huge timber wolf that was “the biggest ever seen in these here parts,” and a twenty-pound marten out of which furriers could make sable furs for some woman somewhere to pay for. Also he could write in his paper something about a musky-smelling glutton of a wolverine that was spoiling old Ed’s trapline.

  Big Jim washed the dishes, and, because Little Jim begged to dry them, the rest of us let him, not feeling very sad that we didn’t get to do it ourselves.

  Barry was over at the writing desk typing for a while and writing in a notebook with his pencil. Once as I passed by him on my way to lie down on the bearskin rug in front of the screened fireplace, I sort of accidentally saw a few words of what he had written. The very second I saw what I saw, I realized it wasn’t any boy’s business, and I hurried past. The words stuck in my mind, though. His writing, as far as I read, said:

  Dear Jeanne:

  Looking forward to next June. Can hardly wait till you come next weekend. Bring your snowshoes and ski outfit. The boys’ll love you, as “others” do and can’t help “themselves.” Will have this postmarked at Forty Mile Crossing tomorrow …

  Because we had to get up early to go with the old-timer on his trapline run, we all went to bed early. Still, we were a pretty groggy bunch when Barry routed us out at four in the morning, but we took it as cheerfully as we could, Poetry starting his day by a short verse from Robert Louis Stevenson, which went:

  In winter, I get up at night

  And dress by yellow candlelight;

  In summer, quite the other way—

  I have to go to bed by day.

  Again it was a surprisingly warm day, and we had a wonderful time. Barry took enough notes and pictures of different kinds of wildlife to give him many pages of material for his paper. I also discovered a lot of muscle I didn’t know I had. When we dragged ourselves into bed that night, I thought I’d never been so tired in my half-long life—as also did all of us.

  We had our first experience fishing in an ice shanty the next morning. It was another sunshiny day, surprisingly warm. Right after breakfast we got our tackle ready and a can of night crawlers from the basement and started out across the lake, following the road of evergreens. One of the first things I noticed as we rambled along was that each tree had a lot of snow piled up around the base. Marks of Ed’s shovel still showed where he had used the back of it to pack the snow good and tight around each tree’s small trunk.

  “That’s so the wind won’t blow the trees away on a stormy day or night, I’ll bet,” Little Jim’s bright little mind thought to say.

  Big Jim tested with his boot the cone-shaped pile of snow around one of the trees and said, “The snow was wet when he packed it. Now it’s ice.”

  Barry had let us go on ahead without him. He wanted to do a little writing on his paper. “I can think better alone,” he told us—maybe meaning we were too noisy.

  The traction-grip tire tracks of old Ed’s Jeep were so clean in some places that you could actually see the sharp corners of their six-sided studs. He’d probably loaded the Jeep with the trees and driven them right out across the lake, stopping every so often to set one out.

  When we finally reached the shanty, which was at least a mile from the lodge, and maybe a lot farther—it was hard to judge distances on a snow-covered lake—Little Jim looked toward the east in the direction of Squaw Lake town, shading his eyes against the sun and said, “There aren’t any tire tracks on that road. Where does that go?”

  The road he was talking about was another row of evergreens, leading off at a right angle from the one we’d come on and stretching away for a mile or so to a cabin or cottage hidden among the pines. Blue smoke rose lazily from a chimney, meaning somebody lived there.

  “I’ll bet that’s where Ed and Martha live,”

  Poetry suggested to me. “They made a ‘road’
out there too.”

  The ice shanty was the very first I’d ever been in, and I could hardly wait till we had unlatched the door and were inside in the half-dark. One of the first things I noticed was a kerosene lantern on a shelf on one of the walls. “That’s to see with when anybody fishes at night,” Circus suggested. And it probably was.

  Beside the lantern I saw a box of safety matches, one of which Big Jim used to start a fire in an old-fashioned iron stove. We used kindling that was already in it and put in a few logs of wood from a stack along the wall. I’d noticed there was quite a large rick of the same kind of wood just outside also.

  “The old man’s a pretty good carpenter,” Big Jim said. His father built houses, and Big Jim would know about those things. The floor of the house was made of boards an inch thick, with two trapdoors through which we were supposed to fish. Each trapdoor was a foot and a half square. When we lifted them up, they could be leaned back against the wall.

  “That’s so they won’t get stumbled over if you have a big fish on and get excited and step into the water and get yourself all wet, I’ll bet,” Little Jim guessed in a cheerful voice.

  “The head of the class for you,” Poetry answered, showing he had probably thought of the same thing but knew that he hadn’t thought to say it first.

  The walls of the house were made of plywood, covered on the outside with tar paper so that they would be windproof and it’d be easy to keep the house warm on an extracold day or night.

  The whole house was maybe eight by ten feet, plenty big for all of us to fish in and not be too crowded. Some of us had to stoop a little to get in the door, though. Circus and Big Jim had to, since they were the tallest. There was also a high sill we had to step over.