Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  “What’s the high sill for?” Dragonfly whined. He had stumbled over it when he came in and landed with a whammety-thud on the floor.

  “To keep cold drafts off your feet,” Big Jim answered, “and also to keep snow from blowing in on a windy day when the door’s open. And to keep water from running in if the snow melts outside.” What he said was probably right, I thought.

  There were four small windows, one of them just above the door and having a blind that could be drawn.

  Poetry guessed what the blind was for—also what the sliding wooden covers at the other windows were for. “It’s so, if you’re fishing in the daytime, you can shut out the light. Then you can see fish swimming around and they can’t see you, and you can watch them biting.”

  There were benches, built so they could be folded down against the wall, and above them was an extrawide shelf, just high enough so that your head didn’t touch it when you were sitting on the bench.

  “Well, what do you know about that?” I exclaimed. I’d seen another shelf with a little camp cooking stove on it and a first-aid kit and a few other supplies that freezing wouldn’t hurt.

  “And look!” Dragonfly said. “There are some blankets on the high shelf. If we get cold or the fire goes out, we can wrap up in ’em and keep warm!”

  “They’re for staying all night, if you want to sleep here, I’ll bet,” Little Jim put in. “And that high shelf is wide enough to be the upper berth of a bunk bed.”

  Pretty soon we were ready to fish, and pretty soon we were doing it, having the shanty as dark as we could make it and still have ventilation. We used both holes under the two trapdoors, having to spud new ones, though, because the weather had been colder since the last person or persons had fished here, and the surface had frozen over.

  Ice fishing in a shanty wasn’t as much fun as fishing from a boat in warm weather, but we did enjoy it, especially when every now and then one of us would get a whopper on and actually land it.

  We had a couple two-or-three-pound walleyes and about six perch before we heard somebody coming.

  “It’s Barry, I’ll bet,” Circus said. “Just listen to the song he’s whistling.”

  I listened, as did we all, and the melody was one I’d heard quite a few times at weddings back at Sugar Creek. Circus, the best singer of the gang and knowing a lot of songs by heart, started singing the words, the first few of which are:

  Because you come to me, with naught save love, dear …

  “Poor Barry!” Poetry said sadly, cutting in on Circus.

  “She’s pretty, though,” I said. Poetry and I were the only ones of the gang to have seen her, when we were under the potted palm in the lobby of the hotel back in Minneapolis.

  “Yeah, but she looks citified,” he countered. “Barry ought to have a girl who can rough it. I’ll bet she’d be as helpless as a kitten on a camping trip. Why—”

  “Sh!” Big Jim chopped Poetry’s sentence off at its very beginning. “Don’t let him hear you!”

  Barry was just outside the door, so that ended our talk about him and the kind of helpless, extrapretty, dainty girl he was going to marry next June, and who, the last of the week, was going to drive Barry’s station wagon up from Minneapolis. As you already know, we’d borrowed her car for most of the gang to drive up in.

  Barry’s coming ended our talk, but it didn’t end our worries. It seemed all right for our camp director to have a special friend, and we supposed he had a right to get married, but what would we do for a camp director next time we wanted to come up here or go to some other place on a vacation? Barry wouldn’t belong to our boys’ world anymore but would be living in a married people’s world, which seemed to have a high wall separating it from our world.

  Barry stopped whistling when he reached the shanty door. He knocked a cheerful knock and called out, “Little pig, little pig! Let me come in!”

  Big Jim, who had an almost mustache on his upper lip, answered, “Not by the fuzz under my nosey-nose-nose.”

  Well, we caught a few more medium-sized fish. Then all of us went back to camp, cleaned them, and took a drive in the Jeep with old Ed to see different winter scenes.

  The days flew by too fast, and the weather kept on being what they called unseasonably warm. We liked the warmer weather, but it wasn’t best for fur, Ed said. He didn’t want nature to decide spring was here, and the “varmints” begin to shed, and their fur be worth a lot less.

  Every day Barry worked on his special paper, and we had plenty of time for ourselves to do as we wished, except that we had to stay close to camp unless when Barry or the old-timer was with us.

  We still hadn’t caught any real whoppers, and we hadn’t seen many large animals—only a few deer and once a red fox. Old Timber seemed to have left the country, as if he didn’t like human beings and the deer meat in the cache wasn’t fit for a fine wolf like him.

  Too soon our vacation would be over. Too soon the girl who next June was going to rob us of our camp director would come driving up in the station wagon. “She may be the helpless type,” Big Jim said to us once when we were out by the kingfisher’s tree, “but we’re going to be polite and courteous and show her that the Sugar Creek Gang knows how to treat a lady.”

  We voted on it, and the count was six to nothing in favor of acting as if we were pleased half to death that there was going to be a wedding in June.

  Along toward the last of our week, the old-timer decided to run his trapline again. This time it was to be a fast trip, so he and Barry would go alone. The littlest ones of us would slow down the hike too much. We were to stay near camp and not let ourselves get out of sight of it.

  As they had the day of the first trip, Barry and Ed started about four in the morning. I hardly woke up at all when the lights of the four-wheel-drive Jeep pickup came shining down the lane and into the lodge windows.

  It felt good not to have to get up, even though the smell of frying bacon and eggs made my mouth water. I was glad I could sleep a while longer, and when I did get up, I could dress by good old yellow sunlight.

  The noise of the Jeep outside the open door almost drowned out Barry’s last words to Big Jim, which were: “We’ll try to be back by noon, but we’re hoping to spot a deer. If we do, we’ll do a little stalking. I need a camera shot of one close up. If we don’t get back by noon, don’t worry. You know how to cook. Better not get too far from camp. Be sure you can always see the Snow Goose sign from wherever you are. Get it?”

  “Got it!” several of our voices grunted.

  I went to sleep again, hearing the Jeep engine fade away down the lane.

  It was quite late by the time we all had waked up, had our breakfast, and were ready for the day—our next to the last one before Ed and Marthy’s grandniece would come with the station wagon.

  The first thing I noticed when we stepped out into the morning was that there had been a fresh snowfall during the night. The sun was shining again, though, and it was going to be an even warmer day than some of the warmest we had had.

  Water was already dripping off the roof. The new snow up there was melting because of the sunshine and the higher temperature.

  The first thing Dragonfly did was make a beeline for the ladder leading up to the cache, where a second later he yelled back to us, “Come here, you guys! There’s been some man running around here barefooted!”

  5

  We were used to Dragonfly yelling crazy things for us to come and see. The very first day we’d been there, as you know, he’d yelled that there were bear tracks around the cache ladder, when it had been only those of Old Timber. So nobody paid any attention to him this time.

  But Dragonfly’s voice sounded very insistent. He kept on yelling to us, “But there’s a barefoot man’s tracks here! All around the place!”

  “Wolf!” Circus yelled back.

  “Wolf!” several of the rest of us echoed.

  But Dragonfly wouldn’t give up. “They’re seven times as big as a wolf’s
tracks! Come and see for yourselves!”

  “Might as well humor him,” Poetry grunted to me, stopping winding the handline he had been getting ready for fishing.

  He sauntered with me through the new snow over to where Dragonfly was.

  Circus must have gotten the same idea as Poetry, because he got there at the same time. He hadn’t any sooner glimpsed what Dragonfly had been looking at for quite a while than he let out a whistle that seemed to say, “What on earth!” With his voice, he called out to the rest of the gang, “It might be a bear!”

  “It can’t be,” Big Jim called from where he was, also on the way to us. “Bears are in hibernation now and won’t come out till spring.”

  I didn’t say anything, but I was remembering what the old-timer had told us the first of the week. Sometimes a bear’s winter sleeping quarters get uncomfortable for him, due maybe to warm weather and melting snow, and he comes out. The footprints did look almost exactly like those of a very large, barefoot man. Not a claw print was visible. I knew enough from what I’d looked up about animals before I’d left home that if it was a bear, the tracks of the back feet would look a lot like those of a barefoot man, but those of the front feet would be different.

  I said so to the gang, and Dragonfly pouted an answer, saying, “That’s why I know it’s a man! All the tracks are alike. There aren’t any front-feet tracks!”

  And he was right. All the tracks around the cache were like those of a barefoot man. Each one had five toe prints.

  We stopped and looked into each other’s eyes. It couldn’t be a bear, because bears were in hibernation—or were supposed to be—but how on earth could it have been a man? Why would anybody want to go barefoot in the snow in the winter?

  I was surprised at Little Jim, who decided it for us. He said, “If it was a man, his big toe would be on one side and the little toe on the other. See? This track’s got two little toes, one on each side, and one big toe right in the middle!”

  And I saw that he was right. Not only that, but a second later, about ten feet from the cache in the direction of the white birch, where on our first afternoon I’d tossed our stringer of fish, Circus spotted the animal’s front-feet tracks. They had five toes, too, but at the end of each toe print was the mark of a long claw. The rest of the track looked exactly like that of a big five-toed dog, except that a dog track would have only four toes.

  Big Jim spoke then, saying, “He was standing on his hind feet back there, looking up at the cache and wishing there was some way he could get up. Here, he’s walking on all four feet!”

  Well, that settled it. There was a bear around here somewhere. Something had waked him from his winter’s nap—the warm weather, maybe.

  “Let’s trail him to see where he went,” Poetry suggested. Pretending to be a hound, he let out a long bawl like Circus’s pop’s old black-and-tan on a coon trail at night along the Sugar Creek bayou. Right away the rest of us, whooping it up like five other hounds, were right after him. That is, I thought all the rest of us were.

  When we got stopped by Big Jim ordering us to stop, I knew there’d been only five of us on the trail.

  Big Jim said, “The forest is pretty dense all around here, and we can’t run any risk of getting lost or getting clawed or mauled by a bear. It’d be the easiest thing in the world to get lost out there somewhere. Besides, I promised Barry we’d stay close to camp.”

  I took a sad look out across an open space leading to a thicket of evergreens toward which the bear’s tracks led. My heart was pounding with excitement for wanting to actually see the bear. I complained a little to Big Jim, saying, “For the first few days after a bear wakes up out of hibernation, nature calls for only a little food, just a little.” I was quoting Ed Wimbish.

  “How do you know he’s been awake only a few days?” Big Jim countered. “Wasn’t he hungry enough to stand on his hind legs and lick his chops in the direction of the deer meat up there?”

  Still not liking to have my desires squelched, I said, “All right, then. Let’s go fishing and have fish for dinner. Let’s go out to the shanty and catch some big ones.”

  But we decided not to go before dinner. It was a long way out there, and we could probably catch quite a few near the second tree at the beginning of the tree road anyway—which we did. Big Jim decided that for us, too.

  That squelched two of my ideas. I had wanted to trail the bear and hadn’t gotten to. I’d wanted to follow the evergreen road away out to the shanty and catch some really big fish and hadn’t gotten to. I felt sort of surly in my mind. I shouldn’t have, because anybody with good sense could see that Big Jim was right, but for a while I didn’t have the good sense that I knew I should have.

  All the time we were catching medium and baby-sized yellow perch, I was smoldering inside. I kept thinking about the bear, wishing we could see him before he found a new hibernating place and went back to sleep for the rest of the winter.

  Poetry must have been thinking the same thing. When he and I were alone for a little while, he said to me, “I wonder where he was holed up before the warm weather spoiled his hiding place.”

  Well, Poetry and Little Jim and I found out that very morning. The rest of the gang wasn’t with us at the time, and it happened kind of accidentally.

  When we got back to the shore with our string of all perch—not a single walleye or northern or bass or muskie among them—we spotted the kingfisher high on his dead tree, watching for a chance to swoop down with a harsh, rattling cry onto our stringer, seize a fish lunch—or dinner—and fly back with it, go through a dozen acrobatic stunts swallowing it whole, and then shoot home to his hole in the bank a hundred yards up the shore.

  I was carrying the stringer of perch at the time, so when Poetry said, “It’s your turn to feed the kingfisher. Give him one of the ones you caught,” I took him up on the idea. I selected one of the smaller fish that would be just about the right size for one bite for a kingfisher, tore it off the stringer, and handed the stringer to Big Jim. Then when we got to the white birch tree, I tossed the perch on the ground.

  Talk about action! Almost before I could have said, “Scat!” there was a flash of black-and-blue-and-white dropping like a bullet from the dead branch down onto the dead perch by the birch. With a flash of fluttering wings and rattling voice, the kingfisher was up and away. This time, though, instead of flying up to his tree to eat his perch, he raced off across the sky to his den.

  It happened so quickly that not a one of the rest of the gang except Little Jim had seen it. The others were almost all the way to the lodge at the time.

  “Come on!” Poetry said to Little Jim and me. “Let’s go see where he lives!”

  It was a good idea. We had to work our way through underbrush and new tree growth, around a few snow-covered rocks, and then through deep drifts, which, because of the warmer weather had had the crust melted on the surface. We kept breaking through, making it hard going.

  Finally, quite a ways from the lodge, we came to a fallen tree that had broken off about six feet from the ground. Part of the trunk was still fastened to the stump. The snow had piled up in a huge drift all along the length of the trunk. It was a very large pine tree.

  I was remembering the old-timer’s story about how Marthy had accidentally slipped off a log into a drift and broken through and landed on a sleeping bear underneath, so I climbed up onto that long tree trunk, crying to Poetry and to Little Jim, “Follow the leader!”

  Follow the leader they did. But Little Jim, being nearer to the stump than I, clambered up quick and got ahead of Poetry and me. He was crying with his own excited, mischievous voice, pleased at the trick he had played on me, “Follow the leader!” And away he went like a little chipmunk, scampering along the trunk toward the place where it was broken halfway off the stump.

  Poetry and I were panting along after him, balancing ourselves on the tree trunk and feeling wonderful when all of a sudden Little Jim let out a happy scream, poised as if he wa
s on a diving board, held his nose, and yelled, “Here I come!” Then he jumped, not headfirst as a boy does sometimes but straight out so that he could land on his feet.

  He landed on his feet all right, but the snowdrift’s crust was thin because of the warmer weather they’d been having up here. The little guy broke through and went down. And I mean down. In any ordinary drift, a boy his weight would have sunk in only a foot or so, at least not any deeper than up to his hips.

  Right then I was about to lose my balance. So while I was struggling to keep from falling off the tree trunk, I didn’t see just how far Little Jim had sunk in. When my eyes came back to look for him, he wasn’t there! He’d completely disappeared.

  What on earth! In a snowdrift?

  But by the time I got there, with Poetry right behind me, Little Jim was yelling happily, “Bill! Poetry! Come here! It’s a cave under the snow!”

  Right away Little Jim’s happy face came up out of the hole he had made when he had landed in the drift. The red cap on his head was covered with snow. He looked as if he had fallen into a flour barrel.

  I must confess I had cringed all over when he disappeared like that, remembering Marthy’s experience. I was afraid he had broken through into a bear’s den and landed right on one. “Look out down there!” I yelled to him. “You might be in a bear’s winter sleeping place! There might be a bear down there!”

  Right that second he began to struggle to regain his balance, slipped, and slid farther down into the hole and under the tree trunk. I didn’t have time to wonder if there was a bear there, or if it had grabbed him by the feet and pulled him under, because he yelled a muffled yell back to us saying, “Come on in! The snow’s fine!”

  Satisfied there wasn’t any actual bear there, Poetry and I worked our way down to where Little Jim was. The place was about the size that would hold a large bear. There were leaves and marsh grass and old pine needles mashed down into a nest. But instead of their being dry as they should have been for a nice cozy bed, they were wet. On one end of the nest, water was dripping in from the melting snow overhead, and at the other end, near the trunk, the snow was broken away. It made a large exit, reminding me of a giant cocoon back at Sugar Creek with a hole in one end where the larva, after turning into a butterfly, had crawled out.