Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  Poetry was first to say what was what, and this is what he said: “This, gentlemen, is where our barefoot, five-toed bear had his winter quarters!”

  I’d never seen Little Jim as bright as he was that day. He was quick on the trigger with a witty remark. “Which of his quarters—his fore or his hind?”

  But Poetry was right. This had to be the place.

  “I don’t blame him for getting out of bed. I’d do the very same thing myself if water started dripping down in my face and all over me,” I said.

  We must have been making quite a lot of noise, hollering and talking loudly, for soon there were yelling voices from the direction of the lodge. There came Big Jim, Circus, and Dragonfly, plowing through the snow toward us to see what we’d found.

  Would we ever have news for Barry and the old-timer!

  There wasn’t room enough for all of us in the hole under the tree trunk. Besides, because of the wet leaves and the two holes—one at each end now that Little Jim had accidentally made the second one—it wasn’t a good place to make a hideout for ourselves.

  We all waded around in the snow at the place where the bear had come out. Sure enough, there were tracks like those we’d seen at the cache—large tracks with five toes, looking very much like those of a large barefoot man, except that the big toe was in the middle and there were two little toes on each foot. Also we saw the tracks of the front feet, like a large five-toed dog’s or wolf’s, with the claw marks quite plain.

  “How big do you suppose he is?” Dragonfly asked, his teeth chattering.

  “Terribly big!” Poetry said, growling the words.

  On our way back to the lodge I was feeling a little worried, so I couldn’t enjoy the “let’s pretend” game the gang was playing as we shuffled along through the drifts, different ones taking the part of the different bears in the story “Goldilocks and the Three Bears.”

  Little Jim’s mouselike voice did sound cute as he took the part of the baby bear, saying, “Some boy has been breaking through the roof of my house and scattering snow all over my bed!”

  We’d forgotten to look for the kingfisher’s home in the low bank up the lake. We’d found something else much more exciting.

  We talked about different things while we cleaned our six perch at the sink. Getting our water out of the iron pump inside the house, the water pouring from its spout right into the sink, certainly was handy. I’d have to tell Dad about that when I got home. It’d save Theodore Collins’s son a lot of steps to have a pump inside the house—and in the wintertime it wouldn’t freeze up and have to be thawed out every morning before we could have fresh water.

  As he had done every time we cleaned a mess of fish, the Everards’ tomcat came to excited life, but he didn’t get by with stealing a fish this time. We made him eat fish heads instead of whole fish, and he wasn’t allowed to get up onto the worktable.

  Noon came, and Barry and old Ed hadn’t come back yet, so we ate our fish and some pancakes Poetry made for us, using a mix that told on the package how to make them.

  We kept the fire going in the fireplace, even though we hardly needed it because the weather was so warm. Then we lazed around after doing the dishes, some of us taking naps because of the fire’s making us drowsy. Others of us leafed through magazines, and I read a little in one of Barry’s books. Two books especially interested my mind, one of them on skiing and the other on winter wildlife.

  I moseyed through page after page until all of a sudden I came to with a start at something I heard on the roof of the house. “Hey!” I exclaimed, all the sleepiness out of me.

  Little Jim, who was leaning against the wall by the window, jumped as if he had been shot at. Dragonfly, on a chair at the table with his head buried against his arm, came to with a jerk that threw him off balance. He landed on the floor on top of Poetry’s stomach—Poetry had been lying there asleep. Circus called out from the couch he was lying on, “Keep still, so I can sleep!” and turned his face to the wall.

  Only Big Jim didn’t react. He kept his nose buried in the book he’d been reading, which I’d seen was named Etiquette for Boys. The book, I’d noticed, was open to a chapter called “Your First Date.”

  I might have known Big Jim was old enough to be interested in a book like that. It wasn’t going to be easy for the gang when he got old enough to think girls were people and wanted to be extrakind to some special girl and then maybe wouldn’t have as much time to be with the gang. In fact, ever since the new minister had come to our church at Sugar Creek, he had been combing his hair better on account of the minister’s daughter Sylvia. She was about his age and was very nice for a girl. She was polite and pretty, and her once-in-a-while smile at Big Jim was like her name sounded, kind of silvery.

  Anyway, when I heard something on the lodge roof and yelled out, “Hey!” Big Jim was the only one who didn’t show any reaction. He just kept on reading with his eyes glued to the chapter on “Your First Date.”

  Pretty soon he had to react, though, for I was out of my easy chair and racing to the heavy oak door to unbolt it and yank it open to see what was going on.

  6

  Before I could get to the door, there was a rumbling noise on the roof as if an animal—or a ghost—was using it for a slide. As fast as greased lightning, whatever was up there slid off and landed somewhere just outside the door with a clatterety-thuddety-scrish!

  What I expected to see when I did open the door, I didn’t know, but probably some kind of wildlife—a porcupine, maybe—that had been climbing one of the twin pines and had accidentally lost his hold on a branch, fallen onto the roof, and rolled all the way down.

  “Oh, no!” I exclaimed in disappointment when I saw nothing but a pile of wet snow on the porch, so close to the door we’d have to scoop it aside to get out.

  “Snow’s melting off the roof,” I started to say. I also started to look up.

  I stopped talking and looking when there was another rumbling above my head. Before I could get my head out of the way, an avalanche of watery snow whammed down on me, making me yell so loud I could have been heard as far away as the kingfisher’s hole in the bluff up the lake.

  It was like the noise of Santa and his reindeer on the lawn in the poem most people know. On our lodge porch there arose such a clatter that Circus and Poetry and Dragonfly and Little Jim sprang from their sleep to see what was the matter.

  What had happened wasn’t important, except that it shows how warm the weather really was. And warm weather meant that things in the north woods were anything but normal. Unless there was a cold spell soon, there wouldn’t be any frozen North.

  It was this same warm weather that had melted the snow and made the bear’s sleeping quarters so uncomfortable that he had to get out and hunt up a new place.

  Weather could certainly make a boy’s vacation interesting, and a change in the weather could make a change in his vacation activities.

  Well, the avalanche from the roof did wake us all up and sent us outdoors to make snowballs. The new snow was just right.

  “Let’s make a statue of Old Timber,” Little Jim suggested.

  We voted that down because we knew we could never make a wolf’s four slender legs strong enough to hold up his body. We decided on a bear. We patterned it after one we had seen a picture of in one of Barry’s books. We certainly had a lot of fun doing it, expecting any minute to see Barry and the old-timer come driving up the lane in Ed’s Jeep pickup.

  Little Jim’s eyes always had a faraway look in them when he was pretending anything, and he kept coming up with bright ideas. “We’re making a wife for the bear that’s been sleeping under the fallen tree,” he said, as he grunted along, pushing the snowball he’d been rolling for quite a while.

  We were very careful not to obliterate the tracks of the real bear that had been walking around on his hind feet under the cache. These we wanted Barry and Mr. Wimbish to see, as well as the abandoned den under the fallen tree.

  Another th
ing Little Jim’s very bright, alert little mind thought to say was: “The father bear’s name is Adam. He lives all alone in the Garden of Eden, and he doesn’t have any wife, so we’re making one for him.”

  Dragonfly knew the Bible story, too, but he was skeptical of Little Jim’s idea. “God used a rib out of the man to make his wife. We’re making the bear’s wife out of snow! Besides, the man Adam was asleep when God took the rib out of his side. Our bear is wide awake and maybe a mile or two or three away from here.”

  We were nearly finished when Little Jim came up with another bright idea. “We’ve got Father Bear and Mother Bear. Now let’s make a baby bear.”

  When, quite a while later, we had finished, our work really looked good. It was easy to stand back about forty feet and imagine our Mother Bear was brownish-black or coal black in color with a tiny white spot on her breast as bears sometimes have, her face having a little cinnamon-brown color, her hair long and not quite soft, not quite hard, her tail not much longer than a cottontail’s, her claws long and sharp and curved a little. And her fierce teeth ready to eat up anybody who interrupted her in something she was already eating.

  The baby bear we made was as cute as a bug’s ear and looked more like a bear than his mother did. We were quite proud of ourselves and kept wishing Barry and Mr. Wimbish would hurry up.

  “He’s as pretty as a picture,” Little Jim exclaimed, pride on his small face because he was the one who had thought of making the baby bear in the first place. He started to stroke the snowy top of the baby bear’s skull.

  It was the word “picture” that gave Poetry an idea. “Let’s make a real bear!” he all of a sudden cried excitedly, with so much enthusiasm in his voice that it shot a thrill through me.

  “I need two strong men,” he ordered. “Come on! Hurry, while the sun is still out.”

  The second he said it, the sun went under a cloud.

  A few minutes later I knew what his idea was. The two strong men he had asked for—Big Jim and Circus—came out of the lodge carrying the big bearskin rug, the one that had been made out of the bear the old-timer had stabbed and Marthy had shot dead with her .300 Magnum rifle.

  Next, we found a man’s raincoat in the lodge closet, which maybe belonged to Mr. Everard, and spread it over the mother bear’s snow statue, so that the inside of the bearskin rug wouldn’t get wet. Then we all worked together, grunting and grinning and growling like real bears until we had the rug spread out and tucked around the snow bear in such a way as to make it look like an honest-to-goodness live black bear. We had to use extra snow, packing it all around, so it’d look as if our bear was stomach-deep in a drift.

  Standing back and studying it while Poetry stood waiting for a few seconds of sunlight so he could get a good picture, I was feeling fine that the bearskin rug, having under it a form that was shaped like a live bear, looked pretty savage. Its powerful incisors looked very dangerous. So also did the rest of its teeth. Its mouth was open and its nose wrinkled into a snarl.

  Poetry was just about to snap the picture when Little Jim yelled, “Wait! Let me be socking her on the head with a club.”

  It was a good idea. Pretty soon Little Jim was standing beside the bear, holding a club in his hands, upraised as if he was about to wham an honest-to-goodness wild bear on her fierce nose.

  Different ones of us got our pictures taken with the bear. Dragonfly wanted to be sitting on it, as though he was on a horse; Circus stood on it. Big Jim worked his arm into the jaws and made a terrible grimace as if he was suffering what he called “excruciating pain.”

  It was good fun, and we would have some excitement at home when we showed the pictures to our friends and especially to our parents.

  The sun was still high, even though it kept going under some fast-moving clouds. We’d still have time to go out to the shanty and back. We’d probably get some whoppers this time and have them sizzling in the pan for Barry and Ed Wimbish when they came into camp from their trapline trip.

  “We’ll leave the rug on her,” Big Jim said. “That bear’s so real-looking, they’ll think it’s an honest-to-goodness live one. It’ll be a good joke to play on them.”

  “Better leave a note telling them where we went, just in case they get back before we do,” Poetry thought to say, and Big Jim ordered him to do it.

  “I’ll help you,” I said to Poetry, and away the two of us went.

  Being good on a typewriter, Poetry plunked himself down on the chair at the table and, using Barry’s machine, quick had the note ready. When it was finished, he handed it to me with a grin, saying, “That’ll let him know we think it’s all right for him to stop being our camp director next June.”

  “But we’re not glad about it,” I answered.

  We left the typed note lying in the center of the dining table, putting a paperweight on it so that, in case it was windy when he and old Ed came in, the note wouldn’t blow off onto the floor or into the fireplace.

  “It’s a good thing we came back,” Poetry exclaimed. “I almost forgot my camera. I want a picture of myself hauling in a nine-pound walleye.”

  The gang was waiting for us at the kingfisher’s tree. For a minute I stood looking up at the place where ordinarily the ridiculous-looking bird was perched, but his branch was empty. Only for a second, though. All of a sudden, there was a whirring and a shadow of wings in the sky, and there our new friend was. The branch he had landed on was shaking as hard as a branch that size does back at Sugar Creek when a blue jay comes shooting across the sky to suddenly drop down on it feetfirst.

  “Hey, you up there!” I exclaimed to my rattling-voiced friend. “Don’t get in such a hurry for supper! You just had dinner!”

  “That was lunch,” Dragonfly said. “He wants his dinner now.”

  I gave Dragonfly a “let’s pretend” angry scowl and answered, “Kingfishers up here are the same as they are at Sugar Creek. They have breakfast, dinner, and supper.”

  At the clump of evergreens, near the beginning of the “road” out to the shanty and just before we started the long trek across the frozen, snow-covered lake, Dragonfly, who was quite a ways ahead of the rest of us, yelled back, “Hey, you guys! Come here quick! Here’s the bear’s tracks again!”

  The minute he said that, going fishing in an ice shanty seemed like nothing. The great big wish I’d had to trail the bear to see where he had holed up again, if he had—or maybe to see the actual bear—blew itself up in my mind like a balloon. I wanted desperately to follow the bear!

  I tried to keep my voice indifferent as I suggested to Big Jim, “If we knew which way he went, we could tell Barry and Mr. Wimbish, so they could find his trail easier when they get back.”

  “We’re going to stay in sight of the camp,” Big Jim answered, and I noticed that his fuzz-covered upper lip was set, meaning I’d better not suggest again that we follow the bear.

  Dragonfly was already hurrying along on the bear’s trail. “He’s following the shoreline!” he cried excitedly.

  I looked back toward the lodge, and the big birchwood letters spelling out Snow Goose were as plain as day.

  A bright idea popped into my mind then and, just as quick, flew on word wings straight toward Dragonfly about a hundred feet ahead of us. “We have to stay in sight of the lodge! The very second his tracks lead off into the forest out of sight of the lodge, we have to stop trailing him!”

  “You little rascal of a schemer!” Big Jim said to me and slapped me a friendly slap on the shoulder. “But you’ve solved my problem. I wanted to follow his tracks myself but didn’t dare because of my promise to Barry to stay within sight of the lodge. We’ll go as far as we can.”

  “I’ve got my compass,” Poetry said cheerfully, “just in case we happen to have to go a little way back into the brush.”

  “We’re not going to run any risks,” Big Jim replied firmly.

  And so we started out, not interested in ice fishing anymore—not with a bigger fish in a fur coat roaming t
he woods.

  Poetry kept his camera in readiness, waiting for a chance to take a picture of any kind of wildlife we happened onto, to help Barry with his important paper. He got several shots of different things. One shot was of the Snow Goose, to prove to Barry that while we were trailing the bear, we could actually see the lodge, even though it was quite a distance away. He had to take a few of his pictures without any sunlight, though.

  Because the trail kept following the shoreline of the bay, it was easy to stay in sight of camp except when our backs were turned to it.

  You’d have thought that bear was drunk, the way he had kept going this way and that, over and around fallen logs, and retracing his steps after going up to a high brush pile or fallen tree.

  Little Jim seemed to be enjoying himself almost more than anybody else. He swung along through the snow, grunting and grinning and swinging his stick as he always did back home. Once he came out with a very bright idea when he said, “The poor mother bear back there by the cache, with her cute little baby bear, is lonesome for the father bear, and we’re out hunting for him to bring him home to his family.”

  Would we actually find the father bear? I wondered. It seemed maybe we might, although his trail kept winding round and round, and it took a lot of time to get anywhere.

  The tracks were still as if the bear was drunk, and he certainly didn’t act as if he had been in any hurry.

  “I’ll bet he’s so sleepy he can’t see straight,” Dragonfly suggested.

  I knew what he meant. I’d been that way myself sometimes, after going to sleep on the sofa of our living room when I should have gone to bed first. I could hardly get up the stairs, fumble my way out of my clothes, and fall into bed.

  Circus, who was ahead of the rest of us most of the time, found two or three places that looked suspicious. When he first saw them, he thought he’d found the bear’s new hibernating place. But always the tracks went on—and on and on and on.