Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24

by Paul Hutchens

  “Hey, you guys!” Dragonfly yelled once. “Here’s a big cave back in the cliff! I’ll bet he’s in there!”

  Poetry had his camera ready for a snapshot, but when we got to where Dragonfly was, Poetry let out an explosive breath, saying, “Goose! Didn’t you see his tracks going in and coming out again? There they go! Around that old Norway pine tree!”

  Poetry was right.

  After maybe a half hour of winding round and round, always getting a little farther around the bay and also farther from the Snow Goose, and after we’d found three more places where the bear had decided not to spend the rest of his winter, Big Jim said, “He must be a snooty old quadruped. Can’t say I blame him, though. Not after what happened to his last bed.”

  The tracks kept on going, always staying not more than a hundred yards from shore, and only a few times did we have to go deep enough into the forest so that we couldn’t strain our eyes through the trees toward the Snow Goose and actually see it. Every time we did, Big Jim halted us and sent Circus on ahead to look, while he and the rest of us stayed behind where the lodge was visible.

  “Bear or no bear,” Big Jim barked to us again and again, “orders are orders! If we don’t obey Barry, he’ll never trust us alone again.”

  And then, all of a sudden, Circus, up ahead of us, stopped stock-still and stood tense. He quick turned and motioned with his hands and face for us to come quick, his expression showing that at last he had found what we were looking for.

  It didn’t take us long to get to where Circus was, and we crept up as quietly as we could.

  “Sh!” he shushed us, with his finger to his lips.

  I could see the tracks zigzagging through the shrubbery in the direction of a fallen tree like the one under which we’d found his other hibernating place.

  I could feel my heart pounding in my temples. This, I thought, is a brand-new experience for you. This is what you wanted.

  We gathered in a football huddle, wondering what to do. You just didn’t walk up to a bear’s bedroom without letting him know you were coming—if you were coming.

  “I want a picture of the entrance,” Poetry said, getting his camera ready.

  “We’ll circle the place first, to see if there are any tracks leading away,” Big Jim said.

  In a few minutes we were making a wide circle, staying within about fifty feet of the base of the tree, where the snow was piled high, blown there by the winter winds.

  “Look!” Dragonfly whispered to whoever was close enough to hear him. He was peering through the dead leaves of a thicket of dwarf oak. The leaves were still hanging on the way oak leaves do nearly all winter. “See? There’s the big hole where he went in!”

  There was a big hole, all right. The only thing was that the den—or nest—wasn’t very deep. Only a few feet back inside, you could see as plain as day that it was filled with pine branches and snow and other stuff, as though whatever had gone in had tried to block the entrance.

  “That’s to keep Old Timber from coming in to wake him up, I’ll bet,” Little Jim piped.

  But his idea got squelched when Poetry said, “That’s to keep out the winter winds. Br-r-r-r! Say, you guys! Do you realize it’s beginning to get cold?”

  I’d noticed it myself but had been so intent on trailing the bear I’d paid little attention. I’d zipped up my winter jacket, though, and had been keeping my hands in my pockets for the past half hour or so, since I’d not worn any mittens.

  “Let’s see if there are any tracks leading away,” Circus said.

  And right away we finished making our complete circle, all the way back to the long fallen pine and around it to where we had been in the first place. That is, we went almost all the way around, for there, at the base of the fallen tree, we saw something that made us all let out a groan at the same time. Right in front of our eyes was another large hole in the snowdrift, and tracks leading away, this time out into the forest.

  It was disgustingly disappointing. “That father bear certainly is particular what kind of bed he sleeps in!” Little Jim said.

  Looking back, I could see, away out in the middle of the lake, the row of evergreens that was the road leading back to the Snow Goose. I couldn’t see the lodge from where we were, but I could see the shore, and from there I knew the lodge was just across the bay a half mile or so.

  First making absolutely sure the bear wasn’t in the hollow under the tree, we went in and looked around.

  Big Jim let out a whistle and exclaimed. “Feel here with your bare hands, will you? The ground is warm yet! He’s been gone maybe only a few minutes!”

  My fears came to life for a second, long enough for me to say, “The three bears in the story of Goldilocks came back while she was still in their house. We’d better get out of here!”

  Out of there I got but was immediately hit in the face by swirling snow from the top of the drift. The wind certainly had gotten stronger the past fifteen minutes. That bear had better decide on a place to spend the winter pretty soon, or he’d find himself really needing his fur coat, I thought.

  “Maybe he stayed out long enough to begin to get hungry. Maybe the warmer weather fooled him into thinking it was spring and time to get out of bed. Look here,” Big Jim said. “He’s been digging into this old decayed stump for grubs or something!”

  “I’ll bet he wasn’t even looking for a place to sleep,” Circus suggested. “He was doing what hungry bears do—looking for the larva of june bugs and plant roots.”

  “OK, you guys,” Poetry ordered us. “Stay here a minute. I’ll get out and take a picture of all of you coming out of hibernation!”

  He looked out and all around to see where the sun was, so that he could get it behind his back for the best picture.

  “Sun’s gone into hibernation, too, looks like,” he said.

  I followed the circle his eyes had taken and saw in the sky only a lot of fast-moving clouds that acted as if they were in a hurry to get from one side of the sky to the other.

  By the time Poetry had us placed where he wanted us, our heads in a huddle looking out of the den, and had snapped our picture a few times—then had me snap his with his head where mine had been—quite a lot of time had passed.

  The bear’s tracks were leading deeper into the forest, so we knew we couldn’t follow them any farther.

  And then, all of a sudden, we heard a strange yet somehow familiar sound, one we’d heard before back home when one of the worst blizzards in Sugar Creek history came roaring in and caught us out in the middle of the woods in Old Man Paddler’s hills.

  What a blizzard that was! And what a time we had had getting to shelter! The nearest place of shelter was a haunted house. No wonder we decided to name that story Lost in the Blizzard.

  “Listen!” Big Jim yelled, so he could be sure we’d hear him.

  I’d already heard it—a sound like the droning of a million bees in the trees overhead and all around us.

  I looked all around and up and saw clouds of blowing snow driving through the trees and shrubbery between us and the lake. The air over the lake itself was alive with a swirling, blinding wall of white. The “road” evergreens, scarcely visible, were tossing wildly in the wind. The storm had come up as fast as a Sugar Creek summer storm, which sometimes roars in out of the northwest, knocking over trees and small outbuildings, making tumbleweeds out of our chicken coops, and rolling our rain barrel across the yard before whamming it against the fence as if it was light as a feather.

  I might have guessed the nervous clouds that had started racing across the sky in the middle of the afternoon meant a storm was coming, especially when all of a sudden, a half hour ago, the wind changed directions and had been blowing steadily harder ever since.

  “Everybody stay together!” Big Jim ordered. “And follow me to the lake! We’ll be all right if we follow the shoreline! We can’t miss the lodge!”

  “That’s almost two miles to go home following the shore!” Circus protested. �
�If we could get out to the row of evergreens, we could be there in half the time.”

  Just then a fierce gust of wind blew my cap off, and I saw it go sailing like a kite with the string broken back toward the fallen tree we’d just left. The wind mussed up my hair, and snow blew down my neck. Boy oh boy! It was cold! “My hat!” I cried. “I gotta go back and get it!”

  Circus, being a faster runner than the rest of us, and maybe stronger, plowed ahead of me and got to the hat first.

  “Thanks a million,” I gasped—and I mean really gasped, because the wind caught my words and tossed them away into the woods as though I hadn’t even said them.

  “Father Bear had better be getting home!” he puffed to me as we plowed our way back to where the gang was—Big Jim had made them stay with him so not a one of us would be lost.

  The closer we got to the lake, the harder the wind blew—and the colder. It seemed the late afternoon had suddenly turned to late twilight. In fact, the snow was coming down so hard that it was like white night all around us.

  It was just as if the blizzard had been waiting for us to get to the lake, where it had planned to meet us, for the minute we got there, the storm struck. It came screaming in like a wild thing, tearing through the leafless trees and evergreens, driving snow ahead of it, completely hiding the sky, the trees we had left behind, and those that had been visible bordering the shore itself.

  Little Jim expressed it for all of us when his small voice yelled, “It’s like a great big giant as big as Paul Bunyan with a scoop as wide as the sky scattering whole forestfuls of snow all over everything!”

  It also sounded as if the giant was panting hard, his breath coming out eighty miles an hour.

  Looking ahead of us out onto the lake where our road was supposed to be was like looking into a white tornado. We couldn’t any more see the road than anything.

  “We shoulda crawled into the bear’s den ourselves!” Poetry yelled. “We’d have been sheltered there!”

  “We’d have frozen!” Big Jim shouted back, struggling along ahead of the rest of us. “It’ll be twenty below zero before morning! You know how it does back home!”

  At the lakeshore, we dropped down behind a fallen log, against which brush had been piled by someone cutting wood. Sheltered for a minute against the driving wind, we could hear each other talk.

  “We’ve got to decide something quick,” Big Jim said.

  “Decide what?” Dragonfly asked, and his worried voice showed he was beginning to be afraid.

  Big Jim’s answer was hardly audible as the wind whipped in over the top of our shelter and caught his words away, but I heard them anyway and they were:

  “We’ve got to decide whether to take the long way around, following the shore, and run the risk of getting bogged down in drifts—maybe not getting to the lodge for two hours—or make a beeline out into the lake to the evergreens and follow them straight across to the Snow Goose! We’ve got to get back before it’s too dark!”

  7

  We decided on the beeline from the shore to the evergreen road.

  Big Jim certainly knew how to give orders, and because a lot was at stake—six lives, maybe—we obeyed. “I’ll fight on ahead, breaking a path,” he said, “and the rest of you follow in this order: Little Jim, Dragonfly, Bill, Poetry, and Circus. And, listen, every one of you—don’t a one of you dare leave the path I’m breaking! We’ve got to stay together!”

  Stay together we did. Every few seconds Big Jim called the roll, and we answered him as we did at the one-room red brick school back at Sugar Creek—although we wouldn’t dare yell, “Here!” in school the way we did when Big Jim called out our names.

  I had never been in such a wild wind, and I hope I’ll never have to spend a worried half hour like that again as long as I live. The wind wasn’t as cold yet as I knew it was bound to get before morning, but it was driving against us, cutting into my bare face and pounding down inside my collar.

  Little Dragonfly, being short of breath most of the time anyway, had it pretty rough, but I stayed right behind him, shoving him along and helping him when he was staggering around for balance.

  All I could see, past the heads of Dragonfly and Little Jim, was the strong, broad back of Big Jim, head down, pushing into the storm, breaking snow and also breaking the driving wind for the smaller guys who struggled behind him. There wasn’t a sign of any of the evergreens yet—not even one of them. We’d been battling the storm for what seemed a terribly long time before we woke up to the fact that we should have found the “road” quite a while ago.

  “You got your compass?” Big Jim shouted back at Poetry.

  We gathered into a huddle around Poetry’s compass, but it was too dark to see its face.

  Lucky for us, though, his compass was part of a combination matchbox and compass. We struck a match, shielding its flame the best we could with our bodies, and the match stayed lit just long enough to see which direction was north.

  I was remembering Mom’s advice on the telephone while we’d been back in the hotel, and it felt good that we really had a compass to tell directions. For just one second, I wondered if my parents were worrying about me. They certainly would if they knew where I was—or wasn’t. I wasn’t sure where I was or wasn’t, myself.

  “North is this way, right behind me,” Poetry puffed. “This is the way to go.”

  “You gotta go east from the lakeshore,” Dragonfly put in.

  “East?” Big Jim exclaimed. “We just came from the east.”

  After maybe three minutes of cold worry, we all came to realize that it didn’t help us a tiny bit to know where north was, because we didn’t know where we were. We might have already passed the row of trees, maybe gone between two of them without seeing either one. We could be away out in the middle of the lake by now.

  It wasn’t exactly the happiest time I’d ever had in my life. You get a terribly lost feeling when you’re lost and know it.

  We’d had all kinds of advice on what to do when you’re lost, but not a one of the rules told us what to do if you’re lost in the middle of a snowstorm and can’t see anything in any direction except blinding snow.

  And I never knew it to get dark so fast.

  Dragonfly’s suggestion was as crazy as any I’d ever heard when he said, “One of the rules for finding your way when you’re lost is to climb a tree and look around.”

  “Out here on the lake,” Big Jim remarked grimly, “trees don’t grow on bushes.”

  We changed our plans at Big Jim’s orders. We held hands, stretched ourselves out in as long a line as we could, and started to struggle along again, hoping to find the row of evergreens.

  We kept the littlest kids in the middle, with Circus and Big Jim on the ends. Our line wasn’t more than fifteen feet from end to end, but we hadn’t gasped our way along for more than five minutes before somebody let out a yell, crying, “Here’s a tree! Here’s the road! We’re saved!”

  Now we could get home easily. All we had to do was follow the line of trees till we got to the shore and then push on to the lodge. Once inside, we’d be safe, warm, and all right.

  It wasn’t any easy-as-pie work to follow the tree road, because the trees had been set quite a distance apart. But one after another of them came into view as we battled our way through the drifting snow.

  “Can’t be long now!” Poetry cried, shouting into my ear so that I could hear, because the wind was so wild and noisy against my face and ears and all of me. “Only six more trees—if we found the first one where I think we did.”

  After another five minutes, with the wind seeming to get colder every second and the snow cutting our faces worse, Big Jim let out a yell. “I see it! We’re there!”

  The sound of his shout sent a thrill of happiness through me in spite of the cold. I’d been praying for help. It seemed I’d been asking for quite a while that we’d be able to get back to the lodge safely. I’d been thinking of Little Jim and especially of Dragonfly, wh
o was having such a hard time getting his breath and was about ready to drop.

  What I’d been praying for especially was that Mom wouldn’t have anything to make her sorry she’d let me go on our winter vacation.

  For a second or two, when it had looked as if maybe we wouldn’t get back and might all freeze to death, I’d seen with my mind’s eye a little white casket in our living room. In it was a red-haired, freckle-faced boy. It also seemed I wasn’t there but had already gone to heaven where Old Man Paddler’s wife, Sarah, was.

  But that was for only a second. I knew I hadn’t actually gone to heaven because of the driving wind in my face and the stinging snow and the cold. Also I was praying and asking forgiveness for any sins I couldn’t think of right then, as well as for a few I could. Then, for a fleeting second, I seemed to see through the storm a big wooden cross planted in the ground on a small hill and the Savior hanging there, dying in my place for my sins. “Thank You …” I started to say.

  But Big Jim’s shout, “I see it! We’re there!” interrupted my thoughts and whirled them away into nothingness. I was still alive and all right, and we had reached the lodge.

  But it turned out that we weren’t there. Circus realized it first and yelled to all of us, “It’s the bobhouse! We’ve come the wrong direction!”

  And we had.

  How on earth we’d happened to do it, I don’t know—and it didn’t make any difference now. At least we had shelter from the blizzard. In only a few minutes we had scooped the snow from the door, unfastened the latch, and were inside out of the biting wind.

  We were also in the dark, so Poetry’s matchbox came in handy. So also did the kerosene lantern on the shelf, which the very first match showed us was still there.

  Big Jim gave quick attention to the stove and soon had a fire going.

  It was wonderful to be inside and safe. We certainly were glad the old-timer had built the house strong and weatherproof. But it wasn’t worry-proof, and we had a lot of things to be concerned about.