It was a silly question to be asking myself, but I didn’t know that till a few seconds later, when the loud whirring noise came with a blaze of light right up to our shanty and stopped. I heard a door slam and footsteps crunching through the snow in our direction.
Whoever was out there, whatever he had come in, didn’t bother to knock. He thrust open our shanty door, letting in a lot more unwanted weather and letting himself in with it.
“Barry!” Jeanne cried. She tried to sit up but didn’t get to, because of Barry’s being down on his knees beside her and—what they said and did wasn’t any of six boys’ business.
It seemed, though, maybe it was Barry’s own business who was going to stand beside him in a wedding gown next June.
While the shanty door was open and before we could close it, I saw what had caused the “thunder” and “lightning.” It was old Ed’s four-wheel-drive Jeep with a snowplow on the front end. The engine was still running, the headlamps were still on, and its powerful spotlight was shining into our open shanty door, lighting up the whole inside.
One of the first things I heard Jeanne say was, “Martha! How is she? Is she all right?”
It felt good to hear Barry answer, “She’s fine. She was just exhausted from walking through the snow. She’s so fine she shot another bear! There was a bear just outside the lodge when we drove up. It seemed confused and blinded by the lights, and she thought it was trying to get inside. She grabbed the shotgun from the wall and pumped five rounds into it at close range. She’ll have another bearskin rug for the lodge!”
Well, that news made me cringe all over. The beautiful bearskin rug, which we’d spread over and tucked in around the stomach of our mother bear’s snow statue, had been riddled with maybe five hundred shotgun pellets!
Our second joke trap, set for Barry, had caught Martha instead, and it had maybe ruined a beautiful bearskin rug! Both our traps had caught the wrong people.
Barry took over from there. We would spend the rest of the night back at the lodge, he told us. The four-wheel-drive Jeep hadn’t had any serious trouble getting out to us by following the tree road. A few trees were missing, blown away by the wind, he told us, but he’d been able to make it.
Jeanne and Dragonfly and Little Jim sat in the seat with Barry as he drove. Big Jim, Poetry, Circus, and I wrapped ourselves in blankets in the back. “Don’t sit on the game sack!” Barry called back to us as he raced the engine, getting ready to plunge into the snowy road, which the lights showed was already blown full of fresh drifts. With the snowplow on the front, though, we could make a smooth track for the heavy-cleated tires to run in.
The back of the Jeep was open, and the wind was working hard to keep us from keeping warm.
We hadn’t any sooner started to pull away than Circus let out an excited cry. “There goes the shanty!”
I could see it myself through the whirling wall of white—a big, dark, rectangular blur being lifted up and whammed over on its side, then turned over again and again like a tumbleweed on the prairie!
We’d gotten out just in time. Old Ed’s carpenter work had been good, but he’d made the shanty out of wood too light to stand a storm with wind as hard as the one we were in.
The little old Jeep plowed right on and on and on and on. Once we came to a place where so many trees of the road were missing that Barry ground to a stop and asked, “You got your compass, Poetry?”
Poetry did have, and in a half an hour more we were at the shore. Up the incline we went, past the little birch and the tree that had the dead branch at the top for the kingfisher.
Here, near the lodge, the wind was less strong, as the tall trees and the cliff behind the lodge protected it a little. In another second now, we’d see the mother bear Marthy had mistaken for a real bear and had poured five shotgun blasts into.
The Jeep came to a grinding stop not more than fifteen feet from the place where the ladder led up to the cache. The ladder was down, of course, which is the way we kept it when we weren’t going up or down.
“Here’s Martha’s bear, boys!” Barry called.
The four of us in the back tumbled out into the weather and saw in the spotlight of the Jeep, where our bear statue with the bearskin rug over it had been, the huge hulk of a savage-looking bear, sprawled half on its stomach, half on its side, in the snow.
It was pretty much covered with snow. No other bear was there. And my heart sank.
The quicker we told Barry, the better. And the quicker we got a letter off to the Everards telling them what had happened, the better. We’d offer to pay for the bearskin. If we didn’t have enough money among us, we’d work hard at odd jobs back home until we’d earned enough.
One thing that made my heart sink as I waded through the snow toward where the spotlight was shining—Poetry and the rest of the gang were tumbling over each other to get there, too—was that it looked like the head of the bearskin rug had been almost blown off.
Poetry got there first. “This is terrible!” he exclaimed. “But how was I to know the joke would backfire?”
“It didn’t,” Big Jim said in a minute. He had his bare hands on the bear’s neck. “This bear,” he said, “is still warm. Marthy did shoot a real bear!”
“And-and-and there’s real blood on his face!” Dragonfly cried excitedly. “We’ve killed a bear! A real bear!”
And we had.
I mean Martha had.
Just that second the lodge door opened, a shaft from a powerful flashlight shot out into the night, and Marthy’s motherly voice called, “Come in, all of you! Supper’s ready!”
It was the most cheerful sound I’d heard in a long time.
Out of the storm we went and into the warm lodge, a happier gang than we’d been in a long time.
“Look!” Little Jim cried to me, pointing toward the fireplace.
I looked, and there was the bearskin rug spread out on the floor, just waiting for a boy my size to come and lie down on it.
A little later, while Dragonfly was chewing an extralarge mouthful of venison, he squeezed out a few mischievous words, saying, “It’s the best dinner I ever ate.”
“Supper!” Little Jim corrected him.
Jeanne, the girl who was going to rob us of our camp director next June, gave Little Jim what I thought was an especially friendly smile, then said to Barry, “Your boys will hardly need a chaperone when they come back next summer. They seem to know their way around. But they will need a cook, and I’m willing to help do it, if they’ll just let me.”
It was like a heavy load all of a sudden lifted from my mind.
Later, when we were in our bunks, Poetry whispered to me, “Looks like we’re not going to lose a camp director but are just going to gain a good cook.”
We still had two more days before our vacation was over, but nothing very important happened—nothing, that is, to compare with all the very wonderful things we’d already experienced.
There was quite a surprise for us, though, when we went to a ski tournament the afternoon after the blizzard and discovered that our next summer’s cook was one of the finest ski jumpers in the country. Barry was getting a real outdoors girl.
Then came our final morning. We were all in the station wagon, driving down to the lane toward the road that would lead us finally to the highway. Just as we were about to round the bend where we’d have our last glimpse of the Snow Goose, where we’d had one of the most wonderful weeks of our lives, all of a sudden Dragonfly, who was in the backseat with me, cried excitedly, “Look, everybody! There’s Old Timber! Back there just below the cache! See! His long bushy tail—it’s waving good-bye to us!”
I looked, as did we all. Barry applied the brakes, and we came to a very abrupt stop.
It was only for a few seconds that I saw him, a big, long-nosed, pointy-eared, blackish-gray, doglike animal with a gray face and whitish underparts and sides. He was standing erect, and the fur on his back was bristling as if he was angry about something.
A second later, it was as if we hadn’t seen him at all. He just faded from sight, seemingly without moving.
A great big lonely yet happy ache came into my heart, then. The world of nature was wonderful. It seemed even more wonderful that the One who had made it was a special friend to everybody who would let Him live in their hearts.
Paul Hutchens
MOODY PUBLISHERS
CHICAGO
© 1957, 1998 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission in writing from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
All Scripture quotations are taken from the New American Standard Bible, © 1960, 1962, 1963, 1968, 1971, 1972, 1973, 1975, 1977, and 1994 by The Lockman Foundation, La Habra, Calif. Used by permission.
Original Title: Sugar Creek Gang Goes Western
ISBN-10: 0-8024-7026-2
ISBN-13: 978-0-8024-7026-3
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PREFACE
Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!
It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.
You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.
Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.
The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
1
We were in the middle of the most exciting part of a pretend cowboys’ necktie party when we heard the shot.
It was one of the loudest shotgun blasts I had ever heard, and its echoes were like four or five fast thunders bounding through the Sugar Creek hills.
What on earth! I thought.
We all stood still and stared at each other with startled faces. We had been running in one direction and looking back in the opposite direction toward the old scarecrow that we had used for our bad man in our game of cowboys’ necktie party.
We had strung up the scarecrow by his neck, hanging him from the branch of a river birch about twenty yards from the sandy beach of our swimming hole.
The ridiculous-looking old dummy we had named Snatzerpazooka was just where we wanted him now, at the edge of Dragonfly’s father’s cornfield. Hanging there in plain sight, swaying in the breeze, he would scare away the crows that had been digging up the new corn sprouts. Dragonfly, as you maybe know, was the nickname we had given to the pop-eyed member of the gang, whose actual name was Roy Gilbert.
The very minute Snatzerpazooka was up and swinging, we started on a helter-skelter run along the creek toward the spring. Following what we knew to be the pattern of cowboys in the Old West after a lynching, which they called a “necktie party,” we were all galloping away on our imaginary horses, looking back and shooting with our voices, using our plastic and metal and wooden toy guns, yelling, “Bang … bang … bang … bang-bang-bang!”
I was seeing Snatzerpazooka over my shoulder, his ragged blue-and-white-striped overalls, his tied-on black hat, his crossbar. At the same time, I was galloping on my imaginary white stallion behind barrel-shaped Poetry, who was riding his own imaginary ordinary-looking roan horse.
The early summer wind was blowing in my hot face, my sleeves were flapping, and it felt good to be alive in a wonderful boys’ world.
The rest of the gang were on their own different colored imaginary horses, yelling, “Bang! Bang! Bang!” as I was. All of us were emptying our imaginary six-shooters at the grotesque scarecrow dangling by his neck in the afternoon sun.
Right in the middle of our excitement was when we heard the actual shot from somebody’s actual gun! It was an explosive blast that sent a shower of shivers all over me and scared me half to death.
As I’ve already told you, we all stopped and stared at each other, but not for long. Big Jim, our leader, barked, “Quick! Down! Drop flat—all of you!”
By all of us, he meant not only mischievous-minded, squawky-voiced Poetry; spindle-legged, pop-eyed Dragonfly; and red-haired, fiery-tempered, freckle-faced me, Bill Collins, son of Theodore Collins; but also Circus, our acrobat, and Little Jim, the littlest one of us and the best Christian.
In case you might be wondering why Little Tom Till wasn’t with us on our necktie party, maybe I’d better tell you that all that spring and early summer, he had been chumming around with a new boy who had moved into the neighborhood. That new boy was our enemy—and it wasn’t our fault, either. It hadn’t felt good to lose Tom out of the gang—even though he wasn’t exactly a member but only played with us and got to go with us on different camping trips.
Well, when Big Jim barked that fierce order for us to “drop flat,” we obeyed like six boy-shaped lumps of lead—all of us except Poetry, who could only drop round.
Who, I wondered, had fired an actual gun? A shotgun!
We lay as quiet as six scared mice, straining our eyes to see through the sedge and ragweed and wild rosebushes and other growth, listening for all we were worth, and wondering, and worrying a little.
It certainly was a tense time. I could hear my heart beating, also the rippling riffle in the creek several feet behind me. Farther up the creek in the direction of our just-hung Snatzerpazooka, a saw-voiced crow was signaling with a rasping “Caw! Caw!” to his crow friends to stay away from the cornfield because there was a man around with a shotgun.
The smell of sweet clover from across the creek mingled with the odor of gun smoke.
Just then Dragonfly said wheezily, “Look! Snatzerpazooka’s gone! He’s down! His rope’s broke!”
“He can’t be!” I answered. “That was a leftover piece of Mom’s clothesline, and that old scarecrow wasn’t heavy enough to break it!”
A second later, though, my straining eyes told me Dragonfly was right. Even as far away as we were, I could see about five feet of rope dangling from the birch branch, and there wasn’t any scarecrow hanging by his neck on the end of it.
“Maybe the knot came untied,” Circus suggested.
Big Jim, beside and a little behind me, was peering over the top of a pile of drift left early that spring when Sugar Creek had overflowed its banks. He answered Circus, saying, “It couldn’t have. I used a bowline knot, and that kind can’t slip or jam!”
“It might have slipped off over his head,” Circus growled back, maybe not wanting his idea squelched.
“If it had,” Big Jim said deep in his throat, “the noose would still be there on the end of the rope”—which made good sense, because there was only the five feet of rope dangling in the breeze and no noose at the end.
&n
bsp; Who, I worried, had shot the shot and why? And where was our scarecrow?
How long we all lay there whispering and wondering and trying to imagine who had shot the shot and why and what at, I don’t know, but it seemed too long before Big Jim would let us get up and follow him back to the river birch to look around.
While you are imagining us crouching and half crawling our way along the edge of the cornfield that bordered the creek, like scouts scouting an enemy camp, wondering with us who had shot the shot and why and what or who at, I’d better also explain what a cowboys’ necktie party is and why we had given our scarecrow such a name.
It was Dragonfly himself who had named him. Why he named him that was because of the strangest story you ever heard, the oddest thing that ever happened around Sugar Creek or maybe anyplace in the whole world.
You see, when Dragonfly was just a little guy, only about three-and-a-half years old—before there was any Sugar Creek Gang—he had no sisters or brothers and was lonesome most of the time. So he created a playmate out of his own imagination.
I never will forget the first time I heard the name Snatzerpazooka and how excited little Dragonfly was, how he yelled and cried, in fact actually screamed, when he thought his imaginary playmate wasn’t going to get to go along with him and his folks when they went to town. It happened like this:
Dragonfly’s parents with their little spindle-legged pop-eyed son, had stopped their car in front of our house beside the mailbox that has “Theodore Collins,” my father’s name, on it. While Mom and Dad stood in the shade of the walnut tree and visited with them through the car window, Dragonfly and I monkeyed around the iron pitcher pump, which is not far from our back door.
Feeling mischievous at the time, I thrust my hand into the stream of water Dragonfly was pumping into the iron kettle there, and, just as quick, flicked some of the water into his face.
A second later, he started to gasp and to wrinkle up his nose and the rest of his face. He looked toward the sun and let out a long-tailed sneeze, then said, “Snatzerpazooka!”
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 29