But there wasn’t any change in the attitude of Alexander the Coppersmith. Instead of coming humbly to his master to find out what he’d done that he shouldn’t have, he stood stiff-legged and straight-nosed, gave two or three short gruff, disgusted barks, tossed his head, whirled all the way around, and ran off toward the pignut trees. There he stopped and looked back.
“Come here, you rabbit chaser!” Wally yelled crossly and with the switch in his hand started on the run toward him.
It was a very interesting sight to watch-Alexander the Coppersmith standing stiffly, looking down the incline at us, his beady eyes on Wally and the switch, and Wally, red-haired and freckled and flush-faced, hurrying toward him, shouting, “Don’t you dare run away! Do you hear me? Don’t you dare!”
But his mongrel dared. He wheeled about, looked in our direction again, and bounded away with Wally right after him.
“Wait!” Circus called to Wally. “I’ll get him for you.” He quickly stooped and picked up an old stick. Then he yelled a cheerful yell toward the pignut trees and tossed the two-foot-long stick as far as he could in the direction of the orchard fence where the raspberry bushes were, calling at the same time, “Go get it!”
That was a game Alex understood. We’d played it with him many a time the week he’d spent here last year. Every time we tossed a stick anywhere, even out into the water, he’d race after it, catch it up in his happy mouth, and come flying back to us.
Now there was a copper streak of dog shooting across the stretch of pasture, and in seconds Alex was back where we were, holding the stick in his mouth.
“Don’t you touch him with that switch!” Circus ordered Wally. “It’s been too long since he chased the rabbit. He wouldn’t understand anything you’d do to him now. Besides you might want him to chase rabbits. A good rabbit dog is worth money.”
And that was that.
Dad called then from the gate near Addie’s pig house. “You boys seen anything of a missing pig? One of the baby pigs is missing!”
I’d almost forgotten Dad. My mind had been tangled up with everything else.
In a little while we were where he was, showing him the chocolate-colored dried blood. We told him about Dragonfly’s dead colt down by the swimming hole, the savage wildcat I’d seen eating a bunny yesterday when I’d been fishing at the mouth of the branch, and the excitement of last night at the chicken house.
I could see Dad’s jaw muscles tensing and knew he was getting stirred up inside. We were really in a situation. Circus’s dad was gone to Parke County with his hounds to help the farmers over there catch a sheep-killing predator, and all of a sudden we find that Old Stubtail is back in our own territory again, killing right and left. Something would have to be done.
We’d have to get a phone call through to Dan Browne as quick as we could and get him back here with the dogs.
Dad got his thoughts interrupted right then by the sound of a long, high-pitched tremolo from down near the raspberry bushes. It was Ichabod again. He was zigzagging around where he and Alexander the Coppersmith had had their tangled-up scramble and where the rabbit had its nest and out of which it had exploded like a rocket and gone hippety-hop down the fencerow.
Ichabod was making such a noisy noise and seemed so extra excited that I guessed he had found Old Stubtail’s trail again and was untangling it.
Wally had a different idea. As soon as he heard Ichabod’s baying, he said to Circus, “Lot of good it did to give him a lickin’! There he goes again after another rabbit.”
But there Ichabod didn’t go—not on another rabbit trail, anyway. He whisked through an opening in the fence and was off at a gallop right down through the center of the orchard, his nose to the ground every few feet, his musical tremolo singing out on the warm, sunshiny air every few seconds.
“Come on!” different ones of us yelled to the rest of us. “Let’s follow him!”
Dad stopped all of us with his gruff voice, ordering, “Wait, boys. A wildcat would tear your hound to shreds if he brought him to bay. Call off your dog, Circus!”
Circus had a different idea. “But the trail’s hot! It’s fresh! The time to chase him to his den is now! It might be a week before we’ll run onto another hot track like this one.”
Well, Dad wasn’t used to having a boy anywhere near my age talk back to him, so he used a very strong dadlike voice when he ordered Circus, “Call him off! You don’t want your hound killed! I’ll go in and get your father on the phone right away and tell him Old Stub-tail’s back here and to come on home fast.”
I could see Circus didn’t want to obey some other boy’s father. Still, he did try to by calling Ichabod and whistling for him.
But Ichabod also had a different idea. Already he was far down at the other end of the orchard. I could see him at the woven wire fence down there, squeezing through into Poetry’s dad’s woods.
“We’ve got to stop him!” Circus said grimly.
I could tell from the expression on his face that he believed my dad. It’d never do to let an innocent hound pup get into a fang-fight with a wildcat. Ichabod would be torn to pieces. The teeth I’d seen on Old Stubtail yesterday were big enough, sharp enough, and strong enough to bite right through the head of a dog the size of Ichabod.
All of us except Alexander the Coppersmith started on the run after Circus to try to help him stop his hound from getting killed. The only reason Alexander didn’t start was that already he was down where Ichabod was, running wild all around in front of and behind and in the way of him, as if he was trying to get attention. Or maybe he wanted to make us think it was his own nose that was doing all the trailing. I knew that excitable city dog didn’t have the least idea what was going on.
What I didn’t know was that, in less than a half hour, Alexander the Coppersmith was going to see his first wildcat and find out that chasing a black and white house cat into a hole under a barn was a lot different from suddenly happening upon a twenty-eight toothed, sharp-taloned, savage-tempered really wild wildcat.
9
I chabod turned out to be one of the fastest trailers that ever trailed a trail. He was also, I thought, one of the most stubborn hound pups I ever saw or heard.
In my mind, while we were running pell-mell after him and Alexander the Coppersmith, I had one main purpose—to stop Ichabod from all of a sudden catching up with Old Stubtail and getting his eyes scratched out.
One thing I didn’t notice at first was that with all the yelling Circus was doing, ordering his pup to stop, he wasn’t using a scolding voice.
He was yelling, “Stop! Leave that wildcat alone! You’ll get your ears slit to ribbons! You’re no good as a catch dog! You’re only a trailer!” But he wasn’t using a tone of voice like the tone he had used several times that morning when he’d been disgusted with Ichy for trailing trash.
It sounded more as if Dan Browne’s son was whooping it up at a basketball game, rooting for his team to win. It was as if he was urging his cute little black-and-tan purebred hound to stay on the job. To keep on keeping on. To chase Old Stubtail to his lair or actually catch up with him and get into a fierce fang-fight.
When we reached the mouth of the branch where I’d first seen Old Stubtail eating a rabbit and where I’d had the dream of wildcats riding up and down a golden escalator, I panted to Circus, “How come he won’t obey you? How come he keeps right on?”
Circus leaped across a narrow place in the stream, landed on the other side, and answered me. “He’s not trailing trash! If I’d scold him now, he might think we didn’t want him to trail wildcats! He’d think I think he was trailing trash, and he might be spoiled! I gotta let him do it!”
“But my father ordered you to stop him!” I protested.
Wally and the rest of the gang were quite a distance behind us, and only I heard what Circus answered. “My father would want me to whoop it up for Ichabod! He’d let him learn to trail. Then right at the last minute, if there was any danger, he’d use a diffe
rent tone of voice. He’d stop him from catching but not from trailing!”
And that was that.
I knew that Dad was back at the house trying to put through a long-distance call to Mr. Browne in Parke County somewhere. And here we were, already a half mile from home, and he wasn’t here to order his own son to stop. Dad hadn’t noticed that I had Betty Lizzie with me, either, and of course he hadn’t ordered me not to take her.
Now that the chase was on, I thought, we might run into an emergency that’d mean I either had to use Betty Lizzie or one or the other of six boys and two dogs might get killed.
Pound … pound … pound … pound. My heart was beating hard, and it wasn’t just from running.
All of a sudden from behind me I heard Little Jim’s excited voice exclaim, “Everybody! Look! Out there in the creek!”
I looked, and there, straight out from the willow where I’d tied my whopper of a bass on the stringer, was a V-shaped water trail moving parallel with the shore. The small brown head of some wild animal was at the point of it.
A glad feeling shot through me. There was proof that I had had a fish on the stringer. I didn’t answer Little Jim, but I did yell to Poetry, “There, smarty. There’s what ate my whopper of a bass!”
Poetry was closer than I’d thought, and his answer was so loud in my ears it almost deafened me. “Right, smarty! I knew it all the time. I saw that muskrat yesterday while I was up on the tree trunk.”
On and on and still on we went. At the cave, Ichabod, with Alexander running circles all around him and acting as if he was enjoying this new country dog game, didn’t even bother to take one tiny sniff. He zigzagged right on, following the path into the swamp, just the way Jay and Bawler had done quite a few other times when they’d been on Old Stubtail’s trail. Boy oh boy oh boy!
“He’s headed for Old Man Paddler’s hills again!” Dragonfly’s raspy voice cried from behind all of us. He was short of breath on account of his hay fever and a little asthma.
I still wasn’t quite sure I was doing right, but it seemed I was. I knew my father wanted Circus to call off his dog, and he would also expect his son to help Circus do it. Yet, my same father was always happy when the gang was together having what he and Mom called “wholesome fun,” if we weren’t supposed to be doing something else at the time. The only thing was, he didn’t know that while Dan Browne’s son was ordering his dog to stop, he was using a tone of voice that was like saying, “Attaboy, Ichabod! Keep on doing what you’re doing. You’re doing a great job. Go to it! You’re a super dog. Wonderful!”
We had to slow down in the swamp because Ichabod was having nose trouble. It seemed he was not able to untangle the wildcat’s smart, mixed-up trail.
In a few minutes now we’d get to the middle of the swamp, where the water, backing into it from Sugar Creek, had made a big pond. I was remembering another time when Wally and Alexander had been here with us. Wally had kept his nervous quadruped on a leash then. We hadn’t wanted to run the risk of his running wild all over everywhere. He might accidentally get out into the quagmire, sink down, and never come back up.
The pond was such an exciting place. Marsh hens were swimming along, leaving nervous V-shaped water trails behind them. Turtles that had been sunning themselves on a log plopped off into the water all of a sudden. Dragonflies were sailing around all over, while red-winged blackbirds furnished music. The whole area was a happy place to be, a place to feel lazy in. The grassy hillock on the shore begged a drowsy boy to take an afternoon nap.
Ichabod wasn’t bothered by marsh hens swimming, redwings singing, turtles splashing, or anything else. He was on a trail of something that wasn’t trash. His master was whooping it up for him to keep on keeping on. So he kept on.
It was different with Alexander the Coppersmith. When we got to the edge of the pond, he stopped and stood stiff-legged and straight-nosed, looking in the direction of the middle of the swamp as if he was using his mind for something that wasn’t play. If he was thinking, I knew what was bothering him. It was the memory of that other time we’d brought him through here and he’d had a fierce underwater fight with a snapping turtle.
I looked to see what was worrying him, and, sure enough, there was the giant turtle, his nose and heavy-lidded eyes looking like drops of transparent blood sticking up above the surface of the water. I got a glimpse of the rest of him under the water just as I had the last time I’d seen him. He was even bigger than he’d been then, having had time to grow some more.
This time Alexander wasn’t interested in getting out into the water to see what was there.
Dragonfly maybe remembered the time somebody had thrown a stick out into the water and Alex had plunged in after it. Anyway, right that second he tossed a piece of driftwood out toward the snapper’s nose.
Alexander might not have had good sense most of the time, but he did know enough to know that it is better to use your head than it is to get it snapped off by a giant-sized snapper. Or as my dad says, “It’s better to have good sense than it is to be brave.”
Anyway, Alex let out a whimper and made a dive for Wally, who, the second he got to him, quick grabbed his collar and snapped on his leash.
Well, it wasn’t the time to enjoy our favorite nature’s paradise. Certainly not right then. From what seemed maybe two hundred yards ahead there came Ichabod’s high-pitched, musical wail. He’d untangled Stubtail’s trail and was running in full cry in the direction of the rocky hills above Old Man Paddler’s cabin.
Circus let out a thrilling yell, crying, “He’s headed for the haunted house! I’ll bet Old Stubtail’s got his den in the attic where the mother coon used to live!”
And the chase was on again.
What would happen this time? Would it be like all the other times when Dan Browne’s hounds had run on Stubtail’s red-hot trail, up and down the hills, across dry canyons, in and out of brier thickets, along the edges of outcrops and high ledges with jagged rocks below, and then finally had lost the scent and couldn’t find it again? I wished with my whole heart it’d be different this time.
We’d no sooner reached the clearing on the other side of the swamp than Wally’s dog changed from a scaredy-cat to an excited wild-running, impossible-to-manage mongrel again.
“Oh, no, you don’t,” Wally cried, holding onto his leash with all his strength. “You’re not going to run wild up there in those rocks! You don’t watch your footing! You’d make a dash for a rabbit or a bird or leap across a gully and miss the other side, and down you’d go. Stop!” He screamed his order toward the animal on the other end of his leash.
The second he said it, I saw a flash of black and tan away up on a ledge above a lot of outcrops. Circus’s hound pup stopped stock-still in his tracks and was looking back down at his master.
Circus fired up at that and barked to Wally. “Don’t you dare yell like that again! Ichy thought it was me ordering him to stop. We’ve got to let him go, let him do what we want him to!”
“I was yelling at my dog!” Wally defended himself. His tone of voice was so surly that I knew if things hadn’t been the way they were, there might have been a fistfight.
Just that second Little Jim let out a yell from away up ahead of us. I was so astonished I almost jumped out of my tracks. I’d supposed he was behind us.
I looked in the direction his high-pitched, cheerful yell had come from, and there he was, standing high on the dead trunk of a fallen tree. When the tree had gone down, one end had landed on the other side of the narrow gulch.
“Look what yesterday’s storm did!” he cried down to us. “It made a bridge for us to go across on!”
Little Jim was right. The big ponderosa pine that had stood so many years all alone on the edge of the gulch had blown over. And there, right out in the middle of the tree bridge, stood Little Jim, holding onto one of the upright branches.
In my mind’s eye I was seeing Little Jim’s acrobatic actions of the past several weeks: “skinning the cat
” on the two-by-four of our grape arbor, balancing himself as he walked across the high beam in our haymow, jumping off into the hay, turning a half somersault in the air and landing on his back in the soft hay, learning to do the cartwheel like Circus, our acrobat, who could do it almost as well as the clown at the Sugar Creek county fair.
What, I thought, cringing, if that little rascal, away out there on that tree trunk bridge over a gully with jagged rocks in it, should decide all of a sudden he wanted to do some kind of a stunt for us to watch?
What if he was imagining himself to be a stuntman and the rest of us an imaginary crowd of thousands of cheering people?
If you’re a boy or have ever known anybody who couldn’t help it because he was one, you can maybe guess that another thought was in my mind right then. It was this: I, Bill Collins, Theodore Collins’s only son, would himself like to climb up to where the tree bridge was and work my way across to the wide ledge on the other side!
That ledge was the one place in all the Sugar Creek territory I had never been. We had never found any way for us to get there except by going around behind Old Man Paddler’s cabin, up and up and up, and then letting ourselves down on a rope. We had talked about doing that but had decided it was too dangerous and too dumb for a boy to do.
But if Little Jim should lose his balance or accidentally let go of the upright branch he was holding onto, I thought, what would happen? There wasn’t any net for him to fall into such as the acrobat at the fair had had. There were only rocks and—
The thought had to be shut out of my mind, and nobody ought to put it into Little Jim’s mind either, or he might get scared, lose his balance, fall, and … and …
Using as calm a voice as I could, I called up to him to be careful, to come back across to our side, and to wait till we could come up and examine the bridge to see if it was safe to try to cross on. If only I could get him to come back before he went any farther …
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 44