Several of the others called to him, too.
Alexander the Coppersmith was straining and whimpering at the end of his leash, wanting to get to wherever Ichabod was, somewhere up ahead of us.
Just that second, Ichabod let out a fresh, wailing tremolo. It sounded now as if he had worked his way across the canyon and was on the other side somewhere, not far from the place where his mother and her big, rangy, hunting dog companion had always lost the trail before.
Our voices warning Little Jim to wait for us before going across were like Circus’s orders to Ichabod for him to stop. They only spurred him on. He called back to us, “Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf?”
Wally called up to him then and said, “It’s a wildcat we’re after, not a wolf,” which was an unnecessary remark, I thought.
Anyway, it didn’t help any. Little Jim carefully worked his way across the tree trunk bridge, and before long there he was on the other side, waving to us and calling, “Come on up and over! Come on in—the water’s fine!” That’s nearly always what the first one in the old swimming hole yells back to the rest of us.
Another voice sounded then. Ichabod’s dog voice all of a sudden broke out into an excited series of bawls, barks, yelps, and chops that said he was getting close to his quarry and for us all to come and help him or else watch him make short work of a fierce-fanged wildcat.
Then a flash of black and tan appeared about a hundred yards beyond Little Jim. Ichabod had found a way for a dog to get onto that long, wide ledge! Now the hound was working his way around the base of a gnarled, weather-killed, twisted juniper, whose roots were somewhere below in the side of the cliff.
I cringed as I watched Ichabod zigzag here and there, sniffing at the face of the cliff to see if Old Stubtail had gone up. He acted as if there was so much wildcat smell on the ledge that it was as hard for him to find the trail as it would be for a boy to work his way blindfolded through a brier patch. Every second, though, he was getting nearer to Little Jim.
At one narrow place on the ledge where there was another juniper, I saw a bird fly from a nest and go scooting along the ledge for several feet before taking wing out across the sky. For a few seconds Ichabod stopped, stood with nose pointed at it, then dropped his head to the rocky ledge as much as to say, “That is trash! My master wants me to stick to my job!”
And then he was busy again, snuffling his way toward where Little Jim stood proudly near the top end of the tree trunk bridge. Little Jim was pleased with himself for not being afraid and was maybe imagining himself to be a clown high in a big outdoor tent doing acrobatic stunts.
It was then that, like a streak of lightning going through my mind, I saw a flash of gray-brown animal between Little Jim and Ichabod. The animal was backed up against the cliff, his ears flattened, ready to fight anything or anybody, tooth and talon and fang.
At almost the same second I saw him, Ichabod changed his tone and began barking “treed.” That little untrained, unafraid dog-child of Bawler had succeeded where his mother, one of the best hunting hounds in the country, and old Jay had failed a half-dozen times. He’d trailed a colt-killing, pig-stealing, sheep-killing marauder to his lair.
I say lair because that’s where Old Stubtail was. Under an overhanging rock was his den, a deep depression in the cliff wall going back in maybe four feet.
The only way for the wildcat to get away from Ichabod now would be to go farther the other way, and the “other way” was toward where Little Jim was. I also noticed that there was only ten more feet of ledge for Little Jim to retreat to, if he had to. Just those ten feet behind him was the end of the ledge. It stopped at a rock wall that went straight up.
Any second now, Ichabod would be close enough for Stubtail to thrust out a long, talon-filled paw and rake in that purebred pup. Then he would either tear him to pieces or open his jaws and just bite through his head. And that’d be the last of one of the finest little dogs there ever was.
For the first time, Little Jim seemed to realize what danger he was in. He realized it because all of us were yelling to him to get to the tree trunk bridge and come back.
But now the big cat was closer to the tree trunk than he was. In fact, the den in the wall was almost at the very end of the treetop.
In a minute now, Ichabod would be there from the other side of the cat. There’d be a savage half-minute fight, and it’d be all over for Ichabod. And then what would happen to Little Jim?
Something had to be done. But I knew, and I guess Wally and Circus and Poetry realized the same thing, that not one of us could get there in time to help Little Jim.
I loaded Betty Lizzie and started toward the fallen ponderosa trunk. But how could I shoot when Ichabod was leaping in and out, snapping at Old Stubtail? And Little Jim was in my line of fire, too!
In my hurry and because of the cyclone in my mind, I quickly stooped, picked up a three-foot-long club from a dead tree, whirled, and threw it as hard as I could straight for the cliff wall near Little Jim. “Use this to fight with if you have to!” I yelled across to him.
Then Ichabod was there, and the fight was on. Circus was screaming for him to stop, but Ichabod didn’t realize he was supposed to be only a trailer and not a catch dog. He was in the fight tooth and toenail. So far he was being missed by all the wildcat’s savage thrusts with his claws.
Little Jim saw the club strike the wall, bounce back, and fall not more than six feet from the fight. He made a dive for it.
Then, I guess Old Stubtail thought he was being attacked from two sides, that he had to fight not only a dog but a human being as well.
He turned from Ichabod and snarled at Little Jim, his fangs bared. In another minute, I expected to see Little Jim get killed.
I couldn’t stand to look, but I also couldn’t look away.
But now something else was going on. With all the excitement on the other side of the gully, a city-bred mongrel of a dog that wasn’t afraid of anything except a snapping turtle and that had been trained to chase after every stick anybody threw anywhere—that city dog had come to wild life at the end of Wally’s leash.
Alexander had always wanted to be in the middle of whatever excitement there was. Now he reared, plunged, and pulled savagely. And suddenly, like a covey of quail being flushed, he was gone, and only a leash with an empty dog collar on it was left in Wally’s hand.
A copper-colored streak with four flying legs on it was on its way to the tree trunk bridge, out on it, and across. With a rush of flying teeth and legs and barks, he charged headfirst toward the wildcat fight.
He’d chased a dangerous black-and-white house cat under a barn. He’d driven a wild cottontail down a hedgerow to Poetry’s dad’s woods. Now he was on the way to save all of us and Ichabod and Little Jim from an insignificant wildcat that he could lick with one tooth.
Before you could have said “Jack Robinson Crusoe,” Alexander the Coppersmith was there. He was there head-and-teeth-first, and he didn’t get stopped by flying cat claws. He rushed in, getting there while Little Jim was still standing, club raised, prepared to meet Old Stubtail’s flying tackle if he sprang toward the cutest little guy that was ever a member of the Sugar Creek Gang.
In another second—or even a half second—that’d have been the end of Little Jim.
But then was when Alexander the Coppersmith struck. His whole body slammed into the wildcat. There was so much fast and noisy action for a few seconds that you couldn’t even see what was happening.
I knew only one thing, and that was that Alexander the Coppersmith, the city-bred dog that couldn’t be managed and wouldn’t obey orders, had landed right in the center of a new kind of dog game.
It was all over before we scarcely realized it had started. The cat and Alexander the Coppersmith, scratching and biting and rolling and hissing, got too near the rim of the ledge, and over they went together, down … down … down …
DOWN!
I heard their bodies crash on the rocks below and saw
them bounce off a jutting rock and go hurtling to the bottom of the canyon.
10
It took us quite a while to work our way down the canyon wall to the bottom where Old Stubtail and Alexander were, and it was hard to believe what we found when we did get there.
Wally, sobbing and holding his empty leash, reached the scene first. The rest of us got there only a few seconds later. We’d waited for Little Jim to come back across the tree trunk bridge before we started down.
All the way down I kept thinking of what had happened on the ledge, the whole exciting, dangerous thing. I remembered Stubtail, with his back to the den in the canyon wall, his ears flattened in anger, his body crouching, ready to spring at Ichabod. Then he realized Little Jim was not more than five feet from him with a club in his hand. Maybe deciding in a flash that Little Jim was going to try to kill him, he was ready to leap straight for that little guy.
Then, what had made the excitement even more like a tornado was a copper-colored city dog, who didn’t know what danger was, streaking across the tree trunk bridge and crashing head-on with the wildcat. He met Old Stubtail in midair. And Little Jim’s life had been saved.
It was one of the saddest sights we’d ever seen. It just didn’t seem possible, but it was the truth, and we had to believe it. Not more than two feet apart, on a pile of jagged rocks, were the broken and bloody bodies of the stub-tailed, fierce-fanged colt-killer and a reckless, uncontrollable, city-bred mongrel.
Little Jim, with tears in his eyes, stood with the rest of us in a little semicircle. He was the first one to say anything, and he broke into sobs as he said, “He saved my life! He got there just in time!”
I guess we were all about as sad as we ever had been, on account of Alexander the Coppersmith’s getting killed in his fall on the rocks. But we were glad that Little Jim was alive and with us.
For just a second I had a flash of thought about a golden stairway leading up and up and up. It seemed that maybe an angel had come swooping down, and that was the reason Little Jim had been saved. Anyway, he was spared, and I knew who had spared him, even if He had used a dog to do it. It felt fine to believe that.
Wally said something then, bringing my thoughts back to our sad circle. I guess I had forgotten that, the last time he had come to visit us, we had made him an honorary member of the gang and that also he had decided to become a Christian. But when he said what he said the way he said it, so reverently and with tears in his voice—and also while he was on his knees trying to hug his dead dog—I all of a sudden went blind with my own tears. I never will forget what he said as long as I live.
“Old pal, I guess God had a plan for your life, too!” Then he broke into crying as people sometimes do at a funeral.
So I didn’t get a chance to use Betty Lizzie on Old Stubtail, because he was already dead. One thing we all noticed was that there was a jagged, bloody place on his throat, as if some animal had sunk its teeth into him. We knew what animal had done it when, a few seconds later, we saw Wally picking little tufts of wildcat fur from Alexander’s teeth.
At first we thought we’d try to get Alexander’s body home and, as Little Jim suggested, “bury him under the papaw bushes and put up a tombstone, and every year on Memorial Day put flowers there, and—”
But Wally said, cutting in on him, “No, we’ll bury him right here. Right where he fell in battle.”
Wally had a right to decide it, since he was the nearest relative. Besides, when I looked up the steep canyon wall and thought about the long trip through the swamp and how heavy Alexander was, I thought the pallbearers would have a very hard time of it.
I took off my hat in a hurry and used it to shoo away several bluebottle flies that had come from somewhere and were buzzing about the two corpses at our feet. That was another reason that we ought to have the funeral right away.
“How come you want to bury him here?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
Wally answered, “Don’t they have a cemetery at Gettysburg where the Battle of Gettysburg was fought?”
Poetry, being good in history, said they did. “They dedicated it on November 19, 1863. That’s when Abraham Lincoln made his famous Gettysburg address.”
First, we dragged Old Stubtail back a ways. Then, with our bare hands and with sticks and sharp rocks, we scooped out a place for Alexander’s grave. It was pretty hard and stony soil to dig in, and so that it wouldn’t be too shallow a grave, we piled rocks and rocks and more rocks on top.
We stepped back to look at it, not a one of us saying anything but all of us gulping a little. Then we faced east the way people did on Armistice Day in respect for the dead, took off our hats, and stood with our heads bowed a minute or so. And the funeral was over.
Even though the wildcat was heavier than Alexander, we decided to try to take him home. Getting him to the top of the canyon wall was the hardest part.
Ichabod was acting very happy, but the gang wasn’t. Ordinarily we’d have felt proud of ourselves, Circus especially, because it was his own dog that had done a better job of trailing than Ichabod’s experienced mother—better, even, than old Jay, one of the best-known “cat” catchers in the whole county.
When we got back to the place where the ponderosa had fallen, Circus stopped us and surprised us by saying, “You guys stay here a minute. I want to go back across and see if I can find her cubs!”
“Her cubs!” different ones of us yelped back at him.
“Yes,” Circus answered grimly. “Her cubs. Old Stubtail was a mother!”
Circus was right. Stubtail was a mother. Her body showed that she’d been nursing her babies.
Wally spoke up then and said, “I want one of them for a pet.”
I remembered that last year he’d wanted a pet polecat and had actually taken a descented one home with him to Memory City!
Well, I’ll have to stop writing in just a few minutes, because the adventure we had when we came back and took the two cute little kitten wildcats alive is another story, which, added onto this one, would make it too long.
For some reason, though, when I found out about there being two wildcat babies left motherless and thought how their mother—who was what is called “carnivorous,” so had to have raw flesh to eat because that was the way she was made—well, it was hard to be glad she was dead.
I could be glad that she wouldn’t steal any more of Old Red Addie’s curly tailed pigs or any of Harm Groenwald’s lambs or anybody’s baby colts. And I was thankful that Little Jim’s life had been saved.
Poetry explained it to Wally and me a little later that day when we were over at his house, waiting for dinner to be ready. We were in his tent in their backyard at the time.
He was showing us his shell collection. “See all these empty shells?” he asked Wally and me.
“They certainly are pretty,” Wally answered. He had one of Poetry’s dull white, two-and-a-half-inch-long Iceland cockles in his hand, admiring it, and I could see that maybe he’d want to start a hobby of collecting shells himself sometime.
But Poetry had something special on his mind. I thought so from the way he was wrinkling his forehead. I knew for sure when he said, “Once there was a bivalve mollusk living in this little shell house. But it died and left its shell behind. Everything in nature has to die sometime.”
I heard Wally gulp. I knew he was thinking about a pile of stones up in Old Man Paddler’s rocky hills, where, at the bottom of a ravine, Alexander the Coppersmith lay buried. It wasn’t pleasant to think what we were all thinking right then, but we couldn’t help it.
I was glad when we were interrupted by a high-pitched tremolo from the direction of the back door. It was Poetry’s mother wanting us to come to dinner.
That night when I was upstairs in my room getting ready to go to bed, I stood for a few minutes looking out at the moonlit backyard, past the chicken house and Addie’s apartment. Wally was in the other room in his own bed, sound asleep. I could tell by the snoring, which I remembered from l
ast year.
It had been an exciting day. My mind certainly had a lot of things to think about. It seemed I was a whole lot older than I had been this time last night—years and years and years. So much had happened. I’d learned a lot of different things. Then, as my parents had taught me to do, I knelt beside my bed to make a goodnight prayer to the heavenly Father and to ask Him about anything that might be on my mind.
I was surprised when I heard myself whispering to Him, “Please help Bill Collins not to be a trash trailer in life. Help me to find out for sure what You want me to be and to stay on the track without getting off on anything You don’t want me to do. Help me to do only what is right …”
I can’t remember finishing my prayer or getting into bed. But I must have finished it, and I must have crawled in between Mom’s nice clean sheets, because only a few minutes later (or so it seemed), I was wide awake in bed, the sun was shining outside, and I could hear birds singing in the woods across the road.
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© 1959, 1998 by
PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON
Revised Edition, 1998
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Original Title: Wild Horse Canyon Mystery
Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 19-24 Page 45