Read Ebook: Beehive for Bairns Vol. 2: From 1st Size to 2 Years With Special Supplement: Bed Jackets by Various

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Ebook has 862 lines and 60670 words, and 18 pages

The owl that had sat in the top branches of the sycamore and watched Old Joe come out of his den had known that he was part burglar, part devil, and part imp. The owl had not known that, depending on circumstances, Old Joe could be any of these three without regard to the other two. Reaching the far bank, he was all imp.

He knew everything about the Creeping Hills, including the location of each farm, the character of the farmer and his family, the gardens planted and the crops that would grow, and the number and species of livestock.

A sagging barbed-wire fence two yards from the edge of Willow Brook marked the border of the Mundee farm. Its proprietor was Arthur Mundee, but because no man in the Creeping Hills was ever called by his given name, his neighbors knew him as Mun. He had a thirteen-year-old son named Harold and called Harky, and a wife who had gone to her eternal peace seven years ago. Next in importance was a hound, a bluetick named Precious Sue. Mun Mundee was a coon hunter so ardent that hunting coons was almost a passion, and Precious Sue one of the few hounds that had ever tracked Old Joe to the great sycamore. This had not impressed Old Joe unduly, or created any special fear of either Mun Mundee or Precious Sue.

After a moment's concentration, Old Joe ran his tongue over his lips. Mun Mundee owned some horses, some cattle, and some pigs. He also owned some chickens. Old Joe had not been hungry when he left the sycamore, but neither had he expected an opportunity to confound Mun Mundee. Old Joe licked his lips a second time. When he thought of the chickens, he was suddenly ravenous.

He left Willow Brook and crawled under the barbed-wire fence. He did not slink or hesitate, for he had chosen his night well; the waning moon left complete darkness behind it. The Mundees would be asleep in their house and Precious Sue on the porch. Nobody hunted coons in winter.

Walking boldly, but with not so much as a whisper of sound on the thawing snow, Old Joe saw as soon as the farm came in sight that his analysis was correct. The house was dark. The Mundees and Precious Sue were asleep. Cattle and horses shuffled in their stalls and pigs grunted sleepily in their sty.

Old Joe went straight to the chicken house, and licked his lips a third time as the odor of sleeping chickens delighted his nostrils.

He did not hesitate but went straight to the small door that let the chickens in and out. It was a sliding door that could be raised or lowered, and it was a combination with which Old Joe had long been familiar. He slipped a front paw beneath the door, raised it, entered the chicken house, and let the door slide shut behind him.

The inside of Mun Mundee's chicken house, like the other chicken houses in the Creeping Hills, was familiar. Old Joe climbed to the roost, and a fat white hen clucked sleepily as she sensed something alien beside her. Almost gently Old Joe opened his mouth, closed it on the fat hen's neck, and leaped lightly to the floor with his plunder. He let himself out the same way he got in.

He was halfway back to Willow Brook when, stopping to get a better grip on the fat hen, he was careless. The hen was good for one last squawk.

One was enough. Precious Sue, sleeping on the porch, heard and correctly interpreted. A silent trailer, a hound that made no noise until quarry was bayed, she came rushing through the night.

Old Joe did not hurry, for haste was scarcely consistent with his dignity. But he had not left his den to play with a hound, and there was a simple way to be rid of Precious Sue.

Coming to Willow Brook, and still clutching his hen, Old Joe leaped in and surrendered to the water. A half mile downstream he left the brook, stopped to feast leisurely on the fat hen, and made his way to a swamp so dense and thick that even full sunlight never penetrated some parts of it.

Deep in the swamp he came to his destination, a hollow oak, a huge old tree as massive as his sycamore. Unhesitatingly he climbed the hollow, and the female coon that had chosen the oak as her winter den awoke to snarl and bite him on the nose.

Repelled, but by no means resigned, Old Joe found another den in a nearby ledge of rocks and made plans to meet the situation.

HARKY

At twenty minutes past five, just four hours before Old Joe startled the owl that watched him come out of his den, Harky Mundee peered furtively around the rear of the cow he was milking to see if his father was watching. He was. Harky sighed and went back to work.

Mun Mundee had firm opinions concerning the proper way to milk a cow or do anything else, and when other arguments failed he enforced his ideas with the flat of his hand. Harky sighed again. Old Brindle, far and away the orneriest of Mun's five cows and probably anyone else's, had teats remarkably like the fingers of a buckskin glove that has been left out in the rain and then dried in the sun. Coaxing the last squirts of milk from her probably was not so hard as squeezing apple juice from a rock, but it certainly ran a close second.

Since there was no alternative, Harky beguiled the anything-but-fleeting moments with the comforting reflection that winter, after all, was one of his favorite seasons. It could not compare with autumn, when corn rustled crisply in the shock and dogs sniffed about for scent of the coons that always raided shocked corn. Nor did it equal early spring, when trout streams were ice-free and the earth still too wet for plowing.

But it was far ahead of late spring and summer, with their endless farm tasks, each of which was worse than the other. Only by exercising the greatest craft and diligence, and manfully preparing himself for the chastisement he was sure to get when he finally came home, could a man sneak away for a bit of fishing or swimming.

Harky bent his head toward Old Brindle's flank but his thoughts whisked him out of the stable into the hills.

Shotgun in hand, he'd spent a fair portion of yesterday tracking a bobcat on the snow. It was a proved fact that a man on foot cannot catch up with a bobcat that is also on foot. But it was not to be denied that all bobcats have a touch of moon madness. They knew when they were being tracked, but they also knew when the tracker ceased following, and that kindled a fire in their heads.

As long as they were tracked they were comfortable in the knowledge that they had only to keep running. When the tracker stopped, it threw the bobcat's whole plan out of gear. They imagined all sorts of ambushes, and cunning traps, and finally they worked themselves into such a frenzy that they just had to come back along their own tracks and find out what was happening. It followed that the hunter had nothing to do except rile the bobcat into a lather and then sit down and wait.

Harky had waited. But he must have done something wrong, or perhaps the bobcat he followed had not been sufficiently moonstruck. Though it had come back, it had not been so anxious to find Harky that it forgot everything else. Harky had glimpsed it across a gully, two hundred yards away and hopelessly beyond shotgun range. If only he had a rifle--

He hadn't any, and the last time he'd sneaked Mun's out his father had caught him coming back with it. The hiding that followed--Mun used a hickory gad instead of the flat of his hand--was something a man wouldn't forget if he lived to be older than the rocks on Dewberry Knob. Harky lost himself in a beautiful dream.

Walking along Willow Brook, he accidentally kicked and overturned a rock. Beneath it, shiny-bright as they had been the day the forgotten bandit buried them, was a whole sack full of gold pieces. At once Harky hurried into town and bought a rifle, not an old 38-55 like his father's but a sleek new bolt action with fancy carving on breech and forearm. When he brought it home, Mun asked, rather timidly, if he might use it. No, Pa, Harky heard himself saying. It's not that I care to slight you but this rifle is for a hunter like me.

The shining dream was shattered by Mun's, "You done, Harky?"

Harky looked hastily up to see his father beside him. "Yes, Pa," he said.

"Lemme see."

Mun sat down beside Old Brindle and Harky sighed with relief. When Mun Mundee could not get the last squirt from a cow, it followed that the cow was indeed stripped. But Mun, conditioned by experience, never completely approved of anything Harky did.

"We'll close up for the night," he said.

Harky scooted out of the barn ahead of his father and gulped lungfuls of the softening wind. It seemed that a man could never get enough of that kind of air. Mun closed and latched the barn door and Harky turned to him.

"It's a thaw wind!" he said rapturously.

"Yep."

"Not the big thaw, though."

"Nope."

"Do you reckon," Harky asked, "it will fetch the coons out?"

Mun deliberated. A subject as serious as coons called for deliberation.

"I don't rightly know," he said finally. "I figger some will go on the prowl an' some won't."

It was, Harky decided, a not unreasonable answer even though it lacked the elements of true drama. Harky gulped another lungful of air and almost, but not quite, loosed the reins of his own imagination. Even seasoned hunters did not argue coon lore with Mun Mundee, but on an evening such as this it was impossible to think in prosaic terms.

They lingered near the barn and faced into the wind. Presently Harky stood there in body only. His spirit took him to Heaven.

Heaven, as translated at the moment, was the summit of a mountain ten times as high as Dewberry Knob. From his lofty eminence, Harky looked at a great forest that stretched as far as his eyes could see. Each tree was hollow and each hollow contained a coon. As though every coon had received the same signal at the same time, all came out. There were more coons than a man could hunt if he hunted every night for the next thousand years.

At exactly the right moment, this entrancing scene became perfection. Deep in the great forest, Precious Sue lifted her voice to announce that she had a coon up.

Harky made his way among the great trees toward the sound. He found Precious Sue doing her best to climb a sycamore so massive that ten men, holding each others' hands, could not come even close to encircling the trunk. When Harky shined his light into the tree he saw, not just a coon, but the king of coons. Sitting on a branch, staring down with eyes big as a locomotive's headlight, was Old Joe himself.

The fancy faded, but Harky was left with no sense of frustration because fact replaced it. Somewhere out in the Creeping Hills--the aura that surrounded him considerably enhanced by the fact that no human being knew exactly where--Old Joe really was sleeping the winter away. Suppose that he really came prowling tonight? Suppose Precious Sue really did run him up that big sycamore in the wood lot? Suppose Harky really--? Harky could no longer be silent.

"Pa," he asked, "how long has Old Joe been prowling these hills?"

A man who would speak of coons must think before he spoke. For a full ninety seconds Mun did not answer. Then he said seriously:

Harky pondered this information. When he went to school down at the Crossroads, which he did whenever he couldn't get out of it, he had acquired some education. But he had also acquired some disturbing information. Miss Cathby, who taught all eight grades, was a very earnest soul dedicated to the proposition that the children in her care must not grow up to wallow in the same morass of mingled ignorance and superstition that surrounded their fathers and mothers.

Miss Cathby had pointed out, and produced scientific statistics to prove, that the moon was nothing more than a satellite of the earth. As such, its influence over earth dwellers was strictly limited. The moon was responsible for tides and other things about which Miss Cathby had been very vague because she didn't know. But she did know that the moon could not affect birth, death, or destiny.

Old Joe had been the subject of another of Miss Cathby's lectures. He was just a big coon, she said, though she mispronounced it "raccoon." It was absurd even to think that he had been living in the Creeping Hills forever. Old Joe's predecessor had also been just a big raccoon. Since Old Joe was mortal, and like all mortals must eventually pass to his everlasting reward, his successor would be in all probability the next biggest raccoon.

Harky conceded that she had something to offer. But it also seemed that Mun had much on his side, and on the whole, Mun's conception of the real and earnest life was far more interesting than Miss Cathby's. She got her information from books that were all right but sort of small. Mun took his lore from the limitless woods.

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