Sugar Creek Gang Set Books 13-18 Page 19

  Pretty soon, though, Poetry spoke again with his back still toward me, “Did you ever read this verse in the Bible?”

  If I hadn’t been already down, you could have knocked me over with a fish scale when I realized what he was doing. He had taken his little leather New Testament out of his shirt pocket and, looking through it, had found a verse he thought was extra good.

  As you maybe know, an official part of the equipment of anybody who belongs to the Sugar Creek Gang is a small New Testament. We each carry one nearly all the time, and every one of us not only reads it every day, but we aren’t ashamed to let anybody know we do, either.

  But on account of being boys and feeling the way nearly all boys do, we didn’t talk about the Bible very much, except in campfire meetings or at Sunday school, and only once in a while when two or three of us were together.

  Little Jim and I did more of that than any of the rest of us. That’s because he—well, he had a keen mind and thought more about the Bible, I guess, and was always getting such good ideas. Also Little Jim was just glad he was alive. Not a boy in the world would be alive if God hadn’t made him and also if God didn’t keep him alive. And there isn’t a boy in the world that’s dumb enough to want to be dead, which is why a boy ought to be glad to love God and to be kind to Him. Little Jim always was.

  Anyway, when Poetry asked me if I had ever read “this verse,” I said, “What verse?”

  So he read it to me, with his back still turned. It was out of the book of Matthew, chapter 18, and was the nineteenth verse. It said, “If two of you agree on earth about anything that they may ask, it shall be done for them by My Father who is in heaven.”

  It made me feel good inside to even think about the Bible, especially since I knew both of us believed what we were talking about. I just lay there, looking through the station wagon window up at the pretty branches of a pine tree that grew not far away. I was also listening to the gurgling of the water close by and felt something sort of warm in my heart, as though Poetry and God and I had a secret of some kind.

  When we finished telling each other what we thought the verse meant, we made up our minds that we were going to stick together and pray until Little Tom’s dad was saved.

  “Let’s shake on it,” Poetry said. He swung around and shoved his hand in my direction.

  I grabbed it quick and said, “Shake.”

  “Shake,” he said again, then we prayed together for Tom’s dad, and I felt good inside.

  I noticed the branches of the pine tree above me were swaying in the wind, and I knew my clothes were drying pretty fast—I hoped.

  A little later we heard the gang coming. I knew it was the gang because it sounded like a flock of blackbirds gathering in the woods in a Sugar Creek autumn, getting ready for migrating to a warmer country. It also sounded like a flock of crows with a few scolding blue jays mixed in with them and maybe a harsh-voiced shrieking kingfisher joining in. Dragonfly was the rattling-voiced kingfisher and Circus the scolding blue jay.

  My clothes were dry enough for me to put on if, while we drove along, I’d sit on the leather seat of the station wagon, which I did. Away we went, back to camp and to the next day’s fishing trip.

  “Look what I got for Charlotte Ann,” Little Jim said and shoved over to me a couple of small balloons. “They cost only ten cents apiece,” he said proudly and handed me my change.

  I was a little disappointed but didn’t want to say so, because Little Jim had such a happy grin on his face to think he had saved me money. And I was also sure Charlotte Ann would be happy to see the balloons blown up nice and big. Most babies laugh and reach out their hands for them the very minute they see them.

  I tucked the two balloons in my shirt pocket beside my New Testament and buttoned the flap and forgot about them.

  The next day was our very special fishing trip for walleyed pike. Boy oh boy, it was going to be a wonderful trip, I thought. We were going to fish, not for small fish such as bluegills and crappies, which people call “pan” fish, but for big walleyes to pack and ship home to our folks at Sugar Creek. Also, we were going to keep our eyes open every second to see if we could find any trace of John Till.

  6

  I was certainly glad our little Indian friend Snow-in-the-Face was well enough to be our guide on our fishing trip for walleye. As you maybe know, he’d been very sick. But almost right away after our gang had gone to see him, he had started to get better. And now, today, he was coming to our camp to visit us and to guide us to the best fishing waters for walleyed pike, so that we could all catch our “limit,” which is eight walleyes apiece. Multiplying eight fish by seven boys, which any teacher will tell you you can’t do, we’d have fifty-six fish to pack in ice and ship back to Sugar Creek for our parents to see and to help us eat. Boy oh boy, it was going to be fun!

  About three o’clock that afternoon, after the gang had all had a rest hour, Snow-in-the-Face and his big brother, Eagle Eye, came gliding in a canoe straight to our shore.

  There was a lot of excitement around camp for a while as all of us finished getting our equipment ready. And we made sure our two big fishing boats were equipped with life preservers, which nobody ought to go on a fishing trip without.

  It had been a terribly hot day, and the sun poured its yellowish heat down on us something fierce as our boats plowed their wet way out across the waves toward an island. It also reflected back up into our faces from the water and made me glad I had on a pair of dark glasses to protect my eyes from the extrabright light.

  Snow-in-the-Face was in the boat I was in, along with Little Jim, Poetry, and Dragonfly. We were following the other boat, which had Eagle Eye and Big Jim and Circus and Little Tom Till. Barry had stayed home to write letters and to look after camp.

  In a little while our boats neared the pretty pine-and spruce-covered island and circled around to the other side, where we anchored in a little cove, not more than thirty yards from each other in some quiet water.

  That super little reddish-brown-faced Indian with his bright black eyes and straight black hair didn’t even use a fishing pole. Instead, he had a big heavy line, which he dropped down over the side of our boat.

  I was sitting beside him in the middle seat. Poetry was in the stern, close to the outboard motor. Dragonfly was in the prow. Little Jim was in front of me in a seat by himself, with his life vest on, which meant he was even safer than the rest of us. If our boat upset or we fell out, he would be ready to float to shore without having to hold onto a pillow.

  In a minute we all had our hooks baited with live chubs and were waiting for somebody—either in our boat or in the other one—to catch the first fish. The very second one of us would get a walleye, we’d know we’d found a school of them, and in a little while we’d all get bites and catch fish at the same time, because walleyes stick together like a gang of boys.

  “Eagle Eye found this place last year,” Snow-in-the-Face said. “Fish bite here when they don’t anyplace else on the lake.”

  But after we all had sat there and waited and waited and pulled our lines in and out of the water for an hour and not a one of us had caught a single fish or even had a nibble, it looked as if having a good guide wasn’t working.

  Snow-in-the-Face had a pucker on his brown forehead and looked worried.

  Ho hum, I thought and shifted myself to another uncomfortable position on the hot boat seat. Any position is uncomfortable when the fish don’t bite and the deerflies are swarming around your legs and hands and biting fiercely just the way you wish the fish would.

  Pretty soon I looked over at the pretty pine-covered island and wished I could go over there and sit in the shade for a while. I was also remembering that was the very island I’d wanted to explore when I’d first gotten the idea of playing Robinson Crusoe and Treasure Island. That was the idea that had got us tangled up in the mystery of the buried treasure, most of which we’d finally found. The rest of it old John Till probably had somewhere, wherever he was,
which nobody knew.

  “I’m terribly hot,” I said to the rest of us in our boat. “Let’s go over to that island and lie down in the shade a while.” The others thought it was a good idea, so we took in our lazy lines and pulled up anchor and rowed over.

  In a little while, Poetry and I were strolling along, following the shore around to the side where we could see our camp away out across the lake. It was one of the prettiest islands I’d seen. It had big Norway pines and spruce and tamarack and ferns and all kinds of wildflowers, such as red columbine and white goldthread. In a boggy place were some pitcher plants, which had weird-looking green leaves that looked like one of the green pitchers Mom has on our sideboard at home. The leaves looked like the lips of a French horn that one of the men at Sugar Creek plays in the band on Saturday night.

  We’d left Snow-in-the-Face and Little Jim and Dragonfly back at the shore with the boat, because Snow-in-the-Face and Little Jim had acted as though they didn’t want to come with us, and Dragonfly had been lazy and also was afraid of smelling wildflowers and having to sneeze a lot. That was one of the reasons he’d come on this vacation with us—so he could get away from Sugar Creek flowers and timothy hay and ragweed and everything else that would make him sneeze.

  “You know what?” Poetry said to me all of a sudden, and when I said, “No, what?” he said, “This would be a good island for John Till to hide on. Maybe when he got out of the icehouse, he came over here.”

  “But how could he get here? We had his boat.”

  “He might swim,” Poetry said.

  But that wasn’t a good idea, because it was pretty far from any other shore to here, so I said, “Of course, he could rent a boat from almost any resort up here.”

  We were standing close to a sandy beach, and the waves were washing up in a very lazy friendly way, when all of a sudden Poetry said, “Look, somebody’s been here not long ago. Somebody’s had a boat beached here on the sand.”

  Somebody had, but it was gone now.

  “Boy oh boy!” I said, all of a sudden getting excited. “And here are shoe tracks, going back into the island somewhere.”

  We decided to follow the tracks, but we didn’t find anything interesting. There might have been a broken twig trail, though, like the one we’d followed before, and which you know about, but we couldn’t find a thing, so we gave up and went back to Dragonfly and Snow-in-the-Face and Little Jim.

  “Where were you guys?” Dragonfly wanted to know, and I said, “Oh, looking for buried treasure.”

  Snow-in-the-Face got a strange, faraway expression on his face, squinted his eyes, and said, “Sometimes we see lights out here at night.”

  And then it was Dragonfly’s turn to get a strange, faraway expression, as if he wished he was as far away as his thoughts.

  Well, we decided to try fishing some more, like the rest of the guys in the other boat, though they still hadn’t caught anything either. We rowed out to another place and baited our hooks and tried again.

  Another hour passed, during which we pulled anchor and tried a half-dozen different locations, and still not a one of us caught a single fish. We were terribly discouraged.

  “You can have one if you want one,” Little Jim said.

  “How?” I said.

  And he said, “One of those balloons I bought for you yesterday is a rubber fish. You can blow it up—maybe it’s a walleye.”

  Well, I still had those two balloons in my shirt pocket, so because I was terribly bored and didn’t know what else to do, I pulled out the one that looked as if it would be fish-shaped when it was blown up. And like the wolf that ate up the little pigs, I huffed and I puffed and I blew the balloon up into a nice big fish that looked like a walleyed pike. For a while I had something to keep my mind off being bored, because if there is anything that is harder to do than anything else, it is to sit on the seat of a boat on a hot day when the fish won’t bite.

  “If we get one, we’ll get twenty,” Poetry said. “Walleyes go in schools, you know.”

  “Yeah,” Little Jim piped up, “but fish maybe don’t have school in August,” which reminded me that right after August came September, and generally in the first week of September the Sugar Creek School started and …

  I let out a fierce long sigh when I thought of that, not because I didn’t need an education, but I hated to have to sit down to get one, which is what you have to do in school most of the time. The boat seat was getting harder and harder every minute.

  The yellow rubber fish I’d just blown up looked cute, though, and was as fat as a butter-ball. For a while I let it float on the water out to the end of the fishing line I had tied it on.

  “Here, Poetry,” I said to the fish, “get out there and float. You’re so fat you can’t sink.”

  That made the real Poetry pretend to be mad, and he said to me, “Oh, you go jump in the lake!”

  And then, all of a sudden, Poetry got a big strike! He waited until he was sure it was time to set the hook, which he did at exactly the right time, and he landed a very excited walleye. Only it wasn’t much bigger than a big yellow perch—hardly big enough to keep.

  “OK, Bill, hand me the stringer,” he ordered me, panting with happiness. Talk about a proud grin on a boy’s face! Poetry really had one.

  “What stringer?” I said and looked all around on the bottom of the boat for one. And—would you believe this?—not a one of us had brought along a fish stringer! The other boat was too far away for them to throw one into our boat, so Poetry just sat there with his fish in his hand, wondering what to do with it.

  “It’s too little to keep,” Little Jim said. “Let him go back to his mama.”

  “I wish I knew where his mama is hiding,” Dragonfly said. “I’d like to catch her.”

  “Let him go, and he’ll find his mama,” Snow-in-the-Face said, and he had the cutest grin on his small face. I could see he was as mischievous as any other boy.

  “It’s probably a little lost child fish,” Little Jim said. “We aren’t going to catch any more anyway. Let’s let him go home to his parents.”

  Well, I had the end of my fish balloon tied airtight shut with a piece of old fishing line I’d had in my pocket, and it was still in the water on the opposite side of the boat. It was really cute, that little yellowish rubber fish, bobbing along out there on the surface.

  And then Poetry yelled across to the other boat, saying, “Hey, you guys over there! We got a fish but don’t have any stringer to put him on. What’ll we do with him?”

  Circus, being mischievous and having lots of bright ideas anyway, yelled back to us, “If you’ll put him back in the water and tell him to swim over here, we’ll put him on our stringer.”

  And that was what gave Poetry another idea, which wasn’t so dumb and which turned our discouraged fishing trip into a one that was wonderful. Poetry yelled to Circus, “Super idea! We’ll send him over right away!” Then he got a command in his voice and said to me, “Here, Bill, give me that line.” He reached out and took it before I could make up my mind not to let him have it.

  “What crazy thing are you going to do?” Dragonfly asked.

  Poetry held his fish between his knees a minute while he made a double slipknot around the walleye’s tail. And then almost before anybody could have stopped him if he had wanted to, Poetry released that frisky little walleye into the water sort of the way my mother does when she carefully holds an old setting hen and eases her into a coop where there is a nestful of eggs to sit on. Poetry said to the fish, as he let go, “Here, Wally, my friend, you go swimming straight for the other boat away over there!”

  That fish certainly had lots of pep. Being out of the water for that short time hadn’t hurt him a bit—although, if you are going to let a fish go free after catching him, you are supposed to be very careful to handle him with wet hands and release him under the water rather than throw him back, and he’ll be more likely to live.

  The frisky walleye made a fierce fast dive st
raight down into the water, and in a few seconds the yellow balloon was bobbing up and down as if it was a boy’s bobber on a fishing line. And it started to move right in the direction of the other boat—kind of slow, but actually toward it!

  Poetry sighed proudly, leaned back, stuck his thumbs in his armpits, and said, “See there, fish understand my language.”

  That made Dragonfly say, “That’s because you talk like a fish,” which, for Dragonfly, was almost a bright remark.

  I could see, though, that the balloon fish was changing its course, which meant that the real fish was too. It began working its way a little toward the left, out toward deeper water and farther from shore. We all watched it, having fun, and Poetry kept yelling to it to turn to the right and to hurry up. But pretty soon, when it was maybe fifty yards from us, it stopped going in one direction and began to move slowly around in a small circle.

  “I’ll bet he’s caught on a snag,” Snow-in the-Face said, and it seemed that he might be right, because, even though the balloon bobbed around a little, it didn’t move any farther away but just seemed to stay more or less in the same place.

  Well, we fished on, all of us hoping for another fish, but not a one of us caught one, so pretty soon we got discouraged again and pulled up anchor.

  Then Poetry said, “Why don’t we go get him, then go home and everybody go swimming?”

  It sounded like a good idea. It’d be a lot more fun to do that than to sit on a hard boat seat watching a rubber balloon bobbing on the surface of a lake that didn’t have any hungry fish in it.

  “Let’s troll over,” Snow-in-the-Face said. “Sometimes when you can’t catch fish any other way, they’ll bite when you do that.”

  Dragonfly said it was a good idea, too, because there might be a “lost, strayed, or stolen” fish all by itself between here and the balloon.

  So we all left our lines in the water while Snow-in-the-Face and Little Jim took the oars and rowed us splashily out toward that nice yellow balloon I was going to get and take home to Charlotte Ann.