almost everybody in Sugar Creek territory had ......named Little Bo-Peep, who had lost her sheep:...

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This was the third worried day since Wan-dering Winnie, Little Jim Foote’s white-

faced Hereford calf, had disappeared. Thoughalmost everybody in Sugar Creek territory hadlooked all over everywhere for her, nobody hadseen hide nor hair of her. And as far as weknew, nobody had even heard her high-pitched, trembling bawl.

Different ideas as to what could have hap-pened to the cutest little calf a boy ever ownedhad been talked about and worried over by allsix members of the Sugar Creek Gang and byour six sets of parents. My own parents weredoing maybe as much or more worrying thanthe Foote family.

As I said about a hundred words above thisparagraph, today was the third worried daysince Winnie had dropped out of sight. It wasalso the beginning of the third night. In a littlewhile now, the Theodore Collins family, whichis ours, would be in bed—just as soon as wecouldn’t stand it to stay up any longer.

Charlotte Ann, my little sister, had alreadybeen carried to her bed in the downstairs bed-room just off the living room, where Mom andDad and I still were. Mom was working on acrossword puzzle, and I was lying on the floor

Case of Missing Calf:Case of Missing Calf 10/9/09 1:34 PM Page 5

piecing together a picture puzzle of a cowboyat a rodeo. The cowboy was trying to rope ascared-half-to-death calf. Dad was lounging inhis favorite chair, reading the part of the news-paper Mom didn’t have.

All of a sudden she interrupted my thoughts,saying, “Maybe we’re all worrying too muchabout Winnie. Maybe she’s already been foundand is in some farmer’s corral somewhere. Ifwe wait long enough, somebody will phone forthem to come and get her.”

Dad, who must have been dozing, came towith a start and yawned a lazy answer. “Leaveher alone, and she’ll come home and bring hertail behind her”—which any boy knows is whatsomebody in a poem had said to somebodynamed Little Bo-Peep, who had lost her sheep:“Leave them alone, and they’ll come home,bringing their tails behind them.”

It was almost ridiculous—Dad’s quoting aline of poetry like that at a time like that,because right that second I was on my handsand knees on the floor by the north window,looking under the library table for the part ofthe picture puzzle that had on it the rodeocalf’s hindquarters. In fact, that last part of thecalf was the very last piece of my puzzle. Assoon as I could find it and slip it into place, thepicture would be finished.

“What,” Mom said to Dad from her rockeron the other side of the hanging lamp he wasreading and dozing under, “is a word of seven

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letters meaning forever? Its first letter is e, andthe last letter is l.”

Dad yawned another long, lazy yawn andmumbled, “What are the other five letters?”Then he folded his paper, unfolded his long,lazy legs, stood up, stretched, and said, “How inthe world can you stay awake long enough toworry your way through a crossword puzzle?”

“I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” Mom exclaimedcheerfully and proudly. “The other five lettersare t-e-r-n-a. The whole word is eternal.”

Dad, not looking where I was lying, stum-bled over part of me but managed to keepfrom falling ker-ploppety-wham onto the floor bycatching himself against the bedroom door-post. He sighed a disgusted sigh down at me,saying, “What on earth are you doing downthere on the floor! Why aren’t you in bed?”

Looking at my picture puzzle, which Dad’sslippered feet had scattered in every directionthere was, I answered, “Nothing. Nothing at all.But I was looking for half a lost calf.”

It seemed a good time for us to get ready togo to bed. When anybody is so tired that he iscranky-sleepy, he might lose his temper onsomebody. And we had a rule in our family thateverybody had to go to bed forgiven to every-body else.

Because, ever since I was little, I’d been giv-ing Mom a good-night kiss just to show her Iliked her, even when I was sometimes too tiredto know for sure whether I did, I reached outmy freckled left cheek for her to kiss. Looking

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at Dad, I gave him a shrug of both shoulders—which is a good enough good night for a fatherwho has scattered his son’s picture puzzle allover—and in a little while I was on my wayupstairs to my room.

The window of that upstairs room, as youmay remember, looks south out over the ironpitcher pump at the end of the board walk,over the garden to old Red Addie’s apartmenthog house, and beyond it to Little Jim’s folks’farm. And over there was an empty corral witha whole calf missing, which calf might nevercome home again and bring her tail behindher.

I was too tired to say very much of a good-night prayer to God, but I knew that the Onewho made boys understood a boy’s tired mindwell enough not to expect him to stay on hisknees beside his bed very long. Besides, any-body knows it’s not how long anybody praysthat counts with God, or what kind of words heuses, but whether he has honest-to-goodnesslove in his heart for his folks and for the Savior,who had first loved him enough to die for him.That was the most important thing my parentshad taught me.

One of the very few things I prayed forbefore I clambered into bed was that Little Jimwouldn’t have too hurt a heart because of hislost, strayed, or stolen white-faced, white-eyelashed calf.

And that—my last thoughts being aboutWandering Winnie—is maybe why I had a

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crazy, mixed-up dream, the like of which I hadnever dreamed before in all my half-long life.

Honestly, that dream was so real it scaredme half to death. It also seemed it wasn’t adream but was the actual truth. In fact, right inthe middle of my dream, I dreamed that I wokeup, and the rest of the dream seemed to behappening for sure.

I guess maybe the half calf I’d lost on thefloor of our living room was part of the reason Idreamed what I did. Maybe the other reasonwas that on the way to the stairs, which wasthrough the kitchen, I had stopped to eat thesecond half of a piece of peach pie that I hadleft over from supper and which Mom hadpromised me I could have for a bedtime snack.

Right in the middle of eating that very tastypiece of peach pie, I heard the radio going inthe living room, and somebody’s voice gallop-ing along about all the things that were hap-pening “in the world and here at home.”

That was one of the last things Dad didevery night—listen to the news, some of whichwas full of excitement and some of it not.

Just as I tucked the last bite of my piece ofpeach pie into my mouth and was startingupstairs to tuck myself into bed, I heard thenews reporter say, “This program is beingbrought to you by the Kangaroo Sales Pavilionof Tippecanoe County. Remember—Saturdayat one o’clock, thirty head of sheep, seventeenHereford calves, fifty-three shoats, and . . .”

On the way to the top of the stairs, where

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the moonlight was streaming in through thesouth window, I was still enjoying the taste ofpeach pie and was thinking what a good piemaker Mom was.

It took me only a few fumbling minutes toget undressed. When I finished my bedtimeprayer, I yawned one of Dad’s kind of long,lazy, noisy yawns, flopped over into bed, pulledMom’s nice fresh-air-smelling sheet over me,sighed a sleepy sigh, and started to sail off in awooden shoe.

Did you ever have in your school reader thepoem called “Wynken, Blynken, and Nod”?We’d had to learn it by heart when I was in thefourth grade. And it seemed that nearly everynight, when I was getting into bed, a part of thepoem would start yawning its way through mymind.

That very interesting poem tells aboutWynken, Blynken, and Nod’s getting into a bigwooden shoe and sailing off on “a river of crys-tal light into a sea of dew.” When the old moonsaw them sailing along, he called out to them,asking where they were going and what theywere looking for. And they answered, “We havecome to fish for the herring fish that live in thisbeautiful sea.”

Anyway, the writer of the poem—somebodyI had never heard of, named Eugene Field—explained in the last verse of the poem that“Wynken and Blynken were two little eyes andNod was a little head,” and the wooden shoewas a trundle bed—whatever that was.

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Anyway, after memorizing the poem, I’dalways thought of going to sleep as sailing off ina wooden shoe.

In seconds, I’d climbed into my own wood-en shoe and taken off. And that’s when mycrazy, mixed-up dream began spinning roundand round in my mind.

First, I saw myself standing in our livingroom, looking into the long mirror on the wallabove the library table, under which, as youalready know, I had been looking for half a lostcalf. All of a sudden then, while I was combingmy red hair, I was seeing in the mirror not ared-haired, freckle-faced boy but a hornless,white-faced Hereford with long white eyelashes.

Quicker than a firefly’s fleeting flash, in mydream I was over at Little Jim’s place, and I wasa red-haired heifer named Wandering Winnie,standing at the Footes’ corral gate.

Racing toward me from behind was a cow-boy on a pinto pony, swinging a lasso. And ascalves do at a rodeo, I whirled and started torun like four-footed lightning to get away fromhim.

Then, in another fleeting flash, I wasn’t acalf anymore but was Theodore Collins’s onlyson. And the cowboy had turned into a maskedrider, whose horse was big and black and hadthundering hoofs.

“Help! Help! Help!” I yelled as I ran.And then that masked rider’s rope settled

over my head and shoulders, the black horseskidded to a dusty four-footed stop by the iron

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pitcher pump on our farm. And right then inthe dream, the big black horse whirled andstarted to run, dragging me head-and-shoul-ders-and-face-and-neck-and-ears-first across awhole barnyard full of peach pies.

“Help! Help! Help! Help!” I kept on yelling. Icouldn’t get my breath. Also I couldn’t turnover in bed, where suddenly it seemed I was, inmy own upstairs room being choked half todeath. I was screaming, but I couldn’t screamvery loud.

Well, right that crazy, mixed-up second,there was a voice coming out of somewhere upthe stairway. It was my mother calling, “BillCollins! What on earth are you yelling aboutup there? You having a nightmare or some-thing?”

It seemed I was still out in our barnyard,being dragged headfirst through a thousandpeach pies, while I was also still in bed, tryingto turn over and wake up and couldn’t.

Right away, though, I did wake up onaccount of my father’s thundery voice joiningin with Mom’s worried one and ordering me togo back to sleep. Also he ordered me to turnover, as I was probably on my back—which Iwas and which most people are when they arehaving what is called a nightmare.

I made myself turn over, and pretty soon,without knowing I was going to do it, I set sailagain for the land of Nod, and the next thing Iknew, it was morning.

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* * *

It was one of the most sunshiny mornings Iever woke up in. And the smell of bacon andeggs frying downstairs in our kitchen made mehungry—not for peach pie, though, which forsome reason, it seemed, maybe I wouldn’t wantany more of for a long time. I wanted some-thing salty instead.

Even while I was shoving myself into myshirt and jeans, I was looking out the south win-dow to the grassy barnyard, where Dad, carry-ing our three-gallon milk pail, was comingtoward the pitcher pump. Mixy, our black-and-white mother cat, was following along withhim, meowing up at him and at the milk pail allthe way.

At the pump, Dad stopped, lifted the pail outof Mixy’s reach, and, shading his eyes, lookedtoward the sky. Then he called to Mom, who wasmaybe standing in the kitchen doorway rightbelow my window, “Turkey buzzards are all overup there! Must be something dead somewhere!”

I stooped low, so that I could see under theoverhanging leaves of the ivy that sprawledacross the upper one-third of my window, andlooked out and up toward where Dad had beenlooking. And what to my wondering eyes shouldappear but seven or eight wide-winged birdssailing like Wynken, Blynken, and Nod in a seaof dew—except that there probably wasn’t anydew that high up in the sky on a sunshiny day.

I knew from the different buzzards I had

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seen on the ground at different times, gob-bling down dead rats or mice—or a possum orcoon or skunk some hunter had caught andskinned—that buzzards were what Dad called“carrion eaters.”

Did you ever see a buzzard up close, maybeonly fifty feet away? If you ever get a chance tosee one on the ground, you will notice that heis twenty or so inches long from his ugly headat the top of his long, naked, wrinkled, scrawnyneck to the tip of his tail. And if while you arewatching him, he decides it’s time to take offon a trip to the sky again, you’d see that hiswingspread is maybe as much as six feet—as farfrom the tip of one black-feathered wing to theother as my tallish father is tall.

A turkey buzzard is the biggest, most awk-ward bird in the whole territory. He is also oneof the most important. Many a time I hadlooked straight up into the straight-up sky andseen one of those big black vultures soaring ina silent circle, sometimes so high above thefields or woods that he would look as if he wasmaybe only ten inches from wingtip to wingtip.

Then, all of a sudden, he would comeshooting down in a long slant and land with anawkward ploppety-plop-plop, ker-flop-flop-flop awayout in the field or maybe even close by.

In less than three minutes, another buz-zard and then another and still another—asmany sometimes as five—would land plop at thesame place like black-winged arrows. And Iknew they had come slanting down out of the

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sky to do what their Creator had made themfor in the first place—to have breakfast or din-ner or supper on a dead carcass of some kind.It could be a rat or a mouse or a possum orcoon or skunk or even a horse or cow that hadhappened to die or get killed. So turkey buz-zards were as important as any birds in thewhole Sugar Creek territory.

“Don’t you boys ever kill one of them,” Dadhad ordered the gang one day when he wasalso talking to us about being careful never tokill owls, because they were helpful to farmersby eating cutworms and mice. “A buzzard,” heexplained to us, “is one of nature’s scavengers.Its business is to clean up the country and notallow any germ-breeding dead animals to smellup the clean, fresh country air and spread sick-ness or disease of any kind.

“Seagulls are scavengers, too,” Dad went on.But we didn’t know anything about sea-

gulls, there not being any in our territory, andnobody in the gang ever saw a seagull.

Well, because I was hungry, I quick finishedshoving myself into my clothes and in a fewminutes was downstairs.

At the breakfast table, Dad looked across atme, studying my face with a question mark inhis eye, and asked, “What was your nightmareabout last night?”

“It wasn’t a nightmare,” I answered, tryingto be funny and maybe not being. “It was anight calf!”

It seemed all right to tell my folks what I

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had dreamed, which I did. We also talked toeach other about different things. It was ahappy breakfast for the whole family exceptCharlotte Ann, my little sister, who wasn’t in agood humor for a change.

And do you know what? My dream wasn’tso crazy after all. Right that very minute, Dadreached up and turned on the radio, which wason the mantel beside our striking clock, just intime for us to hear the announcer say, “TheMontgomery County sheriff’s office reportedlate yesterday that two more calves were stolenin the area. The rustlers drove the calves out agate near the Stonebergers’ barn and down thelane to a parked truck where they were loadedon. This is the second case of livestock rustlingin the county. Eighteen head of hogs were takenfrom the George Ranger’s ranch last week . . .”

The news reporter went on then aboutsomething else, which gave my grayish brownhaired Mom a chance to cut in and say, “What-ever is the world coming to—people stealingcattle and hogs right in front of your eyes onyour back doorstep!”

Dad’s answer wasn’t exactly a surprise. Itwas what any boy who goes to church is sup-posed to know anyway, and it was: “The worldisn’t coming to anything, Mother. The worldwithout God, which most of it still is, is alreadybad. The Bible says in Romans three twenty-three . . .”

And then the phone rang. Dad quick leftthe table to go answer it and started talking to

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somebody about a Farm Bureau meeting wherehe was going to make a speech about nitrogenand alfalfa roots—stuff like that.

When he came back, my deep-voiced, bushy-eyebrowed father was frowning a little aboutsomething somebody had said to him. Then heand Mom agreed with each other a while onwhat the Bible says about people’s hearts andwhat is the matter with them.

My mind was on the news I’d just heard onthe radio about rustlers having stolen two morecalves right in front of our eyes on our ownback doorstep. And it seemed maybe my mindwas on the trail of an idea that would explainwhat had really happened to Little Jim’s Wan-dering Winnie, so I didn’t listen very well towhat Mom and Dad were talking about.

But after breakfast, while I was out in thegarden with the Ebenezer onions, the black-seeded Simpson lettuce, and the Scarlet Globeradishes, I was chewing over with my mind’steeth some of the words Dad had come backfrom the telephone with. Those words, wordfor word from the New Testament, were: “Outof the heart come . . . evil thoughts, murders . . .thefts, false witness . . .”

“The stealing of those calves was in some-body’s heart first,” I remembered he had saidto Mom. “Then it was in the mind, and then heacted it out in his life. What can you expectfrom a sour crab apple tree but that it will bearsour crab apples?”

As I sliced away with my hoe, thinking

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about something Dad had once told me—thatI could keep the big weeds out of the garden bychopping them out while they were still little—I moved into the history section of my mind tothe morning just three days ago when LittleJim had first missed his cute little white-facedbaby beef.

But before I tell you what I thought andwhy, I’d maybe better let you know that, in theafternoon of the day I was living in right then,the Gang was going to have a very importantmeeting down at the spring near the leaninglinden tree not far from the Black WidowStump. I certainly didn’t even dream what a lotof mystery we were going to stumble onto orthat we’d find a clue that would shoot us, likesix arrows out of a bow, into the exciting anddangerous adventure of finding out what hadreally happened to Wandering Winnie.

Boy oh boy, I can hardly wait till I get start-ed into the first paragraph of that part of thisstory. What happened was so different fromanything else that had ever happened to us inall six of our exciting lives.

Boy oh boy!

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In case you are wondering how come LittleJim’s white-faced baby beef was named Wan-

dering Winnie, you might just as well wonderalso how come she had quite a few othernames.

Little Jim called her Wandering Winniebecause she was always wandering away fromtheir farm. Dragonfly, the dragonfly-like-eyedmember of our gang, called her Winnie thePooh, after a character in a children’s book bythat name. Poetry, the barrel-shaped, detective-minded member, who reads more books thanany of us, had named her Little Dogie, explain-ing that “in the Old West, cowboys had a sayingthat a dogie was a calf whose mother was deadand his father had run off with another cow”—something like that.

You see, Little Dogie, Wandering Winnie, andWinnie the Pooh was an honest-to-goodnessorphaned calf. Her mother had died about aweek after Winnie had been born, and thatmade the calf a “dogie.” Little Jim had bottle-fed Winnie until she was old enough to eatgrass and bran shorts and other calf food.

Well, almost as soon as Winnie was a dogieold enough to run and gambol about LittleJim’s barnyard, she had taken on a very bad


habit. Having a wandering spirit in her heart,she was always running away from home.

Winnie never went very far, though. Mostalways it was over to our place. Sometimes asoften as twice a week, when I would go out toour south pasture to drive Lady MacBeth, ourHolstein milk cow, into her corral for Dad tomilk her, I would find Little Jim’s dogie lying inthe shade of the elderberry bushes along thefencerow by Lady MacBeth.

Both of them would be lazily chewing theircuds, as if it was the pleasantest thing ever acow and a calf could do. A black-and-white Hol-stein who didn’t have a calf of her own and awhite-faced Hereford who didn’t have anymother would be lying side by side, doing noth-ing except maybe just liking each other. Mom,trying to defend Little Dogie, said that was veryimportant even to a human being—just likingand being liked by somebody.

I guess maybe Mom felt that way about ani-mals and people because in the Sugar Creekcemetery, not far from the church we all wentto, there was a small tombstone that had on itthe name of a baby sister I had never seen. Shewas born before I was and died when she wasstill little.

Mom had maybe one of the tenderest heartsfor babies anybody ever saw.

Nearly every time I saw a contented cowlying on her side with her head up, chewingaway, her eyes half closed as though she was al-most asleep, I was reminded of a poem Poetry

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was always quoting. It had a line that ran: “Cowslie down upon their sides when they would goto sleep . . .”

Did you ever stop to think of all the differ-ent ways animals go to sleep? Our Mixy catmakes three or four turns round and roundand settles down in a semicircle. Our old redrooster flies up to a tree branch or onto a roostin the chicken house and stands all night onone leg. A horse hangs its head and stands stillall night in a stall.

And Lady MacBeth lies down on her sideand spends all night chewing the food she hastaken all day to eat too fast. Actually she swal-lows backwards every few minutes, doing itmaybe a thousand times a night, and then thenext day she starts in all over again. A cow iswhat is called a “ruminant,” and all ruminantshave two stomachs, one to eat into and theother to digest with.

One morning when I found Winnie lyingon her side with Lady MacBeth, she had a cutover her left eye that was still bleeding a littleand which she’d probably got when she camethrough the barbed-wire fence into our pasture.

Even as sorry as I felt for Winnie, I enjoyedrunning to our house, getting a special germ-killing salve we kept in the medicine cabinet,and dressing the wound, since I’m maybegoing to be a doctor someday,

“You dumb little dogie!” I said to her in aplayful scold. “Don’t you ever let me catch yougetting cut on that barbed wire again!”

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Then I patted her on her hornless headand phoned Little Jim to come and get his cutelittle calf.

Just to be sure she wouldn’t get cut again, Iwent down to our lane fence to the place whereWinnie had been squeezing through andwrapped the barbed wire with a strip of burlapI tore from one of the gunnysacks we had inthe barn.

Well, while I was in the history section ofmy mind out in our garden with the Ebenezeronions, the black-seeded Simpson lettuce, andthe Scarlet Globe radishes, I was rememberingthat morning just three days ago when LittleDogie—Wandering Winnie the Pooh—had dis-appeared.

Little Jim had come pedaling over to ourhouse on his bike, bringing with him a three-foot-long, yellow-barked willow switch, plan-ning to do with the switch what I knew he’ddone a half-dozen other times that summer—drive his white-faced, long-eyelashed, dumbdogie back home to her corral again.

That morning, three days ago, Lady Mac-Beth was already in her corral, already milked.She was waiting for me to turn her out to pas-ture again, where she would eat all day, so shecould chew all night, so she could make whitemilk and yellow butter out of the brown branand green grass she would eat.

The Collins family was at the breakfasttable at the time, eating pancakes and sausageand stuff.

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Hearing a noise out at our front gate, Ilooked across the table past Mom’s grayishbrown hair and through the screened sidedoor of our kitchen. I saw Little Jim leaning hisbike against the walnut tree just inside the gate.Then he went scooting across the lawn towardour barnyard and the pasture bars, carryingthe willow switch. Even from as far away as Iwas, I could see the little guy had a very set face,as though his temper was up and he couldn’twait to explode it on Winnie.

In the middle of the barnyard, Little Jimstopped, looked toward the south pasture,and let out two or three long cow calls, whichany farm boy knows sound like “Swoo-ooo-ook!Sw-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-ook!”

I was pretty soon out of my place withoutbeing excused, which is impolite to do, and wasout the side door, letting it slam behind me—and shouldn’t have or it might wake up Char-lotte Ann. In a barefoot flash I was hurryingdown the board walk and past the iron pitcherpump to where Little Jim was.

His set face was flushed from having ped-aled so hard, his eyebrows were down, and hewas as angry as I had ever seen him. He nearlyalways doesn’t get angry at anything.

As soon as I reached the center of the barn-yard, where Little Jim was, I said to him, “’S’-matter? How come you’re yelling like that atnothing?”

“I’m not yelling at nothing!” Little JimFoote disagreed crossly. “It’s Wandering Win-

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nie the Pooh. That dumb dogie has run awayagain, and when I find her I’m going to giveher a switching she’ll never forget as long asshe lives! You seen anything of her?”

I hadn’t, of course, and neither had any-body else at our house. When I said so, LittleJim asked, “Where on earth can she be?”

What he said next got mixed up in mymind with something that was happening outby our garden gate right then—something I’dseen and heard happen maybe a hundredtimes that spring and summer. Old Red, ourRhode Island Red rooster, had just flown up tothe top of the gatepost and was arching hislong, proud neck, standing on tiptoe and get-ting ready to crow.

Hardly realizing what I was doing, I quicklystooped, grabbed up a roundish stone fromthe ground, and slung it toward the post. Evenwhile that small round stone was flying throughthe air with the greatest of ease, Old Red was inthe middle of his proud “Cock-a-doodle-doo.”

Wham! The stone landed with a thud againstthe locust post just below Old Red’s yellow legs,interrupting his ordinarily long, squawking cock-a-doodle, stopping it before it was half done,and scaring the early morning daylights out ofhim.

Old Red made a jump straight up, his wingsflapping and his voice complaining, and camedown ker-floppety-plop on the other side of thegarden fence in the middle of the Ebenezers.

But Old Red wasn’t any more scared right

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then than I was. What—my stirred-up worryyelled at me inside me—what if either of my par-ents comes to at the kitchen table and comes stormingout to see what on earth is going on and why?

Little Jim had already finished saying whathe had started to say. I had heard his wordswithout hearing them, but I did rememberthem later.

Quicker than a crash of thunder, I was offwith an explosion of fast-running feet, gallop-ing toward the garden gate with Little Jim’swords flying along with me. Those worriedwords had been: “What I can’t understand ishow Winnie got out! We had the gate shut tightall night, and it was still shut this morningwhen I went out to feed her!”

Well, when you are in a garden, zigzaggingafter a scared rooster who is running wild allover the black-seeded Simpson lettuce, actingas crazy as a chicken with its head cut off, whichyou are going to have for dinner—the chicken,I mean, not the head—when your mind andmuscles are as busy as mine were, you hardlynotice anything strange in what Little Jim said,something that had a mystery in it.

All the noise I was making at the gardengate and, especially, the noise Old Red wasmaking were like the noise Santa Claus’s rein-deer made in the “Night Before Christmas”when “out on the lawn there arose such a clat-ter, I sprang from my bed to see what was thematter.”

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“You,” I thundered at Mom’s favorite RhodeIsland Red, “stay out of the garden!”

Little Jim’s temper was still up as he hurriedback to the walnut tree to his bicycle. He wasmaybe fifty yards up the road on the way to Drag-onfly’s house to see if Winnie was there, beforewhat he’d said came to life in my mind. Thewords I all of a sudden remembered were “Wehad the gate shut tight all night, and it was stillshut this morning when I went out to feed her.”

I should have guessed cattle rustlers rightthen, but I didn’t. Instead I had to let threedays pass by and have a dream about a cowboylassoing me and dragging me across the barn-yard, before all the different ideas came to acrossroads in my head. And it seemed maybethere had been honest-to-goodness-for-surecattle rustlers in the neighborhood and thatWinnie the Pooh had been rustled right out ofLittle Jim’s corral and taken off to a sales pavil-ion or somewhere, nobody knew where.

The morning of that fourth day finally passedat our house, and the Collins family was flyingaround getting ready to sit down to the noonmeal, which was going to be fried chicken,bread and butter, rice pudding, and other stuffMom had made.

“Don’t forget early supper tonight,” Momsaid. “It’s Saturday, you remember, and tomor-row is Sunday. So we go to town early, comehome early, go to bed early, get up early, andget to Sunday school on time without rushing.”

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It seemed I had heard Mom say that maybea thousand times in my half-long life, so, whenall of us were at the table and Dad was gettingready to ask the blessing, I said—and shouldn’thave—“Not too long a prayer, Dad. We have tohave early supper so we can go to town early,and get home early, so we can go to bed early,and . . .”

Dad’s answer was kinder than he maybe feltin his heart. He looked with lowered bushy eye-brows at me and said, “Do I ever pray all theway through to supper time?”

His prayer was long enough to be thankfulin words for the food and to ask the Lord to“bless the hands that have prepared it”—meaning Mom’s hardworking brown hands.He also prayed for our church’s missionarywho was working in an orphanage in Korea.

Just before saying, “Amen,” at the end ofhis prayer, Dad thought of something else,which was, “And help us to do what we canabout the hungry orphans over there.”

To Mom he said, when he finished andbefore unfolding his napkin and laying itacross his lap, “It’s like the new Sunday schoolsong says:

‘Look all around you, find someone in need;Help somebody today.’”

As serious as my mind was at the time, it wasstill hard to keep from thinking a mischievousthought, which right that second popped into

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my mind. It was: “How come, Dad, you alwayspray for the hands that prepare the dinner butnever for the hands that dry the dishes afterdinner?”

Dad looked at my already busy hands andsaid, “When they’re clean, they don’t need any-body to pray for them.”

And for some reason I left the table andwent outdoors to the washbasin not far fromthe pitcher pump and scrubbed my hands withsoap, as I was supposed to have not forgotten todo in the first place.

Bit by bit and bite by bite, I managed to getMom’s fried chicken dinner into the historysection of my life. Pretty soon I would be readyto meet the Gang at the place we had agreedon—near the Black Widow Stump, halfwaybetween that well-known stump and the lindentree that leans out over the hill sloping down tothe spring.

With a swish, swish, swish and a scrub, scrub,scrub, I brushed my teeth for the second timethat day, dried the dishes for maybe the thirty-seventh time that month, and pretty soon wason my way.

Out across the grassy yard I loped, past theplum tree, on to and past the walnut tree nearthe front gate, through the gate and past“Theodore Collins” on our mailbox, and acrossthe road. My bare feet didn’t even stop to enjoythe feel of the fluffy white road dust I usuallyliked to go plop-plop-plop in. With a flying leap I

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was over the rail fence, sailing over the way I’dseen a deer do it in an Audubon film one nightthat winter at the Sugar Creek Literary Society.

My shirt sleeves flapped in the wind, andmy brown bare feet raced lickety-sizzle along thepath made by barefoot boys’ feet. I ran and ranand ran. A great big blob of happiness was inmy heart, because that is almost the pleasantestthing ever a boy could do—to fly along, as I wasflying along, toward an afternoon of adventurein a boy’s world.

And it is almost the most wonderful feelingever a boy can have to know you are not run-ning away from something your mother wantsyou to do, because you have already helpedkeep her from getting too tired by helping herwith the housework.

I guess one thing that made me feel so finewas that this time I had not waited for Mom toask me to help but had actually volunteered towash those very discouraged-looking dishes inthe sink, which, unless you actually love yourmother, is one of the most unpleasant thingsever a boy has to do.

As I galloped along the winding path, thenew Sunday school song was singing itself inmy mind:

Look all around you, find someone in need;Help somebody today;Though it be little, a neighborly deed,Help somebody today.

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Many are burdened and weary in heart,Help somebody today;Someone the journey to heaven should start,Help somebody today.

All the way to the Black Widow Stump, myheart was as light as a last year’s maple leaf in awhirlwind.

I hadn’t any sooner reached our meetingplace, plopped myself down in the long, mashed-down bluegrass, and started chewing on thejuicy end of a stalk of grass than Poetry camesauntering along the path that borders thebayou. Poetry was one of my almost bestfriends, the chubbiest one of the gang, the onewith the best imagination, and also the mostmischievous. His powerful binoculars werehanging by a strap around his neck.

I rolled over and up to a sitting position,squinted my sleepy eyes at him, then ploppedback again onto the grass. In a minute he waslying there beside me.

While we waited for the rest of the gang, Iwas wondering if maybe I ought to tell him aboutmy last night’s dream and what I thought I knewabout what had happened to Winnie the Pooh.

Suddenly Poetry let out an excited gaspand exclaimed, “There’s a wild turkey!”

“Wild turkey!” I came to life. “I don’t seeany turkey. Do you see a turkey?”

“Look!” he said, handing me the binocu-lars. “Away up there above the Sugar Creekbridge, maybe a mile high.”

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I looked where he said to look, scanningthe sky with his binoculars.

“Buzzard,” I said. “That’s nothing but aturkey buzzard. I saw half a dozen of them thismorning over the south pasture.”

As you already maybe know, that was theway a buzzard found his breakfast, dinner, orsupper. He just sailed around in a silent circle,his eyes searching the earth far below until hespotted something that looked dead enough toeat. Then he’d come slanting down, land on ornear it, and that would be it. So what was spe-cial about a turkey buzzard or two sailingaround in the sky?

But I had seen something else when I waslooking through Poetry’s binoculars. “If youwant to see something really important,” I saidto my round friend, “take a look at that bigyellow woolpack of clouds hanging above theswamp. You know what that means, don’t you—clouds piling up like that in the afternoon north-west?”

“Of course, I know what it means,” Poetryanswered. “If they come this way and changeinto umbrella clouds and spread all over thesky, it’s going to rain pitchforks and tar babies.”

For a few minutes, while the buzzards kepton sailing around so high that without thebinoculars they looked like swallows, we braggeda little to each other about the cloud lore wehad been studying in a schoolbook the winterbefore.

Any boy ought to know about cloud forma-

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tions so that he can tell whether it is going torain or not without listening to the radio orlooking under a doorstep to see if a rock is wetbecause of the humidity in the air.

“Another thing,” Poetry rolled over in thegrass and said with his back turned, “when acumulus cloud like that is opposite the sun, it isyellowish white, but when it is on the same sideas the sun, with the sun behind it, it is dark andhas bright edges.”

“Is that where they got the song ‘There’s aSilver Lining’?”

“Sure,” Poetry answered, and his squawk-ing, half-and-half voice began croaking away:

“There’s a silver lining,Through the dark cloud shining.”

There was nothing exciting to do until therest of the gang came, which pretty soon theydid. We had a business meeting about differentthings boys have business meetings about, anddifferent ones of us took turns looking throughPoetry’s binoculars. We also skipped flat stonesacross Sugar Creek’s foam-freckled face andlistened to ten thousand or more honeybeesbuzzing among the sweet-smelling flowers ofthe leaning linden tree.

We came to with a start when Little Jim,who had the binoculars at the time, cried out,“Hey, you—everybody! Your turkey buzzard iscoming down! He’s heading straight for thesycamore tree and the mouth of the cave!”

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My eyes took a quick leap toward the sky,and Little Jim was right. I saw that big buzzardslanting toward the earth like a long black arrow.

“There’s another one!” Circus, our acrobat,exclaimed.

“There’s three of them!” Dragonfly shouted,his pop-eyes large and round and excited.

“Five of them, you mean,” Big Jim, ourfuzzy-mustached leader cried out. “They’re allcoming down!”

We watched five black-winged rockets dropout of their silent circles down toward theearth in the direction of the sycamore tree,near which is the mouth of the cave andbeyond which is the Sugar Creek swamp.

“Something’s dead down there,” Dragonflydecided and sniffed with his crooked nose.“Smell it?”

His face took on a mussed-up expression,and he let out two quick long-tailed sneezes.

I sniffed too but didn’t smell anythingexcept the perfume of the creamy yellow flow-ers of the leaning linden tree. But I knew Drag-onfly had a very keen sense of smell and couldsometimes smell things the rest of us couldn’t,having what his doctor called “very sensitiveolfactory nerves.” All of a spine-chilling sud-den, a cold fear blew into my mind, and Ithought I knew what those sharp-eyed turkeybuzzards had spotted from their spaceflight.

They had seen—and maybe smelled too—somebody’s dead white-faced heifer!

Wandering Winnie the Pooh! my sad mind

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told me, and without waiting for anybody elseto say it first, I yelled to us, “Come on, every-body. Let’s go see what’s dead!”

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almost everybody in Sugar Creek territory had ......named Little Bo-Peep, who had lost her sheep:...

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