A boy has a hard time believing his eyes when the mind under his red hair tells him that what he sees isn’t so. Yesterday we’d picked up a dead snake and carried it to the rail fence that enclosed our garden and had draped it over the top rail and left it. A chicken hawk had eaten it. But today—twenty-four hours later—here it was, the same big, heavy-bodied, savage-looking snake, lying alive out in the middle of the field!
We were already close to it, and just as it had done yesterday, it acted as mad as anything. It was puffing out its neck and head and hissing and striking in our direction as though it wanted to kill us quick and would if we came any closer.
“He’s mad because we woke him up out of his sleep,” Poetry said.
“We interrupted his sunbath, and he probably wanted privacy,” Middle-sized Jim said.
I had a big stick with me this time, and I was going to be sure we really killed it. I started to make a rush at the snake and take a swipe at its upraised head.
But Middle-sized Jim’s excited voice stopped me, saying, “Don’t, Bill! Wait! I’ve got an idea! That’s probably a brother or a wife of the one you killed yesterday! Let’s see if you can scare this one to death!”
I looked at his grinning face but couldn’t tell whether he was making fun of me or not. He was having a little trouble balancing himself with his crutches, so I made a dive in his direction to keep him from falling, just as Poetry said, “Let’s see what my voice will do.”
Without waiting for us to let him, Poetry picked up a big clod like the one I’d had yesterday and squashed it into a thousand pieces of dirt and dust about a foot from the snake’s hissing head. He yelled down at it fiercely, making up a poem at the same time, saying:
“You great big ugly squirming lummox,
Get over on your back and turn up your
stomach!”
Well, you can believe it or not, but just like the snake I’d done that to yesterday, that reddish-yellow, brown-splotched snake all of a sudden went into contortions like a boy having a spasm from eating too many green apples or green grapes. The next thing we knew, there it was, over on its back with its pretty greenish-yellow stomach shining in the sun, and it wasn’t even moving a muscle! Imagine that!
That made Middle-sized Jim laugh. “I knew it. I knew it!” he exclaimed. “It’s a hognose snake! That’s the way they do when they’re cornered. First, they act very fierce, like they are the most dangerous snake in the world, and try to scare you away. But if you don’t go and they think their lives are in danger, they’ll play dead like a possum in the woods and plop over like that and stay that way. I have a book in my library that tells about it.”
It made sense but not quite enough to suit me, so I said, “Yes, but we poked at it and carried it by the tail and draped it over the rail fence and everything!”
“That’s what the book says, but when you go away and leave a hognose snake, it looks around to see if you are really gone. And seeing a chance to escape, it quickly crawls away. It doesn’t stay dead,” Middle-sized Jim explained.
And even as he said it, and I was mad at myself for being fooled yesterday, I couldn’t help but remember a sermon that Sylvia’s dad had preached once in the Sugar Creek church. He’d said that Satan, who in the Bible is called “that old serpent,” had been licked at the cross when Jesus had died for our sins. But Satan wouldn’t give up. He still acted as if he owned the world, and if anybody would let him, he would be his boss.
Poetry interrupted my thoughts by saying, “Let’s really kill him.” He started to do what I had started to do, but Middle-sized Jim stopped him just as he had me, saying, “No, let’s have some fun! Pick him up by the tail and lay him down on his stomach again and see what happens.”
“Pop says it’s a puff adder, and they’re terribly dangerous,” I said.
“That’s just another name for the hognose snake,” Middle-sized Jim said. “They act more dangerous than even a copperhead, but they’re harmless. Go ahead. Turn him over!”
I turned the snake over with my stick and—would you believe this?—the funniest thing happened. That heavy reddish-brown-and-yellow snake was no sooner on its stomach than it twisted itself into and out of a half knot and plopped over on its back again. Then it was quiet as a dead mouse. And we knew that it’d actually been playing dead and that this was probably the same snake I thought I’d killed yesterday. It looked silly lying there now, and I could almost imagine that it had a grin on the long slit-shaped mouth on its hognose head.
“Now, let’s go off and leave him awhile. Let’s see how long he will wait before he quits playing possum and crawls away,” Middle-sized Jim said.
It seemed like a chance to have some more fun, so we left the snake and went down the path toward the stile to get the drink of water we had started out to get in the first place.
On the way to the pump, Poetry and I walked backwards part of the time, looking back to see how soon our dead snake would become a live one.
At the stile, Poetry began to pump, while I held one of the paper cups my dad kept there in a rainproof container—Dad wouldn’t leave any other kind of cup there, because he wanted to teach boys and other people not to all drink out of the same cup on account of it might spread different kinds of diseases.
All of an excited sudden, Middle-sized Jim let out a yell and said, “Look! There he goes! See him? He’s heading back to the garden!”
Poetry stopped pumping. I dropped my cup of water and grabbed up my stick. This time there was going to be a dead snake for sure. As fast as I could, with Poetry at my heels, I dashed back across the bare field.
I never saw a snake run so fast in my life—glide, rather, which is the way snakes move. Boy, it was really going!
“Hurry up!” I yelled over my shoulder at Poetry, and he came puffing after me at a very noisy, dusty rate. I hoped I could make it before the snake got to the pignut trees and lost itself in the weeds by the rail fence where we couldn’t find it.
And then the queerest thing happened. It was so interesting and exciting and also so astonishing that it almost made me forget the snake.
From behind me, I heard Middle-sized Jim’s voice yelling, “Hey, you guys! Don’t kill him! Let him live!”
I looked back over my shoulder, and there was our new friend, who hadn’t walked five feet in his life without holding onto someone or something, and he was running after us, dragging his crutches! Running! A boy who couldn’t even walk was running! It didn’t make sense. He wasn’t running straight, the way the members of our gang did, but he was running almost as fast as Poetry and I.
I took my eyes off the snake for a second, and so did Poetry, and I yelled back to Middle-sized Jim. “Hey,” I said, “you’re running!”
Then I wished I hadn’t said it, for the minute Middle-sized Jim heard me, he got a queer expression on his face as if he had just lost something that was worth a million dollars. And the next thing I knew, he was struggling to keep his balance. A second later, down he went, ker-sprawlety-plop onto the ground, stirring up a cloud of dust, which the wind picked up and blew across the field toward the stile, like powdered snow blowing across the field in the wintertime.
Well, that was the first time Middle-sized Jim ever really walked, and he had not only walked but he had run. He was so pleased with himself, he could hardly believe it.
We were so excited that we let our snake get away, and we never saw it again until two weeks later when it turned up in the most interesting way you could ever imagine.
First, though, I’d better explain that Middle-sized Jim’s doctor said that he had learned to walk—or rather run—because he had got what is called “absolute concentration.” He got it when he saw the snake getting away and Poetry and me trying to catch it. He had wanted to stop us from killing it because he knew it wasn’t a dangerous snake, and he had forgotten all about his not being able to run. Seeing us run, he had been so excited that he ran himself.
His running wasn’t like any ordinary boy’s. It was half-run and half-lurch. But he could do it without his crutches, which was wonderful.
That was the beginning of a much happier life for Middle-sized Jim. Also it happened to be the very thing that makes this the story of the most exciting adventure we’d had in a long time, which, pretty soon, I’ll tell you about.
Before I do, I’ll have to tell you where we found old Hognose again, and what he was doing, and why. I’ll also have to tell you a little more about Warty, my dad’s favorite toad friend, and his own very exciting adventure.
I guess I didn’t realize that hognose snakes and garter snakes would rather eat a toad for supper than a boy would like to eat a plateful of raw-fried potatoes and bread and butter when he is hungry. But they would. Only, as I said, I didn’t realize it. And, of course, I didn’t know that snake had been hanging around our garden on purpose because he had his appetite set on making a delicious supper out of Warty.
Warty must have guessed that old Hognose was laying for him, because one day he disappeared, and we didn’t see him around the garden for maybe a week. And there were all kinds of cutworms that kept snipping off Mom’s baby beans and sugar-corn shoots, and there didn’t seem to be much we could do to stop them.
“Maybe Warty finds all the cutworms he can stuff himself with out in the cornfield,” Mom said one day, and maybe she was right.
Anyway, several days later—one or two but not many—I was coming home from fishing down in the branch with Dragonfly. On the way back, I was halfway through one of our other potato patches, which is quite a ways from our regular garden, when I was startled by a clumsy movement at my feet. Looking down, I saw a large, lazy-looking brown toad in the skimpy shade of a wild carrot, which somebody’s boy should have pulled long ago.
The wild carrot, or Queen Anne’s lace, which is one of its other names, was Dad’s worst-hated weed. Mom liked to look at its pretty lacelike flowers, which, when they are only half opened, are all in a little circle with a hollow in the middle. And that’s the reason it is sometimes called by still another name, Bird’s Nest. But Dad always made me pull up all the Queen Anne’s lace I could find on account of its being a very bad weed with very stubborn roots, he says, and if you leave one for a year, then next year there’ll be a great big family of them to get rid of.
As soon as I saw Dad’s toad friend, I cheerfully said down to him, “Why, hello, Warty, old pal! Am I glad to see you! Will Mom ever be pleased!”
I decided to run and tell Mom about him right away, so I started to the house. Then I changed my mind, because an interesting plan popped into my head. In a jiffy, I had Warty picked up in the big handkerchief I had in my pocket, not exactly wanting to handle him with my bare hands.
Right under a toad’s warty skin there are glands that give off a bitter fluid of some kind that is just a little bit poisonous. If a dumb puppy tries to pick up a toad to play with it, he quick drops it, not liking the toad’s taste. I was afraid Warty wouldn’t know I was a friend and that I’d maybe get some poisonous gland fluid on my bare hands.
Some boys think toads cause warts on a boy’s hands, but they don’t. It makes Dad mad to hear anybody say that about an innocent toad, because it isn’t so at all.
Anyway, I wrapped up Warty in my handkerchief, leaving his nose out so he could breathe. Holding him tight so that he wouldn’t squirm himself out of my grasp, I carried him back to the garden where Mom’s cabbage plants needed him to take care of them.
To be sure Warty wouldn’t hop away again, I tied the end of my fishing line around the joint of one of his fat legs, leaving the rest of the long line on the reel on my fishing pole. Warty would be free to hop all over the garden and gobble up all the cutworms he could find that night—for as you maybe know, cutworms always do their cutting off of cabbage plants and young corn shoots at night.
It was sort of like tethering out our old one-eared cow on a long rope where she can eat grass in every direction for quite a long ways, but she can’t get away to eat where she is not supposed to.
“There you are, my friend,” I said to Warty, as soon as I had him tied to the end of the line. “Now see to it that you behave yourself and stay here where we need you a lot worse than we do down yonder in that other potato patch.”
Mom certainly was pleased when I told her Warty was back again and that I’d brought him myself. I didn’t tell her about tying him up.
At the supper table that night, Dad and Mom and Charlotte Ann and I sat very quiet for a minute as we always do before we eat, with our heads bowed while Dad asked the blessing. For a second or so I opened my eyes and looked at Mom’s kind of grayish-brown hair, all combed nice and pretty, the way she hurries up and combs it whenever she knows my dad is coming home from working in the field.
I also noticed his reddish-brown hair and his long, shaggy, reddish-brown eyebrows, which he also combs sometimes and won’t let the barber clip them shorter, the way barbers try to do, Dad says, if you don’t stop them.
Also I saw my brown-haired baby sister’s head. I noticed she had her hands unfolded, and her eyes wide open, and she was looking around at different things. Without knowing I was going to do it, I whispered to her, saying, “Sh! Charlotte Ann! Shut your eyes! Dad is going to ask the blessing! You’re supposed to have your eyes shut!”
My dad probably heard me, but he didn’t pay any attention to me. In his prayer he said that we were thankful for the food before us, which I certainly was because it was raw-fried potatoes, bread and butter, apple pie and cheese, and some leftover cold chicken.
There was also a bottle of cod-liver oil from which Mom was going to put half a spoonful into Charlotte Ann’s orange juice as soon as Pop finished praying. In fact, right that second, Charlotte Ann was stretching one hand as far as she could toward the glass of juice—the way maybe Warty, that very minute, was straining at the end of my fishing line for a nice juicy cutworm.
Pop’s prayer was kind of short, as it sometimes is at supper time, when he knows all of us are hungry and tired. But I remember he prayed for Middle-sized Jim, saying, “Dear Father, we pray that You will bless all the fine boys and girls in the world who were born like Jimmy Lion. Help people to understand them and to love them. We thank You for the blessing Jimmy has been to all of us with his sunny disposition and his eager mind. Help us all to apply ourselves to our studies as earnestly as he does …”
When my dad got that far, I thought maybe he was praying for me too, and I couldn’t tell for sure whether he was talking to God or to me. But it seemed maybe I ought to study a little harder that fall when school started.
Mom, hearing him pray for Jimmy, must have been reminded of the hognose snake that had disappeared a week or two ago. And that must have reminded her of my hands, because the very second Dad finished his prayer, she looked straight at my hands, which were already busy spreading butter on a slice of her homemade bread.
I quick spoke up and said, just to show her I knew what she was thinking about, “I didn’t touch Warty at all. I used my handkerchief.”
Then I saw Mom’s face get a strange expression on it, and I knew I’d made a mistake even before she said, “You mean you used one of your nice white handkerchiefs to pick up a dirty toad!”
I had to quick think of something to defend myself with, so I said, “It wasn’t all white. It already had bloodstains on it from trying to—”
“Blood!” Mom said, astonished.
“I—yes, ma’am,” I said, unusually polite. “Dragonfly and I were wading in the branch, and he stepped on a sharp stone and cut his foot, and I had to help him stop it from bleeding.”
“You were wading in the branch!” my dad said with an exclamation point in his voice. He looked around the edge of the table at my overalls to see if, when I’d had them rolled up and was in the water, the trouser legs had come down as they sometimes do and had gotten wet.
“We didn’t have our overalls on,” I said. “It was too deep there.”
“What?” Dad asked. “The only place the branch is deep is down near where it empties into the creek, and that’s close to the road! I hope you boys didn’t wade out there that close to the road with your clothes off!”
“We had to,” I said. “We were looking for something we had lost.”
“You lost something? Bill Collins!” Mom said. “You haven’t lost anything important, I hope!”
“Just a piece of fishing line that got fastened onto the bottom on a snag.”
“Did you have to break your new line?” Dad asked.
And I said, yawning, as if it didn’t matter much, “Oh, a few feet, maybe.”
“Several?” Dad asked. Out of the corner of my eye, as I poked into my mouth a forkful of great-tasting raw-fried potatoes, I saw that he had a twinkle in his eyes, and I knew he wasn’t mad at me at all for having hoed only three rows of potatoes that other afternoon.
“I’ll try to make it six or seven next time,” I said to him.
And Mom said, “You mean you’ll try to lose more line next time?”
My dad looked at me and winked, and I made up my mind that the very next time I had to hoe several rows of potatoes, I’d see if I could stretch the word “several” until it was almost as long as “many.”
When I was in my room that night with the light out and was getting ready to drop into bed on the nice clean sheets Mom had put on that very day, I looked out the window to the moonlit garden where Warty was tethered. I was a little worried about him, wondering if he would get himself tangled up in the line before he even got started on his trips up and down the corn rows for cutworms.
Warty really knew how to gobble them up too, just as he does a fly or a mosquito or a grub or anything else in the insect family that gets within two inches of his mouth. Warty’s tongue isn’t fastened at the back of his mouth as mine is but at the front, and he can all of a sudden flip his tongue out like a whip. If there is a fly buzzing around his head, quicker than nothing there isn’t any fly, and the only way you know Warty got him is when you see the tiny movement he makes in his throat when he swallows.
Once Dad and I watched Warty hopping down one of Mom’s bean rows, and even though we didn’t see his long sticky whiplike tongue catch a single bug, when he got to the end of the row, there wasn’t a one left.
As I said, I was looking out the window toward our moonlit garden. I cocked one ear in Warty’s direction to see if I could hear my reel clicking, the way it does when I’m fishing and get a bite. But as hard as I listened, I couldn’t hear a thing except the leaves of the ivy vine that grew across the upper part of the window, rustling in the wind.
So I quick dropped down on my knees to pray a sort of tired prayer to the heavenly Father, whom my parents had taught me to pray to when I was as little as Charlotte Ann, and I’ve been doing it ever since. I was so tired I couldn’t think straight. Maybe my words were mixed up a little, but even though God might be pretty busy running such a big world and a whole skyful of stars and planets and things, still I just sort of knew that He liked boys and was interested in the things they like to do. It also seemed He even liked me, Bill Collins, and that He wasn’t holding it against me for praying such an ordinary prayer.
I guess I must have gotten Dad’s supper-time prayer mixed up with mine, although I wasn’t sure, but I heard myself saying, “Bless Middle-sized Jim and take care of him. He’s been a blessing to all of us.”
I don’t remember finishing my prayer at all, but when I woke up sometime in the middle of the night, I was in bed, so I must have climbed in. I had been dreaming that I was fishing and had hooked a terribly big fish like the kind the gang sometimes catches on our northern fishing trips. In my dream, the reel was singing and singing, and the line was running out clear to the end, and I was trying to hold onto the pole and not lose my fish. That was when I woke up. And then I was sure I had heard a noise out in the garden.
I lay quiet for a minute, my heart pounding. I rolled over to sit on the edge of the bed, leaned forward to the open window, and then I knew I was hearing something. I was hearing my reel make little sharp jerking sounds as though the line was being unwound only a little at a time.
Then I grinned to myself there in the moonlight as in my mind’s eye I saw Warty hopping down a row of Mom’s young cabbage plants with his lightning-quick, sticky tongue flipping in and out, gobbling up cutworms and other plant enemies.
I sighed happily and went back to sleep until morning. Then, just as I do when there is something very interesting to get up for, I sprang out of bed, shoved myself into my clothes and, two steps at a time, was on my way downstairs to see how much of my fishing line had been unwound and if Warty had worked himself loose and run away again.