Autumn with a million different shades of color came to Sugar Creek. The hills that year were especially pretty after the first frost. When Mom puts frosting on a cake, it’s nearly always one color—white or pink or chocolate brown—but when old Jack Frost gets through with the maples and oaks and elms and sycamores and lindens and a lot of other kinds of trees on the Sugar Creek hills, they have all the colors of the rainbow at the same time.
“Did you ever see such a big bouquet of colors?” I heard Mom say to Dad one day when they were standing out by our barn looking toward Strawberry Hill.
“It is pretty, isn’t it?” he answered her.
I don’t think they knew I was behind them, looking out the open barn window at Strawberry Hill myself. In fact, they didn’t seem to know there was anybody in the world except themselves. All of a sudden, I noticed Dad’s left arm go around Mom’s kind of roundish shoulders, and I heard him say, “But I like grayish-brown color just as well”—which is the color of Mom’s hair.
Then she leaned her head on his big wide shoulder and said something to him that I couldn’t hear and maybe wasn’t supposed to anyway. But I guess it must have been about her hair getting gray and her not wanting it to, for Dad answered her, saying, “Everybody’s life has to have a winter. That’s the way God made us.”
For about a whole minute neither one of them said a word, and I was quiet as a mouse. In fact, I was even quieter, because right that minute I heard a rustling above my head. Looking up, I saw on the top shelf of Dad’s cupboard a pointed-nosed, beady-eyed mouse, which, I knew, if Mom saw, she’d scream the way women and girls are supposed to when they see a mouse.
I kept on being quieter than a mouse, and I was glad I did, because I heard Mom say something kind of important. It was, “I hope we can bring up our children to love the One who made those beautiful hills.”
Then I saw my dad’s arm tighten around her shoulders. For some reason, I felt terribly good inside, and I decided I ought to try to help Mom and Dad do what they were trying to do—and were having a hard time doing.
It was time to throw down hay for the horses, so I left the yellow-brown-furred mouse to himself and went over to the wooden ladder that leads up to our hayloft. When I got to the top, I started whistling and throwing down forkfuls of sweet-smelling alfalfa, and—do you know what?—I noticed I was whistling the same hymn I had been whistling a whole lot that summer and fall. The words of the first line were:
A mighty fortress is our God.
Suddenly it seemed He was what the song said He was, and even though He was awfully wonderful, He still had time to look after me and all of our gang. In fact, I knew He was interested in us when we had a very dangerous experience one cold winter day that same year.
There were maybe three inches of snow on the ground that day, nice fresh snow, very white and very clean and just right for making tracks, although the weather seemed to be getting colder fast, and the snow didn’t pack well into snowballs.
The gang had been planning to spend a night up in the hills in the haunted house, if our parents would let us. We had tried hard to show them that it would be all right for us to do it. We had carried a lot of firewood into the house and stacked it in the big living room. We had even laid the fire so it would be ready to start in a hurry. Also, we had cleaned the room we had planned to sleep in. If we all took sleeping bags and blankets and had a good fire in the fireplace, it would be more fun than you could shake a stick at to stay there all night.
But our parents said we couldn’t—not in the wintertime.
“Absolutely not!” Dad and all the other pops had said. All of our moms had said the same thing, only my mom said it first. Dad had seemed a little sad when he had to agree with her, but he did almost right away, and that made me feel sad.
So it was “absolutely not” for all of us. Middle-sized Jim had never been to the haunted house, so we decided to take him along one day to show him the upstairs and especially the attic, where we had seen the ring-tailed ghost you know about if you’ve read the book The Haunted House.
But there was too much snow on the ground for us to take Middle-sized Jim along that day, because it’d be too hard for him to walk, even if he used his crutches. Besides, it was pretty far, and he would get too tired, and none of us wanted to walk as slowly as we knew we would have to if he went with us. So we went without him.
We got into the house as we always do, through the basement and up through a trapdoor into the kitchen. Then we went upstairs, where we had a lot of cold fun retelling to ourselves the exciting experiences we’d had there one dark night, scaring a ring-tailed ghost that had been making its home in the attic.
We even went into the attic and looked around a little. The first thing I noticed was that the big hole that had been in the chimney the first time we’d visited the house had been repaired.
“It’s a good thing they plugged up the hole,” Dragonfly said, “or if anybody started a fire in the fireplace downstairs, all the smoke’d come out here.”
Along about four in the afternoon, it began to start to get dark, as it does in the wintertime, especially on a cloudy day, so we decided to get going for our different homes, which were quite a ways away.
“Let’s take the shortcut home,” Big Jim said, “so we can get home in time to help our folks do the chores.”
The shortcut, as you know, is through Old Man Paddler’s cabin and his basement and then along a long tunnel-like cave that comes out at the other end by the old sycamore tree. From the tree, we would follow Sugar Creek to most of our different homes.
It didn’t take us nearly as long to get back as it had to go, because we had played nearly all the way up, the way most boys do.
It hadn’t been nearly as hard walking as we thought it might be, and I was feeling kind of sad because we hadn’t taken Middle-sized Jim along after all. I knew he’d feel bad about it, too, when he found out we had gone and hadn’t even asked him if he wanted to go with us.
Anyway, when we got to the spring, where we had all met before we started, all of sudden Circus, who had been carrying Big Jim’s rifle, said, “Hey, gang, come here! Look! There’s some strange kind of animal been following our tracks up to the haunted house.”
His scary-sounding voice started the red hair under my cap to moving as though it was starting to stand straight up.
We all galloped through the three-inch-deep snow to where Circus was. But, shucks, I thought, it wasn’t anything. Just some kind of a human being’s tracks that had come from the direction of Circus’s and Big Jim’s and Middle-sized Jim’s houses.
“April fool,” Circus said, when we had all looked disgustedly down at only a boy’s tracks. “It’s only a poor crippled Lion.”
Well, it wasn’t April first, and it didn’t seem very funny. Even though I could tell by the tangled-up way the shoe tracks were made that they were Middle-sized Jim’s tracks, I didn’t like anybody to call him “a poor crippled Lion.” I was sure Middle-sized Jim himself wouldn’t like that at all. He didn’t want anybody to pity him, as most handicapped and blind people don’t, Dad says.
“Look everybody!” Poetry said with his squawky voice. “He’s been following our tracks all right! I’ll bet he found out we were going on an adventure and decided to follow us! We’d better take out after him and see if we can catch up with him and stop him.”
And as soon as Big Jim had thought the idea over, we all, as quick as anything, were ready to start off.
“How long ago was he here?” Dragonfly wanted to know.
Circus, whose pop is a hunter and who trails more coon and rabbit tracks than any of the rest of us, stooped down and studied the shoe prints and said, “Maybe not more than an hour ago. See, the wind has already filled some of the Lion’s tracks with snow.”
And it had. Our own tracks—the ones we had made ourselves when we had started out about two o’clock—had quite a little snow blown into them. Middle-sized Jim’s tracks—we were sure they were his because every now and then we saw where he had used his crutches—were a lot fresher than ours.
“Let’s run,” Big Jim said, “or it’ll be too dark to follow his tracks. Or else maybe when he gets to some of those places where the wind has a clean sweep, he’ll lose our trail and get lost, and then if we can’t find him, he’ll have to stay out all night in the hills and maybe freeze to death!”
That sounded like serious business. I was thinking about the “absolute concentration” that Middle-sized Jim had to have all the time when he walked or ran. If he got too cold or worried or something, he might not be able to concentrate and would have to use his crutches. He might fall down a lot of times and hurt himself. He might not even be able to get up. So if we didn’t find him, he really would be lost and have to stay out all night in the woods in the very cold weather.
So away we all went, not stopping to think that our own folks might be worrying about us, wondering where we were and why we didn’t come home.
Pretty soon we came to the old sycamore tree, where, earlier in the afternoon, we had decided not to go through the cave on our way to the haunted house but, instead, had gone on around the long way. There, in the quick gathering twilight, we stopped and looked at each other’s worried faces.
Big Jim said, “He’s gone on, following our tracks. I was hoping he had gone into the cave and that maybe we could follow him through and find him up in Old Man Paddler’s cabin.”
Little Jim, standing beside me, holding onto his ash stick, looked really concerned. I noticed that his teeth were chattering with the cold, and I wished that he, being such a little guy, were home beside a nice warm fire.
“We’d better start really running if we want to catch up with him before he gets clear up to the haunted house.” Big Jim studied Middle-sized Jim’s tracks. “At least he hasn’t started falling down yet.”
“Let’s holler and see if we can make him hear,” Circus said. He was able to make a terribly loud, high-pitched call that sounded both like a loon and a ghost. Right away, he let out a bloodcurdling long, weird scream. “Ohoooo! Ohoooo!”
We listened, but there was no answer—not even an echo—but we did hear something.
“What is that?” Dragonfly asked. “Sounds like a swarm of bees or an airplane or something.”
And honest-to-goodness for sure, something did sound like a swarm of bees. We all listened as hard as we could. And then I began to get worried, because what we’d heard wasn’t an airplane or a swarm of bees but wind blowing through the bare branches of the oaks and maples and elms and other trees of the Sugar Creek hills.
“We’ve really got to get going now,” Big Jim said. “That’s wind! There’s a terrible storm coming up, and when it hits it’ll pick up all this loose dry snow and whip it up into a blizzard! It’ll cover up every track we ever made, and he’ll really get lost for sure! And we can’t follow his tracks either!”
Only one thing was right to do, and we started to do it, which was hurry like a house afire on that trail, following our old tracks and Middle-sized Jim’s new ones.
“It’ll be dark in only a few minutes after that wind hits!” Big Jim said.
I looked toward the highest hill, which was about a quarter of a mile away, and couldn’t even see it because it had got dark that fast. All I could see was a whitish-dark cloud—which is the way a snowstorm looks at twilight before it reaches you.
We plunged headfirst on, following the path our own feet had made in the snow, watching all the time to see if Middle-sized Jim’s tracks were still following them.
And then a thick formation of clouds rolled across the sky, and in almost no time it was whirling, blinding dark, and we were in the middle of a terrible blizzard. At the same time, the wind struck. It seemed the wind was acting like a giant-sized snow shovel, scooping up whole hills of snow and socking us with it. I felt it beating against my face and neck and into my collar, and I knew we were in for some very dangerous excitement.
“H-hadn’t we b-better g-go back h-home?” Dragonfly asked in the whining voice he sometimes uses when he is worried. “Mother told me not to catch cold.” Then he sneezed the way he does when he gets ragweed or goldenrod pollen in his nose or when he gets too close to a horse and smells its dandruffy hair.
Well, it’s a queer feeling being out in the woods among the hills when a howling, blinding snowstorm is all around you, when you can’t see more than a few yards in any direction, and when you know you are a long way from home and from any kind of shelter—also when it’s not only cold but is getting colder every minute.
“We’ve got to find Middle-sized Jim and save him!” Big Jim gasped.
Dragonfly yelled back above the storm, holding his hand up to his mouth to keep from inhaling the cold air direct into his allergic bronchial tubes, “We’ve got to save ourselves!”
For once Dragonfly was right. We all seemed to know it at the same time. And in that blinding, madly whirling blizzard, every direction seemed like every other direction.
“Hey, you guys!” I heard Big Jim yell. “Come here! Quick!”
We struggled through the snow and crowded around him in a little gasping, panting huddle, wondering what he was going to tell us. Also, I was looking around in the snow to see if maybe he had found Middle-sized Jim.
Then in a voice that was pretty excited for Big Jim’s voice, he said, “We’re lost! All our tracks are already covered up with snow!”
It was a sickening feeling, hearing that and knowing we really were lost.
But Big Jim certainly wasn’t any sissy. He raised his voice so that he could be sure all of us heard him and said, “Two things, gang. First, we are to stick together, so if we can’t find the stone house where we’ll be sheltered from this terrible storm, we can huddle close together and help keep each other warm. And second, we’ve got to find our directions so we’ll know which way to go.”
It made sense. I knew we wouldn’t have any trouble staying together, but who could tell what direction it was without any daylight or any sun and without a compass? Every boy who spends a lot of time in the woods or anyplace where he might get lost ought to carry a compass.
“Any of you have a compass? Poetry, you got yours?”
Poetry sometimes carried one with him. Also, on our hikes he always carried a waterproof matchbox.
Poetry tried all his pockets and didn’t have his compass. “I must have left it in my other pants,” he said, which is what a boy does with a lot of different things when he changes clothes.
I shoved my hands into my pockets, too, and pulled out a buckeye and a papaw seed, then shoved my hands back in again and left them there to keep them warm.
Well, that was that. We didn’t have any compass, and there was no way of knowing what direction to go to find the old stone house. It was so blinding dark on account of the swirling, driving snow that we couldn’t see more than a half-dozen white yards in front of us.
Little Jim was close beside me. I looked at his face, which so much of the time is as innocent as a lamb’s face, but this time it wasn’t. His small jaw was set as though he was getting ready to dive through a tangle of football players, and then all of a surprising sudden, he said, “If we can find a tree, we can tell which way north is.”
“If we can find what?” Circus said.
“If we can find a tree—” Little Jim was interrupted by a savage gust of wind that whipped in and cut off his breath.
As you maybe know, Little Jim was always studying nature, looking for and finding wild flowers and weeds and different kinds of trees and writing their names in his notebook. So I thought maybe he might have a bright idea. When he got his breath again, he said, “If we can find a tree, we can tell which way north is, because the thickest moss and lichen grow on the bark on the north side.”
Well, as long as I have lived at Sugar Creek, where there are hundreds and hundreds of trees, I’d never thought about that, but the minute Little Jim said it, I knew it was true.
Also the minute he said it, Big Jim seemed to remember it was so—he having been a Boy Scout. Right away he said, “That’s right. Everybody hold onto everybody till we come to a tree,” which we did.
It was a white birch with bark as white as snow, but it had big patches of green lichen on one side all up and down its trunk. We studied it up close and also several other trees nearby, just to be sure that all of them had patches of lichen on the same side. And that’s how we found out which way north was.
But that didn’t help us much. We still didn’t know what direction we were from the stone house. If we’d been as well acquainted with this part of Sugar Creek territory as we were with that section of it that was closer to our homes, it’d have been easy.
Circus got a bright idea then. He said, “What direction were we going when the storm hit while we were still following our tracks?”
“Southwest,” Big Jim said. “That old house is southwest of the sycamore tree, and we were going toward it.”
Little Jim’s cheerful voice called out right then. I heard him say, “If we keep on watching the north sides of the trees, we can tell which way to keep on going!”
And so we plunged on again, going southwest, following Big Jim and Circus, who were breaking trail for us. The walking got harder, and I kept stumbling over snow-covered logs and underbrush and falling down, even worse maybe than Middle-sized Jim would have done.
I don’t know what the rest of the gang was thinking about while we were struggling and gasping and plunging into and out of and through those drifts, but because I liked Middle-sized Jim very much, I kept wondering if he had managed to get to the house before the storm struck. And had he found out we weren’t there and already started back on the other trail? Was he maybe lying flat in the snow somewhere, unable to get up? What if we couldn’t find him at all, and he would have to stay out all night? Why, he would freeze to death! It was a terribly sad thought.
Also, I was thinking something else, but I probably wouldn’t have written it down for you if Little Jim hadn’t been thinking the same and said it to me out loud. This is what it was: “I wonder if Middle-sized Jim is a Christian.”
I didn’t know for sure.
Dragonfly heard Little Jim say that, and he gasped out a wheezy answer, “A Christian would freeze to death the same as anybody else, if he had to stay all night in this kind of weather.”
I knew Dragonfly was right. Cold weather would be cold for a Christian the same as for anybody else.
It made it seem very important, though, that we find Middle-sized Jim, so without knowing I was going to do it, I yelled at the top of my lungs, calling Middle-sized Jim’s name. But I could hardly hear myself. My voice sounded as dead as if I had thrown it into a lot of whirling goose feathers, on account of the roaring wind. And of course there wasn’t any answer from Middle-sized Jim.
I’ll have to admit I was pretty scared, for myself as well as for Middle-sized Jim. Every single member of the Sugar Creek Gang was already a Christian, because we’d already shoved open the doors of our different hearts and had let the Savior come in, and He had washed all of us from all our sins. I knew that if we had to freeze to death, we would all go straight to heaven, but I certainly didn’t want to go there that afternoon.
While I stumbled and plunged along behind Big Jim and some of the rest of the gang, I thought about my grayish-brown-haired mom. And then I even imagined that if none of our gang came home, Dad would get up a searching party as soon as the storm was over enough so he could, and he and a lot of men would come out looking for us. And maybe they’d find us out here in the snow, huddled together and all frozen stiff.
There’d be a funeral for all of us in the Sugar Creek church. Sylvia’s pop would preach the sermon, and my dad and mom would walk slowly past the casket where their red-haired, freckle-faced boy would be lying. But only my body would be there. My spirit would be in heaven where all saved people’s souls go the minute they die.
Before I got through imagining all that, I heard Circus, who was leading the way with Big Jim, let out a yell, saying, “Hey, gang! We’re there! There’s the old haunted house!”