Chapter Six: Loneliness on the Front Lines
Crouched in some weeds across from the chicken house, we waited in the darkness and silence.
Did I say silence? Not exactly. A guy never realizes how much non-silence there is on a quiet autumn night until he’s forced to sit and listen.
Crickets, for example. You ever stop and wonder how many crickets there are in this world? Neither had I, but there are bound to be bunches and bunches of crickets.
And did you ever stop and wonder how one cricket can make so much noise? I mean, we’re talking about a little bitty feller who makes something more than a little bitty racket.
Don’t crickets ever get tired? You’d think so, but they go on and on, making their chirp or whatever it is, and they don’t ever seem to sleep.
Well, after studying crickets for a lot longer than I ever wanted to, I came to the conclusion that whoever builds ’em is pretty handy with his tools.
And there were other sounds in the night. The hooting of an owl. The “voom” of bull-bats. The howling of coyotes. Bullfrogs saying, “Rrrump, rrump!” down on the creek.
And then there was the whisper of the wind. Did you know that the wind has a different voice for every season of the year? It does, and when you live outside, the way I do, you become something of an expert on the subject.
I listen to the wind every day and every night, and I can tell you that in the fall of the year, that old wind sings a lonesome song. It makes you wonder what happened to spring, and where the summertime went.
And that’s the kind of song I was hearing, as I listened to the wind blowing through the trees. It went kind of like this.
Wind Song
She came here in the springtime
With flowers in her hair,
Inquiring for a place to stay
Until the trees grew bare.
I saw her in the cottonwoods,
Beneath their pools of shade.
She caught a puff of cotton
And blew it on its way.
Oh sing songs of sunshine,
Sing songs of rain,
Sing songs of springtime gone,
Sing them all again.
She stayed through the summer months,
I saw her having fun.
She took a gold strand of hair
And wrapped it ’round the sun.
She warmed the earth and kissed its face
With lips of sparkling dew.
I thought she’d stay forever,
Her name I never knew.
Oh sing songs of sunshine,
Sing songs of rain,
Sing songs of springtime gone,
Sing them all again.
The autumn came, I heard the wind
And saw the swirls of red,
And cottonwoods with gnarled limbs
Against a sky of lead.
I called for her to warm herself
And said that she must stay.
But all at once her eyes turned sad
And then she went away.
Oh sing songs of sunshine,
Sing songs of rain,
Sing songs of springtime gone,
Sing them all again.
Kind of mournful, huh? That old autumn wind can sure send a chill or two down your backbone, especially if you happen to be on a dangerous assignment in the dead of night.
And there were other sounds I couldn’t identify: whispers and rustles and clatters and snaps, swishes and sighs and moans and slithers. Those were the ones that made me uneasy because . . . Well, a guy never knows what manner of beast might produce that kind of noise.
And after a few hours, it begins to work on his mind. I mean, when you’re trying to maintain a state of readiness and alertness, you tend to respond to every little sound. And after doing that for a couple of hours, something happens to your state of readiness and alertness.
For one thing, you begin to feel drowsy. Sleepy. Stuporous. Comatose. Even if you’ve had a nice long nap.
It must have been sometime past midnight when I realized that I was in danger of falling asleep. One of the things you can do to stay awake on a stakeout is talk to your partner. I decided to give it a shot.
“Drover, it’s time to check in. Have you seen anyzzzzzzz . . . ?”
“No thanks, I couldn’t hold another bite zzzzzzzzz.”
“Uh, Roger, did you zzzzzzz get a count on ’em?”
“Three green elephants dancing with a . . . zzzzzz.”
“Come back on that one, Roger, we didn’t have a good . . . zzzzzz.”
“Oh yeah, I’ve been wide asleep for . . . steak bones.”
“Right. Well, I’m having a little troub . . . Beulah, you shouldn’t be here at this hour of the . . . having a little trouble staying . . . asleep myzzzzzzzzzelf. How about you?”
“Oh sure, I’ll take all three . . . snort zzzzzz.”
“Check and double zzzzz . . . got to stay asleep, no matter how hard it . . . zzzzzzz.”
“Fiddle music.”
“You bet. And the fiddler it is, the musicker I like it.”
“Pete, I hear fiddle . . . fiddle-faddle . . . fiddle music.”
“Don’t be obserd, Droving. Pete can’t play a . . . what did you say?”
“Who?”
“Just now. Someone was talking about Pete.”
“No, that must have been . . . fiddle music.”
“You keep talking about . . . fiddle musle . . . zzzzz.”
I keep hearing . . . middle fusic . . . and steak bones.”
“It’s just the crickles, Droving. Crickets.”
“Do crickles play . . . fickle music?”
“Roger, a big ten-four on the crickles.”
Crickle? Fickle? Fiddle?
HUH?
Fiddle! Hey, unless my ears were deceiving me, I was hearing FIDDLE MUSIC! But that was impossible. Nobody on my ranch played the . . . nobody on my ranch had ever played the . . .
I sat up and gave my head a shake. Just for a second there, I must have dozed off for a second or two. Not long, just a momentary lapse of a split second or two, but long enough to . . .
Drover was dead asleep, the little dunce, sleeping on the job, sleeping through a very important stakeout, and I had a good mind to . . .
That WAS fiddle music, and I wasn’t dreaming it. Not that I had been asleep, you understand, or that I might have been dreaming about anything at all, but on the other hand . . .
I took my ears off Automatic Liftup and switched over to manual. I raised them to the Full Alert position, trimmed them out to Max G (that’s our shorthand term for “Maximum Gathering Mode,” don’t you see), and homed in on the alleged sound frequency.
Fiddle music. No question about it. I could hear it as plain as day, but still my mind refused to accept it as real. And yet . . . I had picked it up on Max G, so it had to be the real thing.
Very carefully, I threaded my nose through the weeds in front of me, pushing them aside so as to give myself a clear and unobsconded view of the chicken house. Everything appeared to be normal, but then . . .
HOLY SMOKES!!
My tail stuck straight out and the hair on my back shot straight up and my ears jumped three inches and cold chills went rolling down my backbone.
I blinked my eyes, trying to convince them that they had malfunctioned. No luck there. Hence, after running checks and double-checks on all my sensory equipment, I still saw . . . a fox playing a fiddle, and strolling towards the chicken house.
I saw it, fellers, and I heard it, but I still didn’t believe it. I had a peculiar reaction to this situation. I turned away and looked the other direction, hoping to give my racing mind a chance to catch up with . . . I’m not sure what a racing mind would catch up with, but the point is that I needed a moment to absorb all this.
I tried to think and pull together bits of evidence and testimony and clues that I had gathered over the past several days. Chicken house. Broken eggs. J. T. Cluck’s bizarre story about hearing fiddle music in the night. Drover’s unbelievable tale about a fox playing a fiddle, which he himself had dismissed as nothing but a dream.
But perhaps Drover had been mistaken. Perhaps he had misled me, thrown me off the trail, just as he had done so many times over the years. For you see, it was beginning to appear that the fox playing fiddle was NOT a dream at all, but an actual reality.
And the most astounding thing of all was that I had suspected it all along.
Yes, it was all coming back now and the pieces of the puzzle began falling into place. I took a deep breath and turned my eyes back to the chicken house, ready now to resume my observation.
It was a fox, all right. In his original testimony, Drover had noted, and this is a direct quote, “We don’t have foxes around here.” Almost true but not quite. We don’t have red foxes or gray foxes or your other varieties of northern foxes, but we do have a few kit foxes.
Your kit fox is about half the size of a coyote, don’t you see, which makes him a fairly small animal. He has a long pointed nose, beady little eyes, a light red coat, and a bushy tail. He lives in holes and eats such items as mice, grasshoppers, and rabbits.
Or, when he can get them, he loves to eat anything he might find in a chicken house.
They’re bad about thieving, them foxes, but very few of them play fiddles. This one was a little out of the ordinary in that respect.
So what we had going on at that moment was a kit fox, walking slowly towards the chicken house and playing a tune on a fiddle, which pretty muchly fit into the pattern I had worked up earlier that day.
The question now was, should I come out of hiding and use the Riot Axe on this little villain, or should I remain hidden and see what he would do?
Since I didn’t actually have an airtight case against him, I decided to go with Opinion Two. I would remain hidden in the weeds, observe his every movement and gesture, and then, if he made one false move, I would spring my deadly trap on him.
And I really had suspected a fox all along.
Honest.