Part 6

"Well uh--" Raw aped Mun and looked at Butt Johnson.

Butt stuttered, "Why--why--why--" and fixed his gaze on Harky.

"There!" Melinda said triumphantly. "The other three want me! Now what do you say?"

"Hope ya fall in the mud!"

"Harold!" Melinda wrinkled her distinctly fetching nose. "How terrible!"

"Hope ya fall in the mud, an' I'll stomp on your head if ya do!" Harky said.

"Harky!" This time Mun voiced a full-throated roar. "Mind your tongue!"

"Le's get coon huntin'," Raw Stanfield choked. "Le's do anything long's we git out of here!"

OLD JOE UP

Raw Stanfield with the lantern, Butt Johnson with a torch for shining treed coons and a .22 rifle for plinking them out of the trees, Mun with his coon-hunting axe, Melinda with serene self-assurance, and Harky with a miserable feeling that it couldn't be very long now before the whole world went to pot, they set off through the night.

Misery was Harky's only feeling. If he had another, he told himself sourly, he wouldn't dare put stock in it. When girls horned in on coon hunts anything could happen and it probably would.

Harky comforted himself with thoughts of what can happen on coon hunts. He had a soul-satisfying vision of a cold, wet, mud-spattered, and hungry Melinda wandering through the night pleading for Harky to come to her succor. Harky heard, but he let her wander until the last possible second. Then, just as she was about to sink into mud from which she would never rise had it not been for valiant Harky, he lifted her to her feet, took her home, and scuffed scornful feet on Mellie Garson's threshold.

"There!" he heard himself saying. "Let that teach you that girls ought never horn in on coon hunts!"

Harky breathed a doleful sigh. Delightful as this mental image was, in no way did it erase the fact that a girl had horned in on a coon hunt. Harky sought solace by tearing his thoughts away from Melinda and fastening them on something pleasant. He considered the four hounds.

Queenie was a slow and methodical worker who'd never been known to lose a trail she started. Of course they did not get every coon Queenie started; some went to earth in rock-bound burrows and some escaped by devious means. Queenie, who tongued on a trail, was one of the few hounds who'd followed Old Joe to his magic sycamore.

Glory, as yet untried, might and might not adopt her mother's hunting style. Duckfoot--neither Harky nor anyone else had any reason to believe that he'd already tracked Old Joe to his sycamore--was another unknown quantity insofar as his own special way of hunting was concerned. But Harky had no doubt that, after adequate training, Duckfoot would shine, and Glory would do well enough.

Thunder, next to Precious Sue the best coon hound ever to run the Creeping Hills, couldn't be doubted. Big, long-legged, and powerful, Thunder was another hound who'd distinguished himself by tracking Old Joe to the big sycamore. A silent trailer but a tree barker who did credit to his name, Thunder was so fast that he often caught coons on the ground. With six years of hunting experience behind him, he was probably the best of the four hounds on this current hunt.

They were, Harky thought, a pack fit to run in any company. With Thunder to run ahead and jump the coon, Queenie to work out the trail at her own pace and at regular intervals to announce the direction Thunder had gone, and quality pups like Duckfoot and Glory, any coon they struck tonight, with the probable exception of Old Joe, would find his stretched pelt on the barn door tomorrow. Maybe even Old Joe would have a hard time with this pack.

Thinking of coons, Harky was pleasantly diverted for a few minutes more.

Creatures of the season, coons availed themselves of the most of the best of whatever was handy. When they emerged from their dens at winter's end, they liked to fill empty stomachs with buds and tender grass and flower shoots. As the season advanced, coons conformed. They never spurned vegetation if it was to their liking, but as soon as the spring freshet subsided, they did a great deal of fishing and frog, crawfish, and mussel hunting. When gardens started to bear, the coons varied their diet with green vegetables. As they ripened, both wild and domestic fruits received the attention of properly brought up coons. They were always ready to raid poultry.

At this time of year, with frogs already gone into hibernation, fish inclined to linger in deep pools where even Old Joe couldn't catch them, the crawfish and mussel crop well picked over, and vegetation withered, coons concentrated on fields of shocked corn, such fruit as might cling to branches, and beech and oak groves, where they foraged for fallen beechnuts and acorns.

It was to a beech grove that Raw Stanfield led them.

The black thunderheads that had been surging through Harky's brain changed suddenly to a sky of dazzling blue. Rubber boots were not unknown among coon hunters of the Creeping Hills, but except by a few eccentrics, they were unused. A man trying to make time to a tree-barking hound did not care to be slowed by boots.

Harky licked his lips. God tempered the wind to the shorn lamb, but ice water felt like ice water even to a coon hunter and the grove toward which Raw headed was on the far side of Willow Brook. The water was autumn-low with plenty of exposed stones, but jumping them by daylight and jumping them under lantern light were different matters. Harky wasn't sure that even he could cross at night without getting wet.

It looked as though ladies' night at coon hunts would terminate abruptly and soon. Harky hoped so, and it would be a nice touch indeed if Melinda scraped her shins when she fell in.

Willow Brook glinted in the light as Raw Stanfield held his lantern high to see whether they were approaching a pool or riffle. It was a riffle that purled lazily, and coldly, around exposed stones. Harky grinned in the darkness. It _looked_ easy, but there was a trick to it.

Once you started jumping there was no turning back and the stones were unevenly spaced. You had to adjust your jumps accordingly, so that it took a really experienced stone jumper to cross in reasonably dry condition.

Contemplating the joys of watching Melinda come reasonably near drowning, Harky made a shocking discovery.

Thunder, Queenie, and Glory still trailed at the heels of the hunters, but Duckfoot was no longer present. Harky gulped, then used the thumb of his left hand to trace a circle on the palm of his right. Less than half a shake ago, Duckfoot had pushed his cold nose into that dangling palm and the circle Harky made there would certainly close him in and bring him back from wherever he had gone. At any rate, it should.

It didn't. Chills never born of the frosty night chased each other up and down Harky's spine. Mun claimed Duckfoot was half duck, Miss Cathby said that couldn't be, and Harky wavered between the two. He looked again, but only three hounds waded into the riffle to join the hunters gathering on the other side. Harky jumped.

If he had his mind on his work, he'd have crossed in perfect safety. But just as he made ready to strike a humpbacked boulder with the sole of his left foot, he miscalculated and struck with the heel. That broke his stride to such an extent that the next jump was six inches short, and instead of landing on a flat-topped rock where he could have balanced, he came down in ten inches of ice water.

Only vast experience as a rock jumper prevented an allover bath; Harky threw himself forward to support his upper body on the flat rock. Then, since it was impossible to get his feet any wetter than they were, he waded the remaining distance.

"Really, Harold," said Melinda, who was dry as a shingle under the July sun, "you did that rather clumsily."

Harky made a mental note. It was easy to work the pith out of an elderberry stick. Small stones were plentiful. One of the latter, placed in the mouth and blown through the former, was never forgotten by anyone with whom it collided. The next time Harky attended Miss Cathby's school, Melinda was in for an unforgettable experience.

For the moment, since he could do nothing else about her, he could imagine she wasn't along. Harky turned his back on Melinda and addressed Mun:

"Duckfoot's gone."

"Danged if he ain't," said Mun, who noticed for the first time that they had only three of the four hounds with which they'd started. "When'd you note it?"

"Other side of the brook," Harky said in a hushed voice. "One minute his nose was in my hand, the next it wasn't. Do you figure he took wings and flew off?"

"It could," Mun began, but his about-to-be-expressed opinion that such a premise was wholly reasonable was interrupted by Melinda's, "Nonsense!"

Harky blazed, forgetting his sensible plan to ignore her. "Watta you know about it?"

"Now don't lose your temper, Harold," Melinda chided. "It's silly to suppose Duckfoot's half duck."

Harky drew his arm back. "Silly, huh? I've a good mind to--"

"Harky!" Mun roared. "Men don't hit wimmen!"

"Why don't they?" Harky growled.

"You're being childish, Harold," Melinda said sweetly. "Duckfoot's simply gone off somewhere. Perhaps he got tired and went home."

Harky tried to speak and succeeded only in choking. If it was insult to assert that Duckfoot could not be half duck, it was heresy even to imply that he left a hunt and went home because he was tired. Harky recovered his breath.

"Duckfoot didn't go home!" he screamed.

"Really, Harold," Melinda said, "it isn't necessary to make so much noise."

Harky was saved by the bell-like tones of a suddenly-tonguing hound.

"Queenie's got one," Raw Stanfield said.

"That's Glory tonguing," Melinda corrected. "She's pitched just a shade higher than Queenie."

"Now, Miss," Raw stuffed his tobacco into a corner of his mouth, "I know my own hound."

"There she is," Melinda said.

A second hound, almost exactly like the first but with subtle differences that were apparent when both tongued at the same time, began to sing. Raw Stanfield promptly swallowed his chew. Butt Johnson and Mun were momentarily too shocked to move.

Harky gasped. There was witchery present that had nothing to do with Duckfoot. Raw didn't know his own hound when he heard it, but Melinda did. Then Harky put the entire affair in its proper perspective. What else could you expect when you brought a girl on a coon hunt? Raw was just so shook up that he might be pardoned for failing to recognize Queenie even if he saw her.

"Le's git huntin'," Raw muttered.

Guiding himself by the blended voices of Queenie and Glory rising into the night air, and seeming to hover at treetop level for a moment before they faded, Harky began to run. The cold air whipped his face. The night whispered of all the marvels that have been since the beginning of time and will be until the end. For a moment, he even forgot Melinda.

This, he thought, was what coon hunting really meant. Listening to the hounds and trying to keep pace; knowing that somewhere far ahead, swift and silent-running Thunder was also on the coon's trail; drawing mental pictures of the coon and his scurry to be away; Thunder bursting upon and surprising the coon, who'd be listening to the tonguing hounds; the chorus as all hounds gathered at the tree. Harky laughed out loud.

Now he knew what a running deer knew, he told himself, and almost instantly the swiftest deer seemed unbearably slow. He was the wind itself, and he exulted in the notion that the other plodding humans, who would surely be running, would just as surely be far behind. They hadn't had his experience in running away from Mun.

Glory and Queenie, who seemed to run at the same pace even as they tongued in almost the same pitch, drew farther ahead but remained well within hearing. Harky frowned thoughtfully as he sped through the night. The way that coon was running, and the way the dogs became quiet at intervals, as though they'd been thrown off the scent, he had a feeling that they were on Old Joe himself.

When he climbed a knoll and was able to hear nothing, he no longer doubted. Queenie and Glory were casting for the trail, and Old Joe was the only coon that could keep Queenie puzzled this long. Harky halted.

"Old Joe sure enough," he said out loud.

"Don't you think," Melinda asked calmly, "that we should go directly to his big sycamore?"

Harky jumped like a shot-stung fox. He blinked, not daring to believe she'd kept pace with him but unable to discredit his own eyes. Suddenly he felt far more the plodding turtle than the speeding deer, but he extricated himself as neatly as Old Joe foiled a second-rate hound.

"If I hadn't slowed down on accounta you," he said belligerently, "I'd of been at Old Joe's tree by now."

Melinda said meekly, "I know you were running slowly, Harold, but you needn't have. I could have gone much faster."

Harky gulped and felt his way. Melinda, he decided, must have brought her rabbit's foot with her and probably she'd rolled in a whole field of four-leaf clovers. Beyond any doubt, she'd also observed the phases of the moon and conducted herself accordingly.

"What do you know about Old Joe's sycamore?" he asked.

"What everyone knows," she said casually. "Old Joe runs to it every time he's hard pressed by hounds."

"He's probably lost a thousand hounds and two thousand hunters at that tree," Harky said.

"Pooh!" Melinda scoffed. "There haven't been a thousand hounds and two thousand hunters in the Creeping Hills during the past hundred years!"

"Old Joe's been prowling that long," Harky declared.

"Rubbish!" said Melinda. "He's just a big raccoon who's smart enough to climb a tree that can't be felled or climbed. Even my own father believes he's been here forever, but you should know better. You've been taught by Miss Cathby."

Harky sneered, "Miss Cathby don't know nothin' about nothin'."

"Harold!" Melinda was properly shocked. "Don't you dare talk that way about Miss Cathby!"

"Ha!" Harky crowed. "I'll--"

The battle that might have resulted from this impact of Miss Cathby's education with the lore and legend of the Creeping Hills was forestalled when two hounds began to bay at Old Joe's sycamore. They were Thunder and Duckfoot.

THE FALL OF MUN

Old Joe left his daytime den, a burrow beneath a humpbacked boulder, half an hour after nightfall. He paused for a moment in the exit he'd chosen--one of three leading from the den--to twitch his whiskers and wriggle his nose. As usual, he wanted to determine what was in the wind before going down it. There was nothing, or at least nothing that called for more than ordinary caution. Old Joe chittered contentedly to himself.

Except for the one bad night, when everything went wrong and he'd finally been chased up his big sycamore by Duckfoot, he had enjoyed a successful season indeed. Corn had been plentiful, crawfish and mussels abundant, poultry careless, and enemies few. Some of those that had threatened would have been considerably better off if they hadn't.

Notable among them was Pine Heglin's fighting dog. Smarting from that unexpected encounter, when he'd returned to steal one of Pine's guinea hens and been so desperately pressed, Old Joe had chosen his time and gone back to Pine's house one night. The dog rushed. Old Joe scooted away. After a pathetically short chase, the dog bayed him.

The dog, however, lacked a full appreciation of the properties of bees, and Old Joe had let himself be cornered on one of Pine's beehives. The dog closed, the hive tipped over, and while Old Joe scurried happily onward, the dog received a short but intensive education in the folly of tipping beehives. Bees did not bother Old Joe. Even in summer his fur was long enough to protect him, and whenever he felt like it, which was whenever he wanted some honey, he raided beehives.

Now, with a blanket of fat beneath his glossy fur, he was all ready for the wintry blasts that would send him to bed in his big sycamore. Between now and that uncertain period when bitter winds blew, there was considerable living to be done.

On this particular night the first order of living involved something to eat, and Old Joe was in a mood for beechnuts. They were so tiny that Melinda Garson might have held fifty in the palm of her hand and still lacked a handful. But they were delicious, and along with acorns they spread a bountiful autumn table because they existed by the billion. When frost opened the pods and wind rattled the branches of beech trees, the sound of beechnuts pattering into dry leaves was not unlike the sound of a violent rain.

Having chosen his menu for the night, Old Joe had only to decide which of many beech groves offered the easiest pickings with the greatest advantage to himself. He finally selected the one bordering Willow Brook and just opposite Mun Mundee's farm.

There were various reasons for his choice. First, the grove was in a sheltered area, which meant that its pods ripened later than those that were exposed to first frosts and heavy winds. Therefore it would not be so thoroughly picked over, and would still be dropping nuts in abundance. Second, this grove always produced a lush crop.

But Old Joe's most compelling reason for his choice was that the grove was infested with squirrels, who had been frantically gathering the beechnuts ever since they began to drop, and storing them in hollow logs, stumps, crevices, and any other place available. It was no part of Old Joe's plan to scrape in the leaves and gather his dinner nut by nut when a little investigation was certain to uncover a cache that might contain from half a pint to a couple of quarts of beechnuts, already gathered by some industrious squirrel.

His campaign mapped, Old Joe proceeded to execute it.

The autumn night posed its usual charms, but hunger took precedence over esthetic inclinations. Old Joe did not linger to watch starlight glinting on a pond, investigate fox fire in a swamp, or even to retrieve a nine-inch trout, wounded in combat with some bigger fish, that was feebly wriggling in the shallows. The trout was a delicacy, but so were beechnuts. Let lesser coons settle for less than they wanted.

Coming to a long pool, Old Joe plunged in and swam its length. Thereafter he kept to Willow Brook. He'd seen no evidence of hunters and had no reason to suppose that any were abroad tonight. Though keeping to the water was an amateur's trick--one any good coon hound could decipher without difficulty--leaving this break in his scent was one of Old Joe's numerous forms of insurance. If a hound should get on him, Old Joe would at least have time to plan some really intricate strategy.

Dripping wet, but not even slightly chilled, and with every sense and nerve brought wonderfully alive by his journey through ice water, Old Joe climbed the bank into the beech grove. He paused to reconnoiter.

The grove, composed entirely of massive beech trees, bordered Willow Brook for about a quarter of a mile and gave way to spindly aspens on either side. The best beechnut hunting lay in the most sheltered area near Willow Brook, but there were other considerations.

There had still been no evidence of hunters. Old Joe, however, could not afford to ignore the possibility that some might venture forth. He knew perfectly well that the instant he left Willow Brook he had started laying a hot trail that any mediocre hound could follow. While mediocre hounds were no cause for concern, they were as scarce in the Creeping Hills as apples on a beech tree.

Old Joe must plan accordingly, and his immediate plans centered about a lazy slough that lay a short distance back in the beeches and had its source in a lazy runlet that trickled down an upheaval of massive rocks. He made his way toward that slough.

The grove already had an ample quota of beechnut harvesters of high and low degree. Old Joe circled a snuffling black bear that squatted on its rump, raked dead leaves with both front paws and gusty abandon, and bent its head to lick up beechnuts along with shredded leaves, dirt, and anything else that happened to be in the way. Farther on was a buck with massive antlers, then a whole herd of deer. A family of skunks had come to share the bounty, and a little coon that hadn't yet learned the proper technique of harvesting beechnuts made up in enthusiasm what he lacked in skill.

Old Joe bothered none. The bear and the deer were too big, the skunks too pungent, and he couldn't be bothered with callow little coons. Anyhow, there was plenty for all. Old Joe came to the slough and sat up to turn his pointed nose to each of the four winds. Detecting nothing that might interrupt his dinner, he fell to hunting.

Towering high over the slough, touching branches across it as though they were shaking hands, the beech twigs rattled dryly as the wind shook them and beechnuts pattered in the leaves or made tiny splashes in the slough. Old Joe, with no disdain for the many nuts he might have gathered but a hearty contempt for the work involved in gathering them, went directly to a moss-grown stump.

He sniffed it. Then he nibbled it. Finally, half sitting and half crouching, he felt all around it with both front paws. The moss was soft and the stump rotting, but nowhere was there a crack or crevice in which a provident squirrel, anticipating the winter to come, might have concealed any beechnuts.

In no way disheartened, Old Joe went from the stump to a gray-backed boulder and explored that. Again he failed. On his third try, fortune smiled.

At the very edge of the slough, possibly because its deep roots were imbedded in constantly-wet earth, a great beech had been partially toppled by a high wind that screamed through the grove. One massive root lay on top of the ground and snaked along it for three feet before probing downward again.

Beneath this root Old Joe found the hidden treasure trove of what must have been the most industrious squirrel in the Creeping Hills. At least a gallon of beechnuts were packed in so tightly that it was necessary to pry the first ones loose. Old Joe settled himself to partaking of the squirrel's hoard.

Opportunity, which knocked often but rarely in such lavish measure, had better be welcomed instantly and swiftly or there was some danger that the squirrel might yet partake of some of the nuts. But though Old Joe was industrious, it just wasn't his night.

He'd eaten about a fifth of the squirrel's cache when the bear he'd previously circled raced to the slough, splashed across it, and with a great rattling of stones and rustling of leaves ran up the hill and disappeared in the night.

Old Joe came instantly to attention. The bear, a big one, was frightened. Big bears did not easily take fright, therefore something was now in the beech grove that had not been present when Old Joe arrived.

A moment later, Duckfoot rushed him. Keener scented than any of the other three hounds, Duckfoot had been the first to discover that a coon was indeed in the beech grove and he acted accordingly.

Old Joe rolled down the bank into the slough and started swimming. On such dismal occasions his mind was automatically made up, so that there was no need to linger and determine a proper course of action. He swam fast, but at the same time he exercised discretion. A terrified young coon would have splashed and rippled the water, and thus marked his path of flight for any hound that was not blind. With everything except his eyes and the very tip of his nose submerged, Old Joe swam silently.