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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781575677552 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Moody Publishers |
| Publication date: | 05/01/1998 |
| Series: | Sugar Creek Gang Series , #21 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 128 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
| Age Range: | 9 - 12 Years |
About the Author
The late PAUL HUTCHENS, one of evangelical Christianity's most prolific authors, went to be with the Lord on January 23, 1977. Mr. Hutchens, an ordained Baptist minister, served as an evangelist and itinerant preacher for many years. Best known for his Sugar Creek Gang series, Hutchens was a 1927 graduate of Moody Bible Institute. He was the author of 19 adult novels, 36 books in the Sugar Creek Gang series, and several booklets for servicemen during World War II. Mr. Hutchens and his wife, Jane, were married 52 years. They had two children and four grandchildren.
Read an Excerpt
Sugar Creek Gang 21 The Timber Wolf
By Paul Hutchens
Moody Publishers
Copyright © 1998 Pauline Hutchens WilsonAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-57567-755-2
CHAPTER 1
Our six sets of Sugar Creek parents expected us to have a very safe and sane winter vacation at the Snow Goose Lodge.
They expected it because our camp director was to be Barry Boyland, Old Man Paddler's nephew. Barry had taken us on two north woods summertime trips, and we'd not only come back alive but were, as they expressed it, "better boys than when we went."
We had gone South once in the winter, all the way down to the Mexican border. We'd gone up North twice in the summer, but never before had we spent a week in the north woods in the winter. Our folks seemed to think it would be good for us to have the experience of ice fishing, skiing, playing boys' games around an open fire in a fireplace, and learning a little more about woodcraft and other things it is worthwhile for a boy to know and do.
It's a good thing our parents didn't know in advance that a one-hundred-pound timber wolf would be hanging around the lodge most of the time we were there.
And my mother's grayish-brown hair would have turned completely gray overnight if she had known that the weather in the Paul Bunyan Playground was going to be so unseasonably warm that it would wake up the hibernating bears—and that we would have an adventure with an honest-to-goodness live bear before our wonderful week was over.
Our folks certainly didn't imagine that after nearly a week of unseasonably warm weather, while the bears were still out, not having found their new winter quarters, a wild blizzard would come sweeping in and we would be caught out in it a long way from the lodge, not able to tell directions or to find our way back.
It's a very good thing our parents didn't know.
Of course, none of the gang knew it either. All we knew was that somewhere in the wilds of the North, near a town called Squaw Lake, on the shore of a lake by the same name, there was a lodge called the Snow Goose, and we were going to have a one-week winter vacation there.
The Snow Goose Lodge, as you maybe already know, if you've read the story named The Green Tent Mystery, was owned by the Everards, people who spent part of one wonderful summer camping in a green tent in our own Sugar Creek territory.
What you don't know, and maybe ought to before you get to the most exciting part of this story, is that our camp director, Barry Boyland, was studying in a Minneapolis college, and the vacation was for his education as well as ours.
"He's writing an important paper on 'Wildlife in the Frozen North,'" Mom said at the supper table one evening before we went.
"And you boys are to help him while you're there," Dad said across the table from me.
Mom's kind of bright remark in answer was: "You are not to be the wildlife, understand, but only to help Barry learn all he can about it."
I knew from what they had said, and the way they said it, that I was expected to behave myself even better than usual.
What else you don't know—and maybe would like to—is that this year the Everards had gone to California for the winter. The Gang and Barry would be alone at Snow Goose, except for the time Ed Wimbish, an old trapper, would spend with us.
The day finally arrived for us to leave. After we'd said our last good-byes to our envious fathers and our half-worried mothers, we were on the big bus and gone. Barry would meet us at Minneapolis. Then we'd spend the night in a hotel to get acquainted with what it is like to stay in a big city hotel. We'd start early the next morning in Barry's station wagon for the Snow Goose.
After we had traveled maybe twenty-five miles on the bus, Big Jim, who was sitting in the seat beside me, drew a letter from an inside pocket and said, "I got this just before we left. It's from the Everards."
I read the letter and felt my spine tingling with the kind of feeling I always get when I'm beginning to be scared. When I'd finished it, I passed it back, saying, "Better not let Little Jim and Dragonfly know about it. They're too little. They'd be s-scared."
There was no use keeping the secret from any of the other members of the gang, though. We'd all have to know sooner or later. So Big Jim let everybody read the letter, the scary part of which was:
You won't need to be afraid of any of the wildlife you will see around the lodge. The bears are in hibernation, and the wolves are cowards and afraid of human beings. You'll probably not see even one wolf, unless it is Old Timber, which Mr. Wimbish will tell you about. We've never seen him ourselves. Ed calls him the ghost wolf because he always fades from sight a second after you see him—or so Ed says. But Ed exaggerates, and you can take some of what he says with several grains of salt.
"Sounds fishy to me," I said to Big Jim. I'd read stories about wolves, and in the stories they hadn't been afraid of human beings at all.
Poetry, who had brought his camera along, said, "I've always wanted a picture of a human ghost but could never get one. I'm going to try a ghost wolf!"
His tone of voice was light, but I knew from the way he looked at me that he was only talking that way to help keep Little Jim and Dragonfly from worrying.
When we got to Minneapolis, Barry met us and took us to the Hastings Hotel, where we had two big double rooms with a bath between them and an extra cot in each room.
Dragonfly tried to make us laugh by trying a very old and very worn-out joke on us. He said, "How come we have to have a bathtub when we aren't going to stay till Saturday night?"
"Quiet!" Big Jim ordered. "I'm phoning Sugar Creek to tell them we're all here and all right."
Dragonfly tried another joke, saying, "But some of us are not all there," which wasn't funny, either.
Soon Big Jim had his mother on the phone.
I was standing close by, looking out the window at a small snow-covered park with trees and shrubs scattered through it. My mind's eye was imagining Old Timber standing tall and savage-looking with his long tongue out, panting and looking up at us. Even though my thoughts were at Snow Goose Lodge, it was easy to hear what Big Jim was telling his mother and also to hear what her excited mother voice was saying to him. She could hardly believe we were there so soon.
Then all of a sudden there were what sounded like a dozen other mother voices on the party line, trying to give Big Jim special orders for their sons. Big Jim had a pencil in his hand and was grinning and writing. Then, all of a sudden he was holding out the phone to me, saying, "It's your mother. She wants to talk to you."
"Your compass, Bill," Mom said. "You left it on the upstairs bureau. Be careful not to get lost in the woods. Better buy a new one if none of the other boys have any. You know you got lost up there once before—and also on Palm Tree Island."
It was good advice, although it worried me to have her worry about me.
"Don't worry," I said into the phone and maybe into the ears of five other mothers. "The sun shines up here too—the very same sun that shines down there—and we can tell directions by it anytime."
"Then be sure your watch is running and the time is right all the time," she ordered me. And I knew she knew the secret of telling directions on a sunshiny day if you had a watch and knew how to use a certain Scout trick. Mom was right, though. The watch had to be set correctly.
I guess a boy ought to be glad he has a mother to give him good advice, even if sometimes he doesn't need it because he already knows exactly what she is telling him.
While we were all getting our hair combed, our ties straight, our shoes touched up a little, and our coat collars brushed for dinner in the hotel, we tossed what we hoped were bright remarks at one another. Nobody got angry at anybody since it is a waste of good temper to lose it on a friend.
Nothing happened of any importance till after dinner, which at Sugar Creek we would have called supper.
I'd thought Barry seemed a little anxious about something while we were in the dining room. He hardly noticed the pretty murals, except to tell us they were enlarged photographs in full color of actual cherry trees, with grass and dandelions underneath and a gravel road running past. They covered one whole wall of the dining room.
He kept looking around, and whenever what is called a "page" went through, calling out names of people wanted on the phone, he seemed to hope his own name would be called.
We hadn't any sooner gotten back to our rooms and settled down a little than the phone rang. I was closest to it and, in a mischievous mood, pretended a dignified voice and answered, saying, "Room 423, the Hastings Hotel. William Collins speaking."
I certainly felt foolish a second later when a woman's voice said, "May I speak to Barry, please—Mr. Boyland, I mean?"
I felt and heard myself gulp, then I answered, "Certainly. Just a moment."
I didn't have to call Barry, though. He had been sitting under a floor lamp on the other side of the room, reading a book called Hunting in the Great Northwest and taking notes with his green pen, maybe jotting down things he could quote in the important paper he was going to write for his college class.
Well, the very second the phone rang, he was out of his chair like a rabbit scared out of its hole. Almost before I could hand him the phone, he had it and was saying, "Hello!" in a voice that sounded as if he was all alone with somebody he liked extrawell and was telling her something nobody else was supposed to hear.
Maybe it wasn't polite for me to listen, but how could I help it? It wouldn't have been polite for me to stop my ears, would it?
I couldn't tell what the woman's musical voice on the other end of the line was saying, but Barry's deep-voiced answers were like a boy's hand stroking a baby rabbit in the palm of his other hand. He was talking to her about his trip into the frozen North and asking her not to worry, that he'd be all right.
"Yes," Barry was saying to the person I imagined was his age and was pretty and could smile like our Sugar Creek teacher, Miss Lilly. "I'll be careful. I have six bodyguards, you know."
And then, all of a sudden, Barry was saying, "Yes. I think I can run over for a few minutes."
He put down the phone, turned back into the room, and said, with excitement in his eyes but with a very calm voice, "I'll have to be gone for an hour or so, boys. You can wait here, or you may go down to the basement game room for Ping-Pong—but mind you, no disturbance! Remember who you are."
"Your mother worried about you, too?" Little Jim asked, and I knew he was thinking that whoever called Barry was Barry's own mother, giving him last-minute instructions to take care of himself.
Barry looked at Little Jim with a faraway expression in his eyes. Then he grinned and answered, "Every good mother worries a little."
Maybe I shouldn't have said what I did just then, but I might not have been able to help it even if I'd tried. This is what came out of my mind as I answered Little Jim, "His mother is maybe only about twenty years old."
Barry shot me a quick look with a grin in it and right away put in a phone call for a taxi. He got his heavy brown storm coat out of the closet, put it on, brushed a few flecks of dust off its dark-brown mouton collar, took another look in the mirror at his hair, ran his hand over his chin to see if he needed a shave, decided he didn't—or if he did, he wouldn't have time to give himself one—and a minute later was out the door and gone.
His idea that we might want to go to the game room in the basement was a good one. So pretty soon, Big Jim, who had charge of us, gave the order, and pretty soon after that we were in the basement playing noisy sets of the same kind of table tennis we sometimes played in Poetry's basement back home.
I watched for my chance to talk to Poetry alone for a few minutes, because I had something special on my mind. When he and I finished a game and handed our paddles to Dragonfly and Little Jim, we took the elevator to the hotel lobby.
We knew it wasn't supposed to be good for a boy to eat hard-to-digest candy before going to bed, so we bought the kind of candy bar we liked best and hoped it wouldn't be hard to digest.
Poetry said, as he unwrapped his, "My jaw muscles haven't had any exercise since we were eating dinner beside the cherry trees."
"Supper," I said.
"Dinner," he countered and added, "the people back at Sugar Creek are behind the times!"
We were in two big leather-upholstered chairs behind a potted palm at the time. Ignoring what Poetry thought was a bright remark, I told him about the cheerful woman's voice I'd heard on the phone, asking for Barry. "She wasn't any more his mother than the man in the moon is a man," I said.
Poetry let out a low whistle, squinted his eyes, then said, "Poor Barry," and shook his head sadly.
"How come you say that?" I asked.
He sighed, took another bite of his bar, shook his head again sadly, and answered, "Life is more fun being a boy—without growing up and having a girl to worry about."
Neither of us said anything for a few minutes, while I thought about the happiness I'd seen in Barry's eyes when he was flying around the room getting his tie straight, his coat on, the dust off its lapels, and running his hand over his chin the way Dad does to see if he needs a shave.
There was a radio on in the hotel lobby, and somebody's voice was racing along very fast, giving a news program. My mind was so busy thinking about Barry and wondering where he was and when he would be back that I hardly noticed the news announcement about the weather. It was something about "unseasonably warm weather in northern Minnesota continuing for another week." I could see, out the hotel's large picture window, the stars twinkling in an absolutely clear sky.
Poetry and I, behind our potted palm-pretending we were in a climate where palm trees grow naturally, such as at the very bottom of the United States where we had spent a whole week's winter vacation with Mom and Dad and Dragonfly's parents—sat munching away, talking dreamily about imaginary things:
"See those seagulls up there, tossing around in the hot summer air?" he asked.
I answered lazily, "Don't make me open my eyes. I'm too sleepy here on this sandy beach under this palm tree."
"All right, then. See those snow geese flying? See that beautiful white snow goose, with black wing tips and a pink beak, headed north to the lodge?"
I yawned lazily, my nine-o'clock-at-night imagination making me feel sleepy. "I don't know what Barry went after in such a hurry, but I wish he'd come back. It's my bedtime."
And that's when Barry came breezing into the lobby, and with him was a sparkling-eyed, rosy-cheeked girl in a dark green coat with wide fur sleeves and a fur collar. She was only about five-and-a-half feet tall and was laughing, as also was Barry. They didn't seem to know there was anybody in the world except each other. He was carrying a four-foot-long gun case with a luggage-type handle.
I looked at Poetry in his chair, and the two of us stayed as low as we could under the fronds of the potted palm.
Barry set down the gun case, and the two of them went outside again into the cold night.
In a flash, Poetry and I were out of our tropical climate to see what was going on outside, if anything.
What we saw wasn't any of our business, but since it happened right in front of our astonished eyes, we almost had to see it.
"What do you know about that?" Poetry exclaimed in a disappointed voice. "Poor Barry!"—the same thing he had said when we were still up in our room.
For about a minute Barry and the girl stood at the door of a taxi, whose driver was waiting for her to get in. Then, all of a sudden, they gave each other a half-long kiss, as I'd accidentally seen Mom and Dad give each other quite a few times back home. Barry helped her into the cab then, closed the door, and stood watching while the driver steered out into the night traffic and was gone.
By the time Barry was back inside, Poetry and I were walking around the lobby, looking with let's-pretend indifference at the pictures on the walls and at the many different kinds of candy bars at the hotel magazine stand.
Barry's voice behind us was certainly cheerful as he said, "You boys want a candy bar? Pick out your favorite. The treat's on me."
"No, thank you," Poetry said politely. "Candy at bedtime isn't good for a boy my size."
Just then, from the stairway leading to the basement game room came the rest of the gang, and there wasn't a one of them who thought a candy bar would be hard to digest before going to bed.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Sugar Creek Gang 21 The Timber Wolf by Paul Hutchens. Copyright © 1998 Pauline Hutchens Wilson. Excerpted by permission of Moody Publishers.
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