Читать книгу The Case of the Tricky Trap - John R. Erickson - Страница 7

Chapter Two: A Terrible Crime

A fifty-pound paper sack of turkey corn had been ripped open and the contents strewn across the floor of the shed.

What is “turkey corn”? Great question. See, Slim kept a sack of whole corn in the shed and every morning he threw some out on the ground for the wild turkeys. They’re shameless moochers, you know, those turkeys. Throw out a little corn and they’ll come running on their long gawky legs. After a few days of free corn, they won’t even wait for you to throw it out. They’ll run toward the sound of the pickup, and in fact that’s what they were doing at that very moment.

I could hear them. Twenty-five head of turkey moochers were streaming toward the pickup, and had already started pushing and shoving, gobbling and squawking.

It was enough to throw Drover into a panic. He came running up beside me. “Hank, oh my gosh, there’s a bunch of turkeys and I think . . .”

“Shhh. Hush. Drover, we’ve had a break-in.”

He stared into the shed and let out a gasp. “Oh my gosh, look what the mice did!”

“Not mice, son. It’s more serious than that. Unless I’m badly mistaken, we’ve got a professional burglar on the loose.”

I pointed to some tracks near the door. Tracks tell it all, you know, and these resembled the little hand prints of a child. Drover’s eyes bugged out. “Oh my gosh, Baby Molly’s been stealing corn!”

I let out a groan. “Drover, please. Those are raccoon tracks, and unless I’m badly mistaken, they were left by a coon.”

At that very moment, Slim began speaking in English. “Dadgum coons! Look at that mess. If we don’t get ’em stopped, they’ll tear open every sack in the shed.” He heaved a sigh and scowled at the old wooden door. If you recall, it was warped at the bottom, so that a coon or even a dog could slither inside. “One of these days, somebody needs to fix that door.”

Yes? I waited for him to volunteer for the job—a job, by the way, that had needed doing for years.

“But not today, I ain’t got time.” He hitched up his jeans and grinned. “But by grabs, I’ve got time to set a trap for the little feller. Heh. I’ll fix him.”

I stared at him in disbelief. I don’t want to seem critical of my people, but this struck me as a bit nutty. The door was broken, so he was going to fix the coon? Did that make sense? No, but it was typical of Slim’s method of approaching any kind of construction work or repairs.

Ignore the door and fix the coon. Oh, brother.

Moments later, Slim had abandoned his plans for loading up sacks of feed and was driving up to the machine shed. (He didn’t invite us dogs to ride, so we had to escort the pickup.) He parked near the west side of the shed and waded out into some dead weeds that came up past his knees. This was the place where Slim and Loper stored various odds and ends that were left over from their work projects. There was a pile of old lumber, a pile of welding scraps, a pile of rotten cedar posts, and a pile of junk parts from the tractor and hay baler. It was meant to be a “temporary” junkyard, only the stuff had been there for years and had ceased being “temporary” a long time ago.

I’ll say no more about them being careless and sloppy. They never listen to their dogs anyway.

Slim prowled through the piles of junk and stomped down weeds until at last he pointed toward something that appeared to be a wire cage. “There she is.” He grinned. “That’s my live-trap, dogs. I haven’t used it in quite a spell.”

Yes, I could believe that he hadn’t used it in “quite a spell.” You could hardly even see it for all the weeds that had grown up around it. After considerable lifting, pushing, heaving, and grunting, he got the thing out of the weeds, and Drover and I were able to take a closer look at this so-called live-trap.

For the most part, it was just a cage made of welded rods and covered with mesh wire, maybe four feet long, two feet wide, and three feet high. The thing that made it different from a cage was that on one end, it had a trapdoor that would slam shut if someone or something crawled inside and stepped on the trigger mechanism.

That sounds complicated, doesn’t it? It wasn’t. If it had been complicated, Slim couldn’t have built it. I’m sorry to put it that way, but it’s the truth.

Slim dragged it to the rear of the pickup and managed to heave it up into the bed. He was in a better mood by this time, and he even invited us dogs to ride in the cab down to the feed shed.

I took my usual Shotgun Position on the right side of the pickup. As you may know, we dogs love to hang our heads out an open window. It gives us a clear view of the road ahead and, well, there’s just something invigorating about fresh air. We love that stream of fresh air that blows across our tongues and causes our ears to stand out behind us.

Unfortunately, the window was rolled up (the morning was a little frosty), and right away I began to notice . . . well, stale air. Slim’s pickup had a distinctive smell, don’t you see, and it was never what you would call pleasant. But now it seemed even worse than usual. Old pipe tobacco. Stale coffee. Dirty socks. Cowboy sweat.

And Drover. He was sitting on the seat beside me. “Drover, when was the last time you took a bath?”

“Well, let me think. I can’t remember. You know I hate water.”

“Yes, I’m aware of that. Look, I don’t mean to sound critical, but something really stinks in this pickup. It’s making me ill.”

“Maybe it was all that grass you ate.”

I roasted him with a glare. “Don’t be ridiculous, and don’t try to change the subject. Take a bath sometime or you might end up with no friends.” I turned my gaze back to the . . . boy, I sure wished the window was open. I needed some fresh air. And it didn’t help that Slim seemed to be hitting every bump in the road. How many bumps could you find in a short stretch of road between the machine shed and the feed shed? Ten thousand, and he hit every one of them dead-center.

As we bounced down the hill in front of the house, I noticed that my head was beginning to sink and my eyes seemed to have . . . well, glazed over, shall we say. And the air had become so oppressive that I could hardly breathe. The cab smelled awful, like the dark smoke coming off a pile of burning tires.

I shot a glance at Slim. He was grinning and poking along at about three miles an hour, lost in thoughts of his next big adventure, catching a live raccoon in his fleabag trap. Could we hurry up? I mean, it was nice that he had let us dogs ride in the pickup with him, but for crying out loud . . .

Hot waves began washing across my face. I was smothering! My tongue was dripping like a leaky faucet. And my stomach . . . something was going on down there and it wasn’t good news. Something very bad was happening in the deep caverns of my . . .

I stared at the road ahead and tried to concentrate on pleasant thoughts: sunshine, spring flowers, green grass . . . oops, that was exactly the wrong topic to be thinking about, because . . .

Listen, we need to talk about green grass. Remember my lecture to Drover about the importance of salad in a dog’s diet, and how grass is good for the digestion? It had sounded good at the time, and I had spoken those words with the greatest of sincerity, no kidding, but I was beginning to suspect that . . . how can I say this? Okay, let’s try another approach. In the Great Game of Life, we have our facts that have been proven through years of experience and those facts that are still . . . uh . . . theoretical. The theoretical facts sound good, and sometimes they even sound great, but they haven’t been submitted to rigorous testing.

See, we knew for a fact that dogs sometimes get an irrational craving for green grass. What we didn’t know, what we couldn’t have known, was . . . well, what might happen if a dog not only ate a few sprigs of grass, but maybe ate a whole bunch of it. A gallon. A bushel. Half a ton.

We had no test data to show what might happen to a dog who wolfed down two tons of green grass, but our internal instruments were beginning to suggest . . .

I swallowed hard and stared at the road ahead. I was panting and my tongue continued to drip. The air inside the cab had turned hot and putrid. I really needed to, uh, step outside for a moment, but Slim was still poking along, as slow as a . . .

Uh-oh. I felt this . . . this creepy feeling in the dark depths of my innards, as though a mysterious hand had reached inside me, had closed its deadly grip around my stomach, and had begun . . .

All at once my head began moving up and down, and I heard this . . . this really weird sound that seemed to be coming from . . . well, from my own body and soul. UMP. UMP. It wasn’t a happy sound or the kind of sound a dog would want to make inside the closed cab of a pickup that smelled like . . .

And suddenly I knew that my life had been seized by Unseen Forces. See, that business of my head moving up and down . . . I wasn’t in control of it. It wasn’t coming from my own free will. Some evil force had climbed inside my body, had taken command of all my Vital Plumbing Functions, and . . .

The pickup came to a sudden stop and I went crashing nose-first into the dashboard. I turned my soggy eyes toward Slim and saw that . . . well, that he had melted into a blob of bacon fat. Honest. His face was wavy and fuzzy . . . UMP, UMP . . . and, gee, my head was moving up and down again . . .

“Hank, if you barf in my pickup . . . !”

After that, everything became a blur.