The Summer of 1956

       By Pat Gillum

 The summer of '56 brought a new friend and companion to the farm. Mike Ford, my city boy cousin, arrived from California one morning in June. We were twelve years old. Mike had never been out of the Los Angeles area before, and even the routine occurrences on our hill farm became new adventures to him.

>     Soon after Mike's arrival, the raccoons attacked our corn patch, which was in the roasting ear stage, in force. Every coon in the bottoms seemed to show up at dark. My dog Tooter, Mike, and I were assigned the task of protecting our patch. The stage was set for one of our greatest adventures.

> Early one warm summer night we headed for the patch. No sooner had we reached it than Tooter was on a hot trail. Mike and I ran down a corn middle.

We could hear Tooter running toward us, knocking down corn stalks as he ran.  A silent, furry shadow flashed in front of me, barely visible in the dim

moonlight. Close behind came Tooter. Reason and common sense left me, and I joined the chase, momentarily not noticing that I was doing as much damage to the corn as the coons were, tearing and scattering stalks as I ran. Suddenly, the game changed.  The big coon turned to fight. Tooter, having better control of his senses than anyone else at the moment,jumped aside. I don't think I

really made a decision to do what I did next, for I like to think my decision making process is a little better than this display, and I knew about coons. A coon like this can be a bundle of screaming and biting fury. They often whip a

dog, and can kill them if they get on them in the water. I dived at the coon. I like to think I reconsidered in mid air, but I don't really think I did. I sat on the coon, on my knees. I held the ringed tail tightly in both hands, while

the masked face peered out from behind me. The coon was strangely quiet, giving me a moment to consider my situation. I asked myself, “How do I get off?” when no reasonable solution came to mind, I called, “Do something, Mike!” I don't remember exactly what he did, so I asked him when I visited him this past

summer. He said he hit the coon on the head with a knife, and it just got mean. So I acted. I jumped up, planning to hold the tail by the right hand, slide my hunting knife out of its scabbard, and hit it over the head. But by the time I had began my draw, my fingers had just touched the handle when the coon went crazy. It was wrapped tightly around my right arm, biting and squalling, and my

arm was turning into sausage. I shook it loose,only to have it latch onto my right leg, slightly above the knee. I was struck with a momentary flash of good sense, and I shook him loose. Tooter joined the chase then, for, still being a young dog, he liked it better when the coon was running from him. Myself, I was in the heat of battle now, and I stayed close behind. Again the coon turned to

fight, raking Tooter with his claws. When I entered the fray this time, the knife was in my hand, and it was quickly over.

> We proudly carried the big coon back to the house, and I basked in the attention and glory as everyone examined my wounds. We did not think much about things such as rabies in those days. Mike later confided, “I would sure like to have some scars like that to take back to California.”  A few days later, Mike went down to run the traps we sat out at the corn patch, got too close to a squirrel or coon or some such animal, and got his own battle wounds. For days, he pulled the scabs from the wounds, and he proudly wore his scars back to

California.

> As the corn matured the crows moved in. Life on our farm was a constant battle with assorted animals for our crops. Hundreds of crows. Our

focus turned to them. One who has never experienced the crow as an enemy cannot possibly appreciate the cunning and intellect of a wild crow. Without a gun, we could get close, like the tame golf course variety of today. But with a gun in our hand, they knew what that meant, and we could get almost in range before they abandoned the ear of corn and flew, laughing and calling to the others, or

maybe at us, as they flew.

> Mike and I built a blind in the patch. As we entered, one guard crow watched from the tree line. Even if we sat for hours in the blind, not a crow

showed. When we finally gave up in disgust, heading for the house, the crows would always flog in and cover the patch when we got out of range.

> One day we finally discovered a chink in their armor. A crow does not count well. We both entered the blind, one of us would leave, and the crows

would flog in on top of the remaining shooter, discovering their error in math too late.

> These crows also provided a source of spending money. The county had a fifty cent bounty on crow heads, simply show them to the county clerk and

collect the reward. However, the first time we proudly sat a fruit jar full of aging crow heads on his desk, he suddenly decided he could trust us, as he fled the desk, holding his nose. From now on, we would only have to come in and tell him how many we had.

> Ticks and chiggers were also new to Mike. Me, I had gotten used to them over the years, just scratch it off when you got one. They also served as a good source of entertainment each night before I went to sleep, scratching all my bites good. For Mike, it was different. The first time he saw hundreds of seed ticks crawling up his leg, I thought he was going to throw a runaway.

> The summer was drawing to a close. Mike was ready to ride the train three days back to Los Angeles. When he arrived, he got a dog, named him Tooter. He

bought traps, and sat out a trap line in the concrete jungle of Los Angeles. 

All he could catch were cats and ground squirrels, though. He told me this year that the summer in Arkansas influenced the course of his life. He later made many trips into the wilds of the west.

> I did not see Mike again until he returned from Viet Nam as a demolitions expert, sporting a  Teflon orbit around one eye. We visited Wing a couple of days and talked about the old times. When he got back to California, he had a rude awakening. People there did not appreciate him and the other returning veterans. By the time he had completed college, he had had enough. He went to Australia, taught school a couple of years. Then he played Basketball on a touring team of displaced American veterans awhile. When he returned to California, pushing thirty, he applied for a teaching job. Remembering his earlier treatment, he did not mention to the Superintendent interviewing him

about his war experience. But when the man asked him why, at near thirty, he was just now applying for a job, he came clean. The man, a veteran himself it turns out, stood up, shook his hand, and hired him on the spot. It turned out to be a

30 year job.