“Why hello, my Man Friday!” I said pleasantly, and told him what we were having to do. “Here—you carry the spade and do the digging.” And Poetry said, “And you can carry these fish insides,” and with that he handed him a smallish pail he’d been carrying.
But Dragonfly wouldn’t, so I let him disobey for once. When we got to the place, we saw all kinds of little mounds of fresh dirt where other fish entrails had been buried. And then all of a sudden Poetry said, “Hey, here’s fish heads scattered all over the ground here!”
I looked, and sure enough, he was right. All around there were old half-eaten bullheads, and the eyes and ugly noses of walleyed pike and two or three spatulate-shaped snouts of big northern pike.
“Hey!” Dragonfly said. “Somebody’s been digging them up”—and then he grabbed his nose just in time to stop most of what might have been several very noisy sneezes, and said, “I—kerchew!—I-smell—kerchew!—s-something d-dead.”
Well, that was that, and I got a sinking feeling in my stomach, ’cause right away I knew that what we’d smelled back in the mystery cabin, and around the outside, was maybe something like this.
“It’s raccoons,” I heard a voice saying behind us, and recognized it as Circus’s voice, his pop being a hunter as you know, and he would know about coons’ habits.
“Big Jim sent me to tell you guys to bury’m deep, ’cause the chipmunks and coons’ve been digging’m all up again.”
Well, we buried our stuff very deep, each one of us doing a little bit, but for some reason I wasn’t feeling very happy. I seemed to feel that all the mystery and excitement we’d been having and which had been getting more exciting every minute, was all made out of our own imagination.
“Do you suppose that map with invisible ink on it was only maybe showing somebody where a fish cemetery is?” Poetry asked, and I felt terribly saddish inside. We all looked at each other with saddish eyes, and felt even sadder.
“Then Tom’s daddy is only up here on a fishing trip, and he’s maybe rented the old cabin from somebody for a while,” I said.