“Well, what do you know!” Santa said all of a sudden, stopping and holding the light on the door. “I must have locked it after all, and forgotten I did it.”
At the door we stopped while he shone the light on the Yale padlock on the door, and sure enough it was locked.
Santa laughed and said, “Must be getting forgetful in my old age.” He turned, shot the flashlight all around, focusing it on stumps, out between us and the dock, also on the cottage and the chimney, and on a hole in a hollow tree just above the boathouse, and would you believe it? There sitting in the hole was a rust-red blinking longish-eared screech owl like an olderish woman sitting on the front porch of her house.
Quick as a flash, the owl spread its wings and flew like a shadow out into the night.
Poetry and I looked toward each other and sighed, and knew we’d been fooled by our own imaginations, ’cause if there’s anything a girl sounds like when she is half crying in a high-pitched voice around the Sugar Creek school, it is a screech owl, which makes a sort of moaning, wavering wail....
Well, that was that, and I felt very foolish, as all of us went back to Santa’s dock, climbed into his boat, holding his flashlight and also a bright electric lantern which you are supposed to do when you are out on a lake in a boat, so you won’t run into some other boat and some other boat won’t run into you.
In a little while we were roaring out across the darkish water, around the neck of land and back toward camp.
Pretty soon, Poetry and Dragonfly and Circus and I were in our own tent, with a small candle for a light on a folding table in one corner. It was as warm as toast in the tent in spite of it being really chilly outside, like it is most every night in the Paul Bunyan country.
“What on earth is that water pail doing in the center of the tent?” I asked, ’cause it was right where I wanted to set my suitcase and open it.
“That’s our stove,” Circus said.