It was one of the nicest dog days days I ever saw, with the heat waves dancing above the fields, short-horned grasshoppers springing up along the sunny path as Poetry and I moseyed along, not wanting to run and get hot on such a hot day. I felt kind of sad because of the watermelon and also on account of our boys’ world had been invaded by a flock of girl campers. Girls in our woods would be a lasso on a boy’s fun. He couldn’t go racing wildly among the trees playing leapfrog and yelling and whooping it up like a wild Indian on account of he would be afraid they would think he was a wild Indian.
As I was saying, the short-horned grasshoppers were springing up all along the path, making their funny little rattling sounds during the short time they were in the air, the rattling stopping the very second they landed which they generally did only a few yards from where they took off. Butterflies of a half-dozen families were tossing themselves about in the air above the wild rose bushes and here and there and everywhere in the yellow afternoon.
“Hey, look!” Poetry exclaimed. “There goes a milkweed butterfly! I’ve got to have him for my collection!”—and he started to start on a fast run after him, but I stopped him with “Quiet! The girls will hear you!”
He stopped stock-still and scowled and the beautiful Monarch butterfly swung proudly away in the air, starting to stop every now and then and not doing it, but lifting itself on the breeze and floating away to another place.
It wouldn’t be long until fall now, I thought, when all the Monarchs in the Sugar Creek territory would gather themselves into flocks like blackbirds and crows do, and before winter they would migrate to the South, flying all the way down to the bottom of the United States and even into Mexico or South America. Then next spring they would be back at Sugar Creek to lay their eggs on the milkweeds which grow in the fence rows or wherever a farmer doesn’t cut them down.
The larva that hatches from the milkweed or Monarch butterflies is one of the prettiest a boy ever sees, being a long greenish-yellow caterpillar with crow-black rings around it all along its body from its head to its tail—only it is hard to tell which end is its head on account of it has two short black horns on each end of itself.
You can see a greenish-yellow-and-black Monarch larva hanging from a milkweed leaf most any time in the late summer, if you stop and look close enough.
Dragonfly was the only one of the Gang who didn’t come to our meeting that day, and Poetry and I thought we knew why.
We all plumped ourselves down on the grass under the Little-Jim tree and relaxed awhile, each of us lying in a different direction like we nearly always do. Big Jim looked around at the rest of us, letting his stern eyes stop on each of our faces for a flash of a second—Poetry’s fat mischievous face, Little Jim’s mouselike innocent face, Circus’s monkey-shaped face, and my freckle-faced face.
Big Jim’s own face was more sober than it is sometimes and I noticed his almost mustache on his upper lip was really almost now. If it should keep on growing as fast as it had the last two or three years, pretty soon, he would actually have to start shaving. For a second my mind wandered a little and I was thinking if Big Jim should ever need a razor strap I would very gladly offer him Pop’s discarded one which Pop hardly ever used anymore except for some unnecessary reason. There really wasn’t any sense in having a piece of leather like that lying around our house cluttering up the place and giving a boy’s father the kind of ideas it’s not good for a son for his father to have.