"Lemme see."

Mun sat down beside Old Brindle and Harky sighed with relief. When Mun Mundee could not get the last squirt from a cow, it followed that the cow was indeed stripped. But Mun, conditioned by experience, never completely approved of anything Harky did.

"We'll close up for the night," he said.

Harky scooted out of the barn ahead of his father and gulped lungfuls of the softening wind. It seemed that a man could never get enough of that kind of air. Mun closed and latched the barn door and Harky turned to him.

"It's a thaw wind!" he said rapturously.

"Yep."

"Not the big thaw, though."

"Nope."

"Do you reckon," Harky asked, "it will fetch the coons out?"

Mun deliberated. A subject as serious as coons called for deliberation.

"I don't rightly know," he said finally. "I figger some will go on the prowl an' some won't."

It was, Harky decided, a not unreasonable answer even though it lacked the elements of true drama. Harky gulped another lungful of air and almost, but not quite, loosed the reins of his own imagination. Even seasoned hunters did not argue coon lore with Mun Mundee, but on an evening such as this it was impossible to think in prosaic terms.

They lingered near the barn and faced into the wind. Presently Harky stood there in body only. His spirit took him to Heaven.

Heaven, as translated at the moment, was the summit of a mountain ten times as high as Dewberry Knob. From his lofty eminence, Harky looked at a great forest that stretched as far as his eyes could see. Each tree was hollow and each hollow contained a coon. As though every coon had received the same signal at the same time, all came out. There were more coons than a man could hunt if he hunted every night for the next thousand years.

At exactly the right moment, this entrancing scene became perfection. Deep in the great forest, Precious Sue lifted her voice to announce that she had a coon up.

Harky made his way among the great trees toward the sound. He found Precious Sue doing her best to climb a sycamore so massive that ten men, holding each others' hands, could not come even close to encircling the trunk. When Harky shined his light into the tree he saw, not just a coon, but the king of coons. Sitting on a branch, staring down with eyes big as a locomotive's headlight, was Old Joe himself.

The fancy faded, but Harky was left with no sense of frustration because fact replaced it. Somewhere out in the Creeping Hills—the aura that surrounded him considerably enhanced by the fact that no human being knew exactly where—Old Joe really was sleeping the winter away. Suppose that he really came prowling tonight? Suppose Precious Sue really did run him up that big sycamore in the wood lot? Suppose Harky really—? Harky could no longer be silent.

"Pa," he asked, "how long has Old Joe been prowling these hills?"

A man who would speak of coons must think before he spoke. For a full ninety seconds Mun did not answer. Then he said seriously:

"A right smart time, Harky. There's them'll tell you that even if a coon don't get trapped, or shot, or dog kil't, or die no death 'fore his time, he'll live only about ten years anyhow. I reckon that may be so if you mean just ordinary coons. Old Joe, he ain't no ordinary coon. My grandpa hunted him, an' my pa, an' me, an' you've hunted him. Old Joe, he's jest about as much of a fixture in these hills as us Mundees."

Harky pondered this information. When he went to school down at the Crossroads, which he did whenever he couldn't get out of it, he had acquired some education. But he had also acquired some disturbing information. Miss Cathby, who taught all eight grades, was a very earnest soul dedicated to the proposition that the children in her care must not grow up to wallow in the same morass of mingled ignorance and superstition that surrounded their fathers and mothers.

Miss Cathby had pointed out, and produced scientific statistics to prove, that the moon was nothing more than a satellite of the earth. As such, its influence over earth dwellers was strictly limited. The moon was responsible for tides and other things about which Miss Cathby had been very vague because she didn't know. But she did know that the moon could not affect birth, death, or destiny.

Old Joe had been the subject of another of Miss Cathby's lectures. He was just a big coon, she said, though she mispronounced it "raccoon." It was absurd even to think that he had been living in the Creeping Hills forever. Old Joe's predecessor had also been just a big raccoon. Since Old Joe was mortal, and like all mortals must eventually pass to his everlasting reward, his successor would be in all probability the next biggest raccoon.

Harky conceded that she had something to offer. But it also seemed that Mun had much on his side, and on the whole, Mun's conception of the real and earnest life was far more interesting than Miss Cathby's. She got her information from books that were all right but sort of small. Mun took his lore from the limitless woods.

"How long have us Mundees been here?" Harky asked.

"My grandpa, your great-grandpa, settled this very farm fifty-one years past come April nineteen," Mun said proudly.

"Where did he come from?"

"He never did say," Mun admitted.

"Didn't nobody ask?"

"'Twas thought best not to ask," Mun said. "Blast it, Harky! What's chewin' on you? Ain't it enough to know where your grandpa come from?"

"Why—why yes."

Confused for the moment, Harky went back to fundamentals. His great-grandfather had settled the Mundee farm fifty-one years ago. He was thirteen. Thirteen from fifty-one left thirty-eight years that Mundees had lived on the farm before Harky was even born.

Confusion gave way to mingled awe and pride. Old Joe was not the only tradition in the Creeping Hills. The Mundees were fully as famous and had as much right to call themselves old-timers. For that matter, so did Precious Sue. The last of a line of hounds brought to the Creeping Hills by Mun's grandfather, her breed was doomed unless Mun found a suitable mate for her. But better to let the breed die than to offer Precious Sue an unworthy mate.

Mun said, "Reckon we'd best get in."

"Yes, Pa."

Side by side they started down the soggy path toward the house. Precious Sue left her bed on the porch and came to meet them.

She was medium-sized, and her dark undercoat was dappled with bluish spots, or ticks. Shredded ears bore mute testimony to her many battles with coons. Though she ate prodigious meals, every slatted rib showed, her paunch was lean, and knobby hip bones thrust over her back. Outwardly, Precious Sue resembled nothing so much as an emaciated alligator.

For all the coon hunters of the Creeping Hills cared she could have been an alligator, as long as she continued to perform with such consummate artistry on a coon's track. Though a casual observer might have deduced that Precious Sue had trouble just holding herself up, she had once disappeared for forty-eight hours. Mun finally found her under the same tree, and holding the same coon, that she must have run up two hours after starting. She was one of the very few hounds that had ever forced Old Joe to seek a refuge in his magic sycamore, and no hound could do more.

Unfortunately, she lived under a curse. The only pup of what should have been an abundant litter, a bad enough thing if considered by itself, Precious Sue had been born on a wild night at the wrong time of the moon. Therefore, she had a streak of wildness that must assert itself whenever the moon was dark. If she were run at such times, she must surely meet disaster. But as Precious Sue met and fell in beside them, Harky thought only of his dream.

"Do you think Old Joe will prowl tonight?" he asked his father.

"What you drivin' at, Harky?"

"I was thinking Old Joe might prowl, and come here, and Sue will run him up that sycamore in the woodlot, and—"

"Harky!" Mun thundered. "Heed what you say!"

"Huh?" Harky asked bewilderedly.

Mun shook a puzzled head. "I can't figger you, Harky. I can't figger you a'tall. This is the dark of the moon!"

"I forgot," Harky said humbly.

"I reckon you ain't allus at fault for what runs on in that head of yours."

"Hadn't you ought to tie her up?" Harky questioned.

"Sue can't abide ties and no coon'll come here tonight," Mun said decisively. "Least of all, Old Joe."

"But if he does—" Harky began.

"Harky!" Mun thundered. "He won't!"

"Yes, Pa."

Long after he was supposedly in bed, Harky stood before his open window listening to the song of the south wind. Sometimes he couldn't even figure himself.

There'd been last fall, when they jumped the big buck out of Garson's slashing. Mun and Mellie Garson had taken its trail, but Harky had a feeling about that buck. He'd felt that it would head for the rhododendron thicket on Hoot Owl Ridge, and that in getting there it would pass Split Rock. Harky went to sit on Split Rock. Not twenty minutes later, the buck passed beside him. It was an easy shot.

Old Joe would not come tonight because Mun said he wouldn't. But Harky was unable to rid himself of a feeling that he would, and he was uneasy when he finally went to bed.

He slept soundly, but Harky had never been able to figure his sleep either. Often he awakened with a feeling that something was due to happen, and it always did. When the wild geese flew north or south, or a thunder storm was due to break, Harky knew before he heard anything. This night he sat up in bed with a feeling that he would hear something very soon.

He heard it, the muffled squawk of a hen. On a backwoods farm, at night, a squawking hen means just one thing. Harky jumped out of bed and padded to the door of his father's bedroom.

"Pa."

"What ya want?"

"I heard a hen squawk."

"Be right with ya."

Harky was dressed and ready, with his shotgun in his hands, when Mun came into the kitchen. Mun lighted a lantern, took his own shotgun from its rack, and led the way to the chicken house. He knelt beside the little door by which the chickens left and entered and his muffled word ripped the air.

"Look!"

Harky looked. Seeming to begin and end at the little door, the biggest coon tracks in the world were plain in the soft snow. Ten thousand butterflies churned in his stomach. It was almost as though the whole thing were his fault.

He said, "Old Joe."

Mun glanced queerly at his son, but he made no reply as he held his lantern so it lighted the tracks. Harky trotted behind his father and noted with miserable eyes where Sue's tracks joined Old Joe's. They came to the flood surging over Willow Brook, and just at the edge a whole section of ice had already caved in.

Both sets of tracks ended there.