Free Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls

what I said, Rowdy seemed to think the sack had climbed the tree. He started bawling the tree bark. I had never known my old dog to lie, so I looked up into the branches of the big sycamore. What I saw all but caused me to fall over backwards.
    Sitting on a limb, with his back against the trunk, was that hundred dollar monkey. He was just sitting there, as big as you please, with a sandwich in one paw, and an apple in the other, eating away and looking straight at me.
    He had passed out my apples to some of the little monkeys. They were sitting around on the limbs, chewing away and peering at me with their beady little eyes. I could see my gunny sack with the traps in it draped over a limb.
    I felt the anger start way down in my feet. It burned its way through my body and exploded in my head.
    “Why, you thieving rascal,” I yelled. “You can’t get away with this. You give that stuff back to me.”
    I saw right away that the big monkey had no intention of giving anything back to me. He stood up on the limb and started jumping up and down, and laughing fit to kill. This made me so mad I came close to cussing a little.
    While hanging around my grandpa’s store, I had learned a few cuss words from the men, but I never did use them. I was afraid to. Daisy had told me that if any boy who wasn’t twenty-one years old yet cussed, his tongue would rot out of his head. So I just didn’t do any cussing. I didn’t figure that I could get along without my tongue. But I was so mad at that monkey, I had to do something.
    I grabbed up a chunk from the ground and threw it at him as hard as I could. I didn’t come close to hitting him, but it made him mad anyway. He let out a squall and threw one of my apples straight at me. I had to jump sideways to keep it from hitting me.
    The idea of an old monkey throwing something at me was more than I could stand. I went all to pieces. I had a darn good beanshooter, and was such a good shot I could almost drive nails with it. I jerked it out of my pocket and reached for some ammunition. When I discovered that I didn’t have one little rock in my pocket, that really made me mad. It looked like everything in the world was going against me.
    Not far away was a washout and the bottom was covered with gravel. I ran over and jumped down in it. Dropping to my knees, I started filling my pockets with small rocks.
    “Rowdy,” I said, “I don’t care what the Old Man of the Mountains, or anyone else, does, I’m not going to let that monkey get away with this. I’ll make it so hot for him he’ll think that the woods are on fire.”
    With my pockets bulging with ammunition, I climbed out ofthe washout and ran back to the sycamore tree. The big monkey was still standing on the limb, jumping up and down, and laughing his head off.
    I loaded my beanshooter and pulled the rubbers back as far as I could. Taking dead aim, I let go. Old William Tell himself couldn’t have shot any straighter than I did. I plunked that monkey a good one about where his belly button should have been. He let out a squall that could have been heard all over the bottoms, and started scratching at the spot where my rock had stung him. I couldn’t have been more pleased.
    I reared back and laughed as loud as I could. “How do you like that?” I yelled at him. “It’s not so funny now, is it? Well, you haven’t seen anything yet.”
    Chuckling to myself, I loaded up again, took dead aim, and plunked him another good one. I never should have shot that big monkey the second time, because it made him awfully mad. Turning to the little monkeys, he uttered a few of those deep grunts and then every one of them started dropping down from the sycamore tree.
    This was the last thing in the world I expected the monkeys to do, and I didn’t like what was happening at all. I started backing up, one step at a time.
    “Holy smokes, Rowdy,” I said, “they’re coming after us. I didn’t think they’d do that, did you?”
    By the