Free Summer of the Monkeys by Wilson Rawls Page B

why don’t you just forget about catching him, and try to catch the little ones? If you could catch all of them, you’d still have a lot of money.”
    “It’s not that simple, Papa,” I said. “That big monkey is the leader of the pack. He tells the little monkeys what to do, and they mind him. He won’t let one of them get close to a trap.”
    Papa frowned and looked at me like he couldn’t believe what I had said.
    “Are you trying to tell me that those monkeys can talk to each other?” he asked.
    “They sure can,” I said. “As sure as I’m standing here, they can talk to each other. Why, that big monkey even laughed at me. He can turn flips and somersaults, and do things that you wouldn’t believe he could do.”
    “Aw, Jay Berry,” Papa said, “you’re just imagining things. Monkeys can’t talk to each other. Whatever gave you that idea anyway?”
    It was getting harder and harder to explain things to Papa. It seemed that the more I talked, the crazier everything sounded; but I wanted him to believe me, so there wasn’t but one thing I could do. Starting at the very beginning, I told him everything that had happened, from my first go-around with the monkeys until I had sailed over the rail fence.
    Papa listened to me, but I could see a lot of doubt in his eyes. He just stood there with a frown on his face, looking at me, and then at Rowdy. Now and then he would turn and stare off toward the bottoms. Finally, as if he had made up his mind about something, he shook his head, pursed his lips, and blew out a lot of air.
    Taking the check lines from his shoulders, he wrapped them around the handles of the corn planter and said, “Well, corn or no corn, I’d like to see an animal that’s as smart as all of that. Come on. Let’s go and have a look at this educated monkey.”
    If I had found a pony and a .22 lying in the middle of the road, I wouldn’t have been more pleased. As long as my papa was with me, I wouldn’t have been scared of the devil himself if he’d had horns on both ends. Besides, Papa was as stout as a grizzly bear, and I just knew that if he ever got his hands on that big monkey we would sack him up.
    Just as we entered the thick timber of the bottoms, Papa reached down and picked up a club. “I don’t think those monkeys will jump on us,” he said, “but just in case they do, I think I’ll be ready for them.”
    “That’s a good idea, Papa,” I said. “I think I’ll get one, too.” I walked over to an old high-water drift and picked up a club twice as big as the one Papa had.
    Papa laughed and said, “What are you going to do with that? Stick it in the ground and climb it in case that big monkey gets after us?”
    “That wouldn’t do any good, Papa,” I said. “It wouldn’t do any good to climb anything. Those monkeys can climb better than squirrels can. You ought to see how fast they can get around in the timber.”
    When we reached the sycamore where I had last seen the monkeys, I got another surprise. My gunny sack was gone again. We walked all around the big tree and really looked it over. There wasn’t a monkey or a gunny sack in it.
    “Are you sure this is the tree?” Papa asked.
    “Oh, I know it’s the tree, Papa,” I said. “See that limb way up there? That’s where my gunny sack and traps were. Now they’re gone. I guess that big monkey took them with him.”
    “Oh, I don’t think he could do anything like that,” Papa said,“but if he did, he couldn’t get very far carrying a sack with steel traps in it. Come on, let’s look around a little.”
    Papa didn’t know that hundred dollar monkey like I did, or he wouldn’t have said anything like that. I was pretty well convinced that the big monkey could do anything a human being could do.
    We walked all around through the bottoms, looking up into the trees for a monkey. We looked and we looked. Even Old Rowdy looked and sniffed, but we didn’t see hair nor hide of a monkey.
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