Free Thief of Dreams by John Yount Page A

the wagon road, the fox making frenzied dashes toward any sort of cover before the rope, coming taut, snatched it off its feet, but it was always up in an instant, making a mad dash in another direction. When they were out of sight of the house, they cut across the lower pasture, where, at last, Lester knelt and began to pull the fox gently toward him. “Well, well, buddyroe, easy now, well, well,” he crooned, but he got bitten just the same, quicker than the eye could follow. Still, he got his left hand around its muzzle, got the collar off, and stroked the fox gently and fondly until it quit bucking and jerking. But the moment he turned it loose, it skimmed across the open ground of the pasture and into the woods. Gone. Vanished. Just like that.
    After a while Lester seemed to notice, in a distant sort of way, the puncture wounds the fox’s sharp teeth had left between his thumb and forefinger, and absently, he sucked them and spat, sucked them and spat, gazing across the somehow outrageously empty pasture the fox had left in its wake.
    James didn’t know what made him think he understood how Lester was feeling, but he was sure that, on some level or other, he did understand, and he couldn’t take it another minute. “Did you know that chiggers don’t bite?” he asked all at once.
    Lester gave him an odd look.
    â€œThat’s right,” James told him. “They spit on you, and the spit is such a powerful acid, it dissolves your skin at once, and then the chigger climbs down in the hole and eats the dissolved skin. You can put clear fingernail polish over the little bastards and smother them, but you’ll still itch like mad because you’ve got all that chigger spit down in there, plus a dead chigger. It’s true,” James said, looking into Lester’s perplexed face, “I read it in the Sunday paper in an article about strange animal facts, or some such thing. Did you know that more people die every year from bee stings than they do of snake bite? And,” he said, pointing a finger at Lester as though he were delivering an important lecture, “did you know that if an eagle were flying a mile up and could read, he could have read the headlines of that Sunday paper?”
    At last Lester began to grin and shake his head. “No,” he said, “I didn’t know none of them things, but I’m beginning to suspicion you’re a little bit crazy.”
    â€œI absolutely guarantee it,” James said and pushed Lester over backwards.
    â€œWhy you …” Lester said, but James caught one of Lester’s bare feet, as horny with callous as a horse’s hoof, and spun him on his back.
    â€œLet me git a-holt … durn you …” Lester sputtered, but James rushed him, lifting the foot as high as he could and standing Lester almost on his head before he turned loose, and Lester went over as stiffly as a chopped tree to land flat on his belly.
    â€œOooff! Daaagone little …” Lester said and scrabbled up.
    But he was awkward and slow, and for a while James was able to sidestep him, to duck under his big, grasping hands, to push him off, but finally Lester managed to catch an arm, and although James yanked him off his feet, he couldn’t jerk free. Laughing, they both fell thrashing and rolling down the steep pasture until James found himself nearly paralyzed by the strength of Lester’s grip.
    â€œJesus,” he said at last, gasping with laughter and pain, “turn loose! You’re killing me!”
    Lester obeyed instantly, but it took a while before James could shake some feeling back into the arm Lester had grabbed. His neck, which Lester had also gotten a passing grip on, felt seriously wrenched. He’d seen Grandfather Marshall wring the neck of a chicken, and he felt Lester had stopped just short of doing the same thing.
    â€œI never meant to hurt you none,” Lester told him, looking