a tale of my guest author, a scared little boy who grew up to be my daddy
Cousin Anna has a cat. She calls her Kitsy-Witsy. She loves cats. Every morning she says, “Good morning Kitsy, do you want Mama to fix you some warm milk?”
Cousin Anna calls herself “Mama” when she talks to her cat. At night she says, “Do you want to sleep with Mama?”
That is Cousin Anna. She likes cats.
She won’t put Kitsy-Witsy out of doors at night because coyotes live in the forest around us. Cousin Anna thinks the coyotes might get her cat. Maybe they would. Coyotes tried to eat our turkeys.
It was night, and the turkeys were sleeping in the big fir tree behind the chicken house. The coyotes barked, and howled, and tried to climb the tree to get the turkeys.
“Yip, yip, yip. Oowhaa, OUOUOOUU! Hickey, hickey, hicky, ooooooOOOH!”
My sisters and I were sleeping in the new bedroom way off on the end of the house. We heard the coyotes. One of them was right outside the window where we slept – that was way off out there on the far side of the new room.
We were afraid the coyote would try to get us instead of the turkeys. My big sister said, “Let’s hide under the bed so the coyotes can’t find us.”
the author and his sisters
We pulled the covers off the bed and crawled under it. We shivered and cried until Old Spot started barking at the coyotes.
He said, “Go away or I’ll eat you up.”
But the coyotes barked back, “There are six of us and only one of you.”
Then Daddy jumped out of bed and grabbed his shot gun. He went outside, right by our bedroom window. “Blood, thunder, and sudden death!” he shouted. He fired the gun. “BAM, BAM!”
A shotgun sounds very loud when you are under a bed at midnight. My mother heard us crying way down there at the far end of the house. She told us to get on top of the bed because coyotes wouldn’t hurt children anyway.
Do you think that my mother gets strange ideas?
This coyote crawled under an old house and died. How would you like those eyes staring at you?