Demon Box

It was a fine fall morning, early and cold and sweet as cider. Down in the Bottom the only one up and about was old Papa Sun, and him just barely. Hanging in the low limbs of the crabapple trees was still some of those strings of daybreak fog called “haint hair” by them that believes in such. The night shifts and the day shifts were shifting very slow. The crickets hadn’t put away their fiddles. The spiders hadn’t shook the dew out of their webs yet. The birds hadn’t quite woke up and the bats hadn’t quite gone to sleep. Nothing was a-move except one finger of sun slipping soft up the knobby trunk of the hazel. It was one of the prettiest times of day at one of the prettiest times of year, and all the Bottom folk were content to let it come about quiet and slow and savory.

Tricker the Squirrel was awake but he wasn’t about. He was lazying in the highest hole in his cottonwood highrise with just his nose poking from his pillow of a tail, dreaming about flying. Every now and again he would twinkle one bright eye out through his dream and his puffy pillowhair to check the hazel tree way down below to see if any of the nuts was ready for reaping. He had to admit they were all pretty near prime. All day yesterday he had watched those nuts turning softly browner and browner and, come sundown, had judged them just one day short of perfect.

“And that means if I don’t get them today, tomorrow they are very apt to be just one day past perfect.”

So he was promising himself “Just as quick as that sunbeam touches the first hazelnut I get right on the job.” Then, after a couple of winks, “Just as quick as that sunbeam touches the second hazelnut I’ll zip right down with my tote sack and go to gathering.”—and so forth, merely dozing and dallying, and savoring the still, sweet air. The hazelnuts get browner. The sunbeam inches silently on—the fifteenth! the twentieth!—but the morning was simply so pretty and the air hanging so dreamy and still he hated to break the peace.

Well then, the finger just about touches the twenty-seventh hazelnut, when a holy dadblamed goshalmighty roar came kabooming through the Bottom like a freight druv by the Devil himself, or at least his next hottest hollerer.

Oh, what a roar! Oh oh oh! Not just loud, and long, but high and low and chilling and fiery all to once. The haint hair and the spider webs all froze stiff—it was that chilling!—whilst the springs boiled dry and the crabapples burned black from the hellheat of it. Even way up in Tricker’s tall, tall tree the cottonwood leaves turned brown and looked ready to fall still weeks before their time. Moreover, that roar had startled Tricker out of his snooze so sudden that he stuck startled halfway between ceiling and floor. And hung there, petrified, spraddle-eagled spellbound stiff in midair, with eyes big as biscuits and every hair stabbing straight out from him like quills on a puffed-up porcupine.

“What in the name of sixty cyclones was that?” he asks himself in a quakering voice. “A dream gone nightmare?”

He pinches his nose to check. The spellbind busts and Tricker drops hard to the floor: bump!

“Hmm,” he puzzles, rubbing his nose and his knees, “it is like a dream with a little nightmare noise thrown in—like a plain old floating and flying dream dream… except when you get real bumps it must be a real floor.”

And right then it cut loose again—“ROAWRRR!” shaking the cottonwood from root to crown till a critter could hardly stand. Tricker crawls cautious across the floor on his sore knees, and very cautious sticks his sore nose out, and very very cautious cranes over to look down into the clearing below.

“Again I say ROARR!”

The sound made Tricker’s ears ring and his blood curdle, and the sight he saw made him wonder if he wasn’t still dreaming, bumps or no.

“I’m BIG DOUBLE from the high ridges and I’m DOUBLE BIG and DOUBLE BAD and DOUBLE DOUBLE HONGRY a-ROARRR!”

It was a bear, a grizzerly bear, so big and hairy and horrible it looked like the two biggest baddest bears in the Ozarks had teamed up to make one.

“Again I say HONGRY! And I don’t mean lunchtime snacktime littletime hongry, I mean grumpy grouchy bedtime bigtime hongry. I live big and I sleep big. When I hit the hay tonight I got six months before breakfast so I need a supper the size of my sleep. I need a big bellyfull of fuel and layby of fat to fire my fulltime furnace and stoke my sixmonths snore a-ROOAAHRRRR!”

When the bear opened his mouth his teeth looked like stalactites in a cavern. When he swung his head around his eyes looked like a doublebarrel shotgun going off at you.

“I ate the high hills bare as a bone and the foothills raw as a rock, and now I’m going to eat the WHOLE! BOTTOM! and everybody in it ALL UP!”