Harris and me : a summer remembered by Gary Paulsen Page B

clothes off he looked as white as paper except for his face, which was burned red.
    Harris was already in the water and I was in midair when Knute went over me and almost drained the pool when he landed. Water must have gone
    no

    twenty feet in the air. He was going so fast he almost skipped across the surface, and as soon as he came up he grabbed Harris by the arm in one hand and me in the other and started slamming and flipping us around like a couple of dead fish.
    Then he threw us to the side and walked out of the pool and dressed, putting his clothes on over his wet body, and walked up to the house without saying a word.
    Harris came up covered with mud, sputtering, and I looked around the pool trying to understand which way was out of the water.
    "Man," Harris laughed, "ain't it fun when Pa plays with us?"
    "Plays?"
    "Yeah. He hardly ever does it. I just wish he'd do it more. I think it would settle him some."
    It felt like most of the bones in my body had turned to cartilage. At no time during the "play" did I ever have any idea of control over my own body and I had never felt strength like I felt in Knute's hand holding my arm, or the ease with which he flipped us around. His grip was like a vise connected to spring steel.
    "Settle him?" Knute seemed the least nervous person I had ever seen. He just drank coffee and smoked Bull Durham cigarettes.
    "Yeah. It's his nerves, makes him the way he is.

    Worry about the farm and all. He used to play with me all the time. Once he threw me clean over the threshing machine. That was a day, I'll tell you."
    "I'll bet . . ."
    We were lying nude on the bank of the river, the sun cooking us dry. I kept looking up toward the house and covering myself with my hand—we were in plain view—but Harris didn't seem to care.
    I lay back and watched the clouds for a moment and wondered how it could be that I was living here now and had been living somewhere else before, and why I didn't seem to remember so much of the other place I had lived, and wondered if I could talk about it with Harris, when he suddenly swore.
    "Damn."
    "What's the matter?"
    "Tick."
    "Wood tick?" I opened my eyes and sat up. We'd been seeing ticks all summer. It was now about the first of July and they were almost all gone. Clair once said that the ticks were always gone by the Fourth of July. "So what?"
    "Not wood tick. Fever tick."
    I scanned the ground around me carefully. "They'll give us a fever?"
    "Not us, the cattle. It means we'll have to dip the cows. Man, I hate to dip cattle."

    "Dip the cows?" I had no idea—as usual—what he meant. "How do you dip cows?"
    But he ignored me and instead slipped into his bibs and headed for the house. "Come on, we got to tell Pa about the tick."
    At first it didn't seem that dipping the cattle would be such a difficult thing. There was a large pen in back of the barn with a gate that was usually left open. Feed was put in a trough and it brought the cattle into the pen. The cows came readily enough but there was a bull, a large, flat-sided, black-and-white Holstein that kept pushing at the fence, throwing dirt up over his shoulders and blowing snot.
    "He looks mean," I said to Harris. "The bull."
    "Naww. He's just nervous. We've kept him apart until now and he knows it's time to be with the cows. He don't like nothing to mess his breeding up. And he don't like to dip. None of 'em do."
    With all the cattle in the pen and the gate closed, a chute was rigged up with board panels and a ramp that led up to the top of a long sheet-metal tank over four feet deep. Inside the tank another ramp was laid that led out of the tank. It had wooden crosspieces so the cows could get footing to climb out to yet another ramp that led down to the ground and out into the pasture.

    The idea was simple. The cattle were to be pushed out of the pen into the chute, forced to jump into the tank, and then prodded up the ramp to freedom.
    "What goes in the tank?" I asked.
    "Creosote," Harris said,