The Weirdo by Theodore Taylor Page A

do you feed a hawk?" Chip asked.
    "Meat, table scraps. I'm not sure. Watch it doesn't eat you."
    Chip grinned over. "Am I crazy?"
    "Not altogether."
    Chip soon established the bird hospital in the spillway house yard.
    ***
    "I WISH Papa would get off my back about the Dairy Queen," Sam said. "He's been at it for two months."
    "He's stubborn, Samantha, you know that. He wants you to get a daytime job. He doesn't like you driving home alone at night," Dell replied. "No mystery about that."
    "It's still August, Mama. Summer! All the jobs have been taken. Does he want me to go to Norfolk, Portsmouth, Lizzie City...?"
    "Of course not."
    "Well, then..."
    The smell of peach jam was heavy in the old kitchen, a pot of the sugary, peeled, crushed fruit boiling on the stove. Sam had helped Dell wash pint-sized Ball mason jars earlier in the morning. It was pectin-time at the Sanders house, the height of the jam and jelly season.
    Next would be wild grapes. Dell had already made her quota of blackberry jam, close to a hundred pints, and she would sell every jar.
    "Do I have to say it again? He cares about you; he worries about you. You're the pride of his life. You're
the one he talks about, brags about—not me. How smart you are, what a good girl you are."
    "He doesn't tell me that. All he tells me is, get another job."
    "Samantha, we've been married twenty-two years, and he still has trouble communicating with me. You're sixteen, and that's double trouble. But I'm telling you, he'd walk through fire for either one of us, and Steve, too."
    Sam pushed a damp curl from her forehead and sighed deeply.
    Dell laughed. It was a laugh of understanding more than of humor. "Just because he doesn't hug you all the time or tell you he loves you doesn't mean it isn't so. There are just as many women who can't do that as men. So take a lesson from a homegrown example." Dell stopped and regarded her daughter a moment in silence. "I'll bet this kitchen sermon has been preached by mothers a trillion times."
    Sam nodded and smiled, at last. Then asked, "But, Mama, what's he so afraid of?"
    Dell threw up her hands. "Samantha, he doesn't want you to get shot at that dam Dairy Queen!"
    "The chances of
that
are a trillion to one."
    "Are they?"
    Okay, Dennis didn't seem to think so, either.
    "Your papa has seen danger, a lot of it. I think he
has a little bell up in his head that rings when a rattler is crossin' Chapanoke. Same applies to the Dairy Queen waitin there for a stickup, like Burger King."
    Sam gave up. "Do you need any more help?"
    "Not for a little while."
    "Think I'll go cool off."
    "Good idea."
    Sam went upstairs, changed into her cutoffs, lifted a swimsuit top out of the lower drawer—not that she had much to cover up—and rode her bike up heat-waved Chapanoke toward the canal, feeling she'd solved nothing.
    A few minutes later she plunged off the bridge into the mahogany-colored water, rolled over and back-stroked. No one else was there, as usual. With her skin-and-bones figure, she preferred to swim alone.
    ***
    TELFORD called Chip one evening in late August, saying, "Meet me at Dunnegan's tomorrow morning. Around eight. A farmer's shot a bear on the western edge."
    "One of ours?"
    "He was raiding a cornfield this afternoon."
    "Not Henry?" Chip asked, alarmed. Any of them were cause for alarm, but Henry in particular.
    The last week, they'd traced three males into cornfields that neighbored the swamp. Males often ventured out to gobble down the ripe ears. Now one was dead.
    Next morning, riding north by the canal before swinging west to visit the farmer, Chip asked, "Isn't there any way to stop the killing?"
    Telford shook his head. "I don't know of any. Bears've been raiding the fields for centuries and will keep on doing it so long as crops are put in."
    "Can't the shooting be outlawed?"
    "Farmer has a right to protect his livelihood, Chip. Most of 'em don't even report it. They shoot and skin the carcass, put steaks into the