The True Blue Scouts of Sugar Man Swamp by Kathi Appelt

“Anything for you, my dearie dear.”
    And with that, they turned south, all seventeen of them, while visions of sugarcane danced in their heads.

26
    A FTER J AEGER AND S ONNY B OY drove off, Chap felt an urge to throw all of the pots and pans against the wall, and he might have if it hadn’t been for Sweetums.
    The tall ginger cat wove his way around his boy’s ankles, which had a surprisingly calming effect. While Chap gathered his wits, the cat stretched his full length, then sauntered over to his food bowl in the corner and started to munch. It was some sort of crunchy mix especially designed for “adult cats with hair balls.” It wasn’t the same tasty flavor as, say, fresh catfish, but altogether it wasn’t that bad. And it did seem to assuage the hair balls, which, Sweetums had to admit, weren’t all that attractive.
    Then he remembered that he needed to let Chap know that something wasn’t right with the world. Last night had brought some odd rumble-rumble-rumble-rumble s up through the floorboards, and he could tell they weren’t the usual rumblings of the thunderstorm.
    â€œPeople,” he announced, “I’ve come bearing news.” He said it in his clearest Catalian, but to his chagrin, they both ignored him. He meowed again. “Heads up, people!” But instead of offering him a listening ear, Chap told him, “You know you have to go to the back during café hours.” Of course Sweetums knew that. Duh!
    The back was where the family actually lived. The front was the café. There was a back porch, which was screened in. And a front porch, which wasn’t screened in.
    Sometimes a customer chose to eat his or her pies on the front porch, an action that Sweetums understood because he longed, longed, longed to go out there. Alas . “You’re an indoor cat,” Chap told him. “If you got out, you’d eat all the baby birds.”
    â€œBaby birds would be nice,” replied Sweetums, licking his chops. But alas again. It was against the rules. Who made these rules, anyways? he wondered. Were any of them written in Catalian?
    He was especially not allowed into the café during business hours. Chap told him it had something to do with the county health department and cleanliness regulations, which was a puzzle because, “People! Can’t you see that I clean my fur all the time?” He was reasonably sure that he was cleaner than any number of the patrons who ate their fried pies.
    Then again, there was that whole hair ball thing. Humans. They had such weak stomachs. Still, hair balls notwithstanding, he knew that something was not right in the swamp. He meowed again, to no avail. For the third time that morning: Alas!

27
    J UST A FEW MILES UP the road from Paradise Pies Café, Coyoteman Jim wrapped up his overnight show on the local radio station KSUG. He stretched and yawned. The night had been long, and he was tired. The storm that had blown by had been a humdinger, and watching it on the radar had worn him out. Plus, he was worried about the Jaeger Stitch situation. He had learned about it the day before, when Jaeger and Sonny Boy came by the station to talk about airing some radio ads.
    Coyoteman Jim wasn’t a serious bona fide “twitcher” (a nickname for a birder), but he just loved to paddle through the dark ins and outs of the Bayou Tourterelle, looking and listening for the beautiful birds that made their homes in the Sugar Man Swamp. Like his old friend Audie, he too dreamed of one day seeing an actual ivory-billed woodpecker.
    â€œGhost bird,” he called it. Some people named it a Lord God bird, or a good-God bird. Some called it a Lazarusbird. Others just called it IBWO, which was its official banding and spotting ID.
    But to Coyoteman Jim, it was a ghost. Just like the Sugar Man himself. Something that had been there before, and still seemed to be there, even though there was no hard