The Great Sand Fracas of Ames County Read Online Free Page A

discovered that he had this gift, and he truly believed it was a gift, when he was seven years old. Felix, the Adler’s collie, would look at Ambrose as if he understood exactly what Ambrose was saying. And Ambrose noticed another strange thing; when he was alone with an animal and talking to it, he didn’t stutter. One day Ambrose found a raccoon by the side of the road. Someone must have hit it with a car. It had a broken leg, but otherwise the animal seemed in reasonable shape. Ambrose named him George and put a little wooden splint on his leg wrapped tight with cloth and tape. Ambrose talked to George all the while he was fixing his leg, expecting any minute that the animal would bite him or try to run away. But George did neither. The injured raccoon seemed to understand what Ambrose was saying. Ambrose was afraid that the raccoon and Felix wouldn’t get along, that they might try to kill each other. But the dog and the raccoon got along with each other just fine. In fact they became good buddies. What a threesome they were: a big collie dog, a limping raccoon, and a stuttering farm kid.
    Ambrose was afraid that his father would make him turn George lose once he healed. But his father never said a word, and while the little raccoon could have run off anytime he wanted, he never did.
    When Ambrose finished high school in 1951, most folks didn’t think he was smart enough to graduate, except his father and mother, who always believed he was “destined for great things,” as Ma said. After high school Ambrose turned to full-time farming with his father, helping him take care of the twenty milk cows, growing fifteen acres of corn, fifteen acres of oats, ten acres of potatoes, and tending a large vegetable garden that provided much of the food for their table.
    George was Ambrose’s pet for almost twenty years, but one morning the raccoon didn’t greet Ambrose when he went out to the barn to help with the morning milking. Ambrose crawled the ladder to the haymow and found George’s body; sometime during the night he must have died. Ambrose figured in human terms George would have been eighty or even ninety years old.
    Only a few days after George died, Ambrose heard a neighbor telling his father that he had shot a big female raccoon that had been raiding his sweet corn patch.
    â€œThat old coon had little ones; I could tell she was nursing,” the neighbor said. “Probably got rid of a half a dozen of them raiding bastards,” he concluded proudly.
    Overhearing this, Ambrose immediately decided to go looking for the raccoon’s den, likely in a hollow tree in a woodlot near the neighbor’s sweet corn patch. Every evening, when the chores were done, he went searching for the raccoon’s den, knowing that if he didn’t find it in a couple days the little ones would all die of starvation.
    On his third foray into the neighbor’s woodlot, Ambrose found the den tree. Only one little raccoon in the litter was alive, and just barely. Ambrose fed the weak little fellow with milk that he dripped into his mouth with an eyedropper. After a couple weeks, the baby raccoon was drinking out of a bowl and growing like everything. Ambrose named him George II. And of course he and the little raccoon talked to each other every day. Felix had died several years earlier, and Ambrose’s father had replaced him with another collie named Fanny. Fanny and George had never much liked each other, but Fanny and George II became great buddies, and together with Ambrose they often had a three-way conversation: Ambrose sharing his thoughts, Fanny making a little whining noise, and George II making a purring sound. Ambrose couldn’t understand what Fanny and George II were saying, but from the way they looked at Ambrose, they seemed to know exactly the meaning of what was coming out of his mouth.
    Ambrose had grown accustomed to not being able to speak well when he was with people. He