The Weirdo by Theodore Taylor Read Free Book Online

to Florida. They travel south each fall and north in the spring. Dunnegan occasionally comes out from his store across from the Feeder Ditch to watch the traffic.
For almost two hundred years, the waters have borne trade from states below North Carolina. Steam packets chuffed along it loaded with produce and cotton. Barges full of timber were towed through it, as were schooners. There were watermelon boats and potato boats and boats full of fresh corn bound for Norfolk and Washington and Baltimore. A showboat once plied it every summer, offering evening performances at canalside hamlets.
No longer is it used for commerce. Now only pleasure boats sail up and down its placid surfaces. I watched them, too, now and then.
The serenity of the days of George Washington remains. Trees grow down the banks in thick walls of foliage on the swamp side, and bears sometimes
emerge from them to swim the canal. For their own sake, Dunnegan wishes they'd stay in the swamp. So do I.
Powhatan Swamp

English I

Charles Clewt

Ohio State University
    ***
    "DUNNEGAN'S, in about forty-five minutes," she told her mother. The convenience store—deli, with video rentals as a sideline, was less than ten minutes away from home.
    Sam got to her feet and took a step, then closed her eyes in pain.
    Seeing the grimace, Chip quickly said, "Don't try to walk. I'll piggyback you."
    "That's ridiculous," she said.
    "You'd rather walk?"
    "No."
    He bent down, and she climbed aboard.
    Going through the front room, he stopped a moment. "My dad works in here."
    A large window and skylight let in the morning sun. There were sketches and watercolors of birds everywhere. Three or four mounted specimens, roosting or in flight, looking alive, stood on pedestals.
    "He does the necessary taxidermy, uses them as models, then gives them to museums."
    "Stuffed things have never appealed to me." Some of her father's friends had walls covered with deer heads, game birds, and fish.
    "Me neither."
    Chip carried her on out into the yard, telling the dogs he'd be back soon.
    They bumped along toward the little dam and the spillway chutes.
    "Don't you get bored back here?"
    "Right now, I'm so busy between watching the bears and working on my project that I barely have time to sleep."
    Sam knew she was being nosy again. "What project?"
    "That five-year moratorium on hunting and shooting in the Powhatan will end next fall unless we—Tom Telford and myself—can persuade the Wildlife Service to continue it another five years."
    Tom Telford was grit in her papa's eyes. An ache in his ear.
    "I've talked to the National Wildlife Conservancy a dozen times. They weren't even aware the ban was going to be lifted."
    "Are you serious?"
    "Absolutely. They'll give me help and money."
    Whoops,
Sam thought. Collision course with all the hunters and fishermen in the area. There'd been rumors that an environmentalist group was being organized to keep the ban. One hunter and fisherman named Stuart Sanders would be livid when he found out a seventeen-year-old kid was behind it.
    A few minutes later, Chip deposited her in the Feeder Ditch boat and started the motor. They headed east down the waterway, past tangles of berry bushes and thom thickets wound with dead honeysuckle vines.
    He shouted above the racket of the outboard. "You know how much the bear population has increased in the last four years?"
    Facing him, Sam shook her head.
    "We think somewhere between a hundred and one-fifty...."
    "We?"
    "Tom Telford and myself..."
    Sam remained silent.
Tom Telford again.
    "That the white-tailed deer have tripled is a guess...."
    His shouting echoed against the sides of the ditch.
    "And we think we can count thousands more wood ducks, mourning doves, bobwhites...."
    All shotgun targets.
    "So we can't allow people to come back in here and start killing again...." He was looking over her head.
    We
again.
    The boy lapsed into silence for the remainder of the trip.
    Â 
    EMERGING out of the Feeder