Excerpt from The Night The Bear Ate Goombaw

   There was so much confusion over the in incident anyway that I don't want to add to it by getting the sequences mixed up. First of all-and I remember this clearly-it was the summer after Crazy Eddie Muldoon and I had been sprung from third grade at Delmore Blight Grade School. The Muldoons' only good milk cow died that summer, shortly after the weasel got in their chicken house and killed most of the laying hens. This was just before the fertilizer company Mr. Muldoon worked for went bankrupt, and he lost his job. The engine on his tractor blew up a week later, so he couldn't harvest his crops, which were all pretty much dried up from the drought anyway.
   Then Mr. Muldoon fell in the pit trap that Crazy Eddie and I had dug to capture wild animals. Our plan was to train the wild animals and then put on shows to earn a little extra money for the family. But Mr. Muldoon fell in the trap, and afterwards made us shove all the dirt back into it. The only wild animal we had trapped was a skunk, and when Mr. Muldoon fell in on top of it, he terrified the poor creature practically to death. Neither Mr. Muldoon nor the skunk was hurt much, but the skunk managed to escape during all the excitement. So there went our wild-animal show. This occurred about midsummer, as I recall, about the time Mr. Muldoon's nerves got so bad that old Doc Hix told him to stop drinking coffee, which apparently was what had brought on his nervous condition.
   For the rest of the summer, Mr. Muldoon gave off a faint, gradually fading odor of skunk. Unless he got wet. Then the odor reconstituted itself to approximately its original power, which placed a major restraint on the Muldoons' social life, meager as that was. Fortunately, Mr. Muldoon didn't get wet that often, mainly because of the drought that had killed off his crops. As Mrs. Muldoon was fond of saying, every cloud has a silver lining.
   So far it had been a fairly typical summer for Mr. Muldoon, but he claimed to be worried about a premonition that his luck was about to turn bad. Then Eddie's grandmother, Mrs. Muldoon's mother, showed up for a visit.
   "I knew it!" Mr. Muldoon told a neighbor. "I knew something like this was about to happen! I must be physic."
   After I got to know Eddie's grandmother a little better, I could see why Mr. Muldoon regarded her visit as visit a stroke of bad luck. She immediately assumed command of the family and began to boss everyone around, including me. Nevertheless, I doubted that Mr. Muldoon was actually physic, because otherwise he would never have come up with the idea of the camping trip. "
   "I'm worried about Pa," Eddie said one morning as we sat on his back porch. "He's not been hisself lately ."
   "Who's he been?" I asked, somewhat startled, although I regarded Mr. Muldoon as one of the oddest persons I knew. 
   "Pa's just started acting weird, that's all. You know what crazy idea he came up with this morning? He says we all gotta go on a camping trip up in the mountains and pick huckleberries. He says we can sell any extra huckleberries we get for cash. But Pa don't know anything about camping. We don't even have any camping
stuff.  Ain't that strange?"
   "Yeah," I said. "Say, Eddie, you don't suppose your pa. ..uh ...your pa. .." I tried to think of a delicate way to phrase it.
   "What?" Eddie said. .
   "Uh, you don't suppose your pa, uh, would let me go on the camping trip too, do you?"
   When Eddie put the question to his father, Mr. Muldoon tried to conceal his affection for me beneath a malevolent frown. "Oh, all right," he growled at me. "But no mischief. That means no knives, no hatchets, no matches, no slingshots, and no shovels! Understood?"
   Eddie and I laughed. It was good to see his father in a humorous mood once again. I rushed home and asked my mother if I could go camping with the Muldoons.
   "You'd be away from home a whole week?" she said. "I'll have to think about that. Okay, you can go."
   I quickly packed my hatchet, knife, and slingshot, along with edibles Mom gave me to contribute to the Muldoon grub box.