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    The Killer Bear
    The Killer Bear
    The Killer Bear
    Ebook83 pages1 hour

    The Killer Bear

    By Paul Hutchens

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    The tales and travels of the Sugar Creek Gang have passed the test of time, delighting young readers for more than fifty years. Great mysteries for kids with a message, The Sugar Creek Gang series chronicles the faith-building adventures of a group of fun-loving, courageous Christian boys. Your kids will be thrilled, chilled, and inspired to grow as they follow the legendary escapades of Bill Collins, Dragonfly, and the rest of the gang as they struggle with the application of their Christian faith to the adventure of life. "Circus" Brown's father makes a life-changing decision at a revival meeting. Will he be able to stay on the narrow path? Back in the woods, the mean Till boys and the Sugar Creek Gang wrestle over a patch of wild strawberries. This leads to an encounter with an angry black bear. Join the gang as they learn to apply the lesson of forgiving seventy times seven in the face of great danger.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMoody Publishers
    Release dateJun 5, 1997
    ISBN9781575677361
    Author

    Paul Hutchens

    The late PAUL HUTCHENS, one of evangelical Christianity's most prolific authors, went to be with the Lord on January 23, 1977. Mr. Hutchens, an ordained Baptist minister, served as an evangelist and itinerant preacher for many years. Best known for his Sugar Creek Gang series, Hutchens was a 1927 graduate of Moody Bible Institute. He was the author of 19 adult novels, 36 books in the Sugar Creek Gang series, and several booklets for servicemen during World War II. Mr. Hutchens and his wife, Jane, were married 52 years. They had two children and four grandchildren.

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    • 5/5
      Two new kids move into the neighborhood and they are nothin' but trouble. That's when the Sugar Creek Gang fight them and a town gang and come to church with black eyes. Then,Circus and his dad both make life-changing decisions at a church tent meeting. And best of all, a killer bear steps into the story, and the Gang is caught in the middle of it! Along with the smaller of the two trouble makers, Tom Till. The Gang could just save themselves and forget about Tom. Little Jim then jumps into action! This book is great and this story is mentioned in many of the other books, mostly the part about the Battle of Bumblebee Hill. I like the fight they got into and how it ended.

    Book preview

    The Killer Bear - Paul Hutchens

    Creek

    PREFACE

    Hi—from a member of the Sugar Creek Gang!

    It’s just that I don’t know which one I am. When I was good, I was Little Jim. When I did bad things—well, sometimes I was Bill Collins or even mischievous Poetry.

    You see, I am the daughter of Paul Hutchens, and I spent many an hour listening to him read his manuscript as far as he had written it that particular day. I went along to the north woods of Minnesota, to Colorado, and to the various other places he would go to find something different for the Gang to do.

    Now the years have passed—more than fifty, actually. My father is in heaven, but the Gang goes on. All thirty-six books are still in print and now are being updated for today’s readers with input from my five children, who also span the decades from the ’50s to the ’70s.

    The real Sugar Creek is in Indiana, and my father and his six brothers were the original Gang. But the idea of the books and their ministry were and are the Lord’s. It is He who keeps the Gang going.

    PAULINE HUTCHENS WILSON

    1

    It was Dragonfly who first saw the bear—a big, hairy, black thing that looked more like one of my dad’s hogs than anything else.

    None of us boys had ever seen an honest-to-goodness wild bear, although we’d all been to the zoo and the circus and had watched bears juggling rope balls and doing different kinds of acrobatic stunts. Naturally we had read a lot of bear stories, having borrowed books from our school and public libraries. But we had never dreamed that a bear story would happen to us, the kind of story that would make any boy’s hair stand right up on end.

    Perhaps I’d better explain right away that when I say us I mean the Sugar Creek Gang, which is the name of our gang of six boys. We have crazy names as nearly all boys do—that is, all of us except me. I am just plain Bill, which is short for William, which name I don’t like. My middle name is Jasper. I don’t like that either.

    Dragonfly’s real name is Roy Gilbert, but we call him Dragonfly because he is always seeing important things first. His eyes grow big when he does, making him look a little like a dragonfly or a walleyed pike.

    Then there is Big Jim, the leader of our gang, who has been a Boy Scout; and Little Jim, the grandest fellow you ever saw and as good as a million dollars worth of gold. Little Jim is my very best friend, except for Poetry. Poetry is the name we’ve given to Leslie Thompson because he knows maybe a hundred poems by heart and is always quoting one of them, much to Circus’s disgust. Circus is our acrobat. He can juggle baseballs better than any trained bear and is always climbing trees and acting like a monkey and looking like one. He is almost as mischievous as Poetry, although I don’t think anybody could be that mischievous. Poetry is big, almost as big around as a barrel.

    That’s all of us: Big Jim, our leader; Little Jim, the best Christian any boy ever saw; Poetry, whose voice is squawky like a duck with a bad cold; Dragonfly, whose eyes are as keen as a hawk’s. And Circus, whose dad was always getting drunk. Circus has four sisters, one of them only about a month old, just one day younger than my own little sister, Charlotte Ann, who really ought to belong to our gang too because she’s so great. But she can’t because she’s too little and especially because she’s a girl, and girls don’t usually belong to a boys’ club.

    Let me see—oh, yes! I ought to tell you that Poetry has a tent in his backyard, where our gang sometimes has our meetings—when we don’t have them at the spring or the big sycamore tree or on top of the hill on the east side of the woods, where there are a big rock and a big patch of wild strawberries.

    Well, I’d better get busy telling you about the bear. When we first saw her, she was way down along Sugar Creek, right out in the middle of the swamp. She’d been wallowing in the mud, the way black bears do in the summertime when it’s terribly hot. That’s why I told you the bear looked like one of my dad’s big black hogs.

    Dragonfly had come over to my house right after lunch that day. And because it was so terribly hot, my dad and mom decided we could go swimming—except that we had to wait an hour first because it’s dangerous to go in swimming right after a meal. You might get cramps, which is kind of like local paralysis, and you can’t move your legs, and you might drown. Maybe I’m going to be a doctor someday. That’s how I happen to know the medical names for some of these things.

    Whew! I said when I’d finished eating. "It’s terribly hot! Then I said, May I be excused, please?" That is what you’re supposed to say when you leave the table before the others do.

    Certainly, Dad said.

    But Mom said, I’m sorry, Billy, but I’ll have to have help with the dishes today. It’s wash day, you know.

    I looked at all those dirty dishes on the table—the plates and cups and saucers and my big blue-and-white mug out of which I drank milk three times a day. And when I saw all the forks and knives and spoons and a big stack of other dishes, it actually hurt way down inside of me. I’d a

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