by
Joe Donnelly’s quite walk in the forest was interrupted by the shrill scream of a woman frightened. Joe stopped trying to place the direction from which the scream came. Suddenly, the stillness was again broken by the scream.
Donnelly, an active, athletic and impulsive man, began running in the direction of the scream. He wove his way between the trees and over rocks and logs.
The scream again shattered the peacefulness of the woodlands. Donnelly leaped over a log, dodged a huge boulder, and ran into a tree lap that whipped him smartly as he fought his way through leaving him marked with several burning whelks.
Just as he freed himself from the tree top, the scream sounded again straight ahead across a large briar thicket.
Donnelly was a man who once started something would not be stopped or turned aside. He did not look to see if there was a way around the thicket but charged ahead into the briars. Three steps into the thicket he tripped and fell face first into a snarling convention of briars.
He got to his feet with tears and blood streaming down his face. His breath was coming in great gasps when he finally emerged on the other side of the thicket.
He was trying to catch his breath and slow down his rapidly beating heart when the haunting scream sounded again. It came from just out of sight over a small ridge. He began running again toward the ridge and fell just short of the top twisting his knee. Crawling the remaining few feet, he looked over the ridge into a small glen by a tree.
What he saw brought a curse to his lips as he got slowly to his feet. A young woman was being chased by a boy, about twelve years of age, with what looked to be a frog.
The girl stopped running as Donnelly limped down from the ridge top. The boy ran up beside the girl looking with large dark eyes at Donnelly’s bloody face.
Donnelly walked over to the boy and took the frog from his hands. He bent stiffly to set the frog by the water’s edge and nudge it gently into the stream.
Turning to the boy he asked, “Can you swim?”
“Yes,” answered the boy puzzled.
“Good,” said Donnelly stepping up to the boy, he took him by the back of his belt and the scruff of the neck. The boy started yelling as Donnelly walked to the stream. The girl stood paralyzed with her mouth open as Donnelly threw the boy into the water.
“I enjoy a good joke too,” said Donnelly as he limped off holding his knee and pulling a thorn from his face.