Dad and the Jones's left to go back to the valley about 5:30 Sunday afternoon, leaving mom and us kids to spend our second week alone at the cabin. Mom was being a really good sport that summer. It was quiet that evening as we ate supper and mom read aloud to us. Suddenly, we heard a loud thump. It seemed to come from the bedroom, and Phillip jumped up and ran in to see what it was. He turned on the light and looked all around, but everything seemed normal. Shrugging, he came back into the front room.
“There’s nothing in there,” he said as he climbed back on the bed. Mom had just begun reading again when, “thump, thump!’ we heard the noise again.
This time we all trooped into the bedroom to see what was going on, but we couldn’t find anything out of place. I'll have to admit we were getting a little spooked by that time, so we really jumped when there was a “thump” right over our heads as we stood in the kitchen doorway.
“What is it?” cried Julie, who was only four years old.
“It’s probably that bear Keith warned us about,” I suggested sarcastically. After all, only three days earlier he had tried to ruin our slumber party with his bear stories and throwing rocks on the trailer's roof.
“No, it isn’t,” mom assured Julie, with a warning look at me. “I bet it’s a squirrel on the roof or something.”
“Nothing on the roof would make a noise like that,” Keith corrected her. “That noise if coming from the attic.”
Linda screamed, and Julie and Sharon began to cry. Mom hushed them, and assured all of us that if something was in the attic it was probably just a big mouse. “Remember, they are more afraid of you than we are of them. Nothing is going to hurt us,” she promised.
Keith and Phillip both agreed with her, and Phillip called Linda a scaredy-cat. That didn’t go over too well, and soon mom had her hands full trying to get us settled down and in bed. Julie begged to sleep with mom and Sharon in the bedroom, (Sharon was only two) but Linda got mad because there wasn’t room for her on the double bed as well. Mom told her she could sleep on the floor next to the bed, but there was no way Linda wanted to do that! Still, she refused to sleep with me out on the back porch. In the end, she put the old ironing board we had bought at a thrift shop in Young on two chairs at the foot of mom’s bed, determined to sleep there.
Linda soon found out that an ironing board wasn’t very wide and didn’t make a good bed, especially for a nine-and-a-half-year old girl. Finally she gave in and slept on her regular bed in the front room, but she wasn’t happy about it.
All during the following week we kept hearing the "thump" from the attic. Mom got so tired of it that she took the broom and thumped back. She was amazed when whatever it was thumped right back at her.
When dad came up that weekend he climbed up on the ladder and shined a flashlight into the far corners of the attic. Sure enough, he saw a big white rat hiding in a nest up there. Keith and Phillip wanted to take the twenty-two and shoot it, but dad didn’t think that was such a good idea. Instead, he set a big trap and put out mouse poison when we went home. That was the end of the “thump”.
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