The Brilliantly Rainbowed Adventure

        Frogstick was in a pickle.
        Before dark on the night of the play, along about the time when we headed for the Nowhere County Wilderness Campground and Theater, our old pal Frogstick had found a sandy branch and had drunk his fill of the clear, flowing water. Then he had waded through the shallow stream for about a quarter of an mile.
        When he came to an overhanging limb he latched hold of it and lifted himself up into the tree, scrambling for traction against the coarse bark. From that tree he climbed directly into another one, and then another, until he was a good one hundred yards from the little branch. Frogstick dropped to the earth now and snuck off into the woods. Dark was falling, so he stopped about a mile away and shinnied on up into a tall, skinny hickory tree to try and get some sleep. He found a broad crook and rested, leaning back wearily as night wrapped him up in starlight and silence.
        Before he knew it he fell asleep. The day's turmoil flashed sporadically through Frogstick's weary head as he slept; glimpses of roaring alligators and irate little monsters collided like pool balls between his ears and set him to grumbling and twitching something fierce. He just about halfway woke up one time and thought that he heard something, but then the remembrance came to him that he had shaken his slimy adversaries, and he fell back again, hard and fast asleep.
        "Crunchmunchcrunchmunchmunch," the sound went. But Frogstick was dreaming. He dreamed that he was skiing behind a fancy boat, and that all of the members of our band were in it. It was a beautiful day, but the ski rope was stretching and flexing like a big rubber band and he felt sort of vulnerable out there all on his lonesome.
        "Hold on," we all cried out to him, "we'll get you safely to shore."
        Well sir, Frogstick turned around and behind him, and then he saw it. That giant alligator was hard on his trail; she was kicking up a roostertail like a pro on a trick ski and she was powering along at a good 30 MPH.
        On her back was her baby, Captain Ahab himself. The ugly little rascal was ravening like a wolf, slathering at the mouth as he uttered his hatred with painful, piercing shrieks; he squalled out his rage in a veritable torrent of gatorish billingsgate that shocked and sickened old Froggy as he sensed that things just weren't quite rosy at the moment.
        Ahab had a patch over one eye and a peg leg. He wore a tiny life jacket, and he was standing upright; in his forepaws he clutched a tiny whip. With this whip the diminutive despot smote vigorously upon the lumpy back of his gargantuan jet ski. Straightaway she picked up her pace; her giant tail was just a blur; it thrashed the water like a spinning propeller. The massive monster was traveling so fast, she was actually beginning to hydroplane. She was a good thirty feet in back of Frogstick, gaining by the minute.
        "Faster!" he cried out to our band in the boat. The wind blew his words away.
        "What did he say?" yelled Stink from his specially-built perch behind the outboard engine.
        "Stratocaster," hollered Zeb, "Guitar man, he likes your axe."
        In his dream, Frogstick saw the gator close in for the kill. He felt its hot, fishy breath caress his neck like clammy fingers from an open grave.
        "Help!" he hollered, "Help!" His eyes focused on the name of the ski boat that his beloved fellow band-members were riding in. As the boat bounded upon the waves, sending spray flying out behind its speeding form, Frogstick read the name of the ski boat from off of its bouncing stern. "Gator Bait" was the name that he read.
        "AAAGH!" he cried from the depths of his soul.
        "AAAGH!" he cried in shocked despair.
        "AAAGH!" he hollered from his tree-perch, high in the lanky hickory, sending the sound echoing out into the light of a dawning day.
        "Crunchmunchcrunchmunchcrunchmunchcrunch," droned the noise again. What was that noise? He awoke with a start.
        "Crunchmunchcrunchmunchcrunchmunch." He heard it again. Rubbing his eyes, he sat up and looked around him in the still half-light of the dawn.
        "Crunchmunchcrunchmunchcrunchmunch." He looked down. And then, suddenly, he saw it. Terror of terrors! There they were!
        Sha-no-she-ba was below him, gnawing at the base of his tree. With her were at least a dozen lesser gators, some up to twelve feet long. They had encircled the broad base of Frogstick's tree and were chomping away with their heads turned sideways like busy little beavers, except that they weren't beavers by a long shot, and they had worse manners. On the great gator's back the tiny dragon was perched, railing at Frogstick to the top of its vicious little lungs, limping along on its gimpy hind foot and shaking its paw at Frogstick without as much as a thank you that he had set the bone.
        Well, I reckon that old Frogstick just couldn't take it anymore. His patience had just finally plumb worn out, that's all that I can say, and I don't really blame him for what he did next. You see, old Froggy is a dead-eyed marksman with a slingshot; he always carries one when he's in the woods, along with a bag of steel ball-bearings that he uses for shot. Granny Gutchins made him a right pretty holster, by the way, and he had it engraved with his name.
        Frogstick didn't want to use his slingshot on them, but enough was enough. He can drill a hole through a hubcap at a hundred feet, but I reckon that he was too fed up with Old Two-Toes and her evil spawn to worry anymore about hurting them.
        Frogstick started off with old Captain Ahab. He knocked him sprawling about five feet away from his mama with the first shot. That sort of broke up the party downstairs.
        The giant gator started roaring like a bass singer in an opera, and in reply to her aria the Frog-Thing fired another heavy metal projectile down the old lizard's open gullet, putting the dampers on her caterwauling for a spell. Then he shut one of her eyes with a little half-speed shot, just enough to close it up tight for a few days, and for good measure he drilled one up the gizzle, right on down into her open nostril.
        Well siree, that last shot took the cake. It wedged itself somewhere deep within the ugly critter's sinuses, and it started to sneeze. Sha-no-she-ba sneezed like a volcano erupting. She spasmodically thrashed upon the ground, mightily clubbing her compatriots with her tail, which was about the size of a large tree trunk. All of the other gators fled except for her wretched offspring. Captain Ahab, however, was knocked spinning about thirty feet by a good shot from that unsightly appendage that stuck out behind her. By and by she was going plumb wild from the misery and she tried to climb the trunk of the hickory tree, but to no avail; she flopped over backwards and landed on her back on the forest floor. As quick as greased lightning Frogstick leaped down out of that tree and began to stroke her belly with a long green branch that Sha-no-she-ba had torn loose with her floundering.
        Slowly he raked the branch along her glistening underbelly, and as he did he hummed to the irate reptile. She began to relax as she lay there, belly-up to the rising sun. She heaved a big old sigh. Then she began to snore softly, and our pal Frogstick was home free. About this time he tromped on something, and he heard a squeal. Frogstick looked down into the hate-contorted face of the little gator that had started this mess. I reckon that I don't blame him one mite for what happened next.
        Frogstick had been vexed and scared more that your average fellow, and he hadn't had a single drop of coffee all morning. So the old Froggish One took that rabid reptilian rascal firmly in hand. Then he loaded the vicious little guy into his slingshot, and he stretched it just as far back as it would go.
        Frogstick fired, and the tiny gator went whirling off over the distant trees. Its tongue trailed the remnant of its once-rabid froth as its terror-filled face turned to face a bold new day.
        It was a lovely, poetic sight, and one that could only be fully appreciated by Frogstick himself. As he said later, "You had to be there."
        Frogstick left the clearing, and, as light-hearted as a flying fish, he strolled back down the trail with his hands in his pockets, whistling like a lark.
        I know that you might say, "Why did he have to treat this creature so callously? Couldn't he have turned it loose, or have sold it to some New York City schoolchild as a pet?"
        Well now, Frogstick has a limit to his patience, but I suppose that he considered it important to protect his fellow people from such a misanthropic pest, who would soon have been somewhat huge and potentially very deadly. As far as giving the gator away to the children of Gotham, he had serious reservations.
        Weren't the sewers already choked with enough effluvia without adding more dead gators to the load? Even in his anger Frogstick had too much respect for the gator; he had no desire to consign it to such a fate. As for the baby gator, be assured that it did not crush itself as it fell (take heart, reptile enthusiasts) or crush any plants when it fell (be appeased, O friend of flora, ally of the Plant's Rights movement).
        I'm glad to report that no funguses were damaged by his fanciful flight (receive comfort, Friends of the Fungus). In fact, he didn't even hurt the little rascal's leg, because he had been faking his injury the whole time!
        Well sirree, this all just goes to show you that a dumb beast is just that, whether it gimps on two legs or hobbles on four; even if it can't run a four minute mile or cook a two-minute egg. As for me, I never would have set that critter's leg in the first place, but I'm just a poor old country boy; I've never congealed the quark like Egghead, or written a great play, like Billy, so I don't know if that makes me smart, or just fortunate, that I wouldn't have done it.
        As for Frogstick, he went and burned his card in the Critters-Before-Humans Society, and the last Be Kind to Animals Week, I heard that he was on a non-vegetarian, high protein diet, if you drift into my catch. Froggy still treats his pets well, but I haven't caught him crying over any dead snakes lately. I can't say that I blame the boy.
        Oh my goodness, I've gone and digressed all over the page, and you-all don't even know what happened to us next. Of course, it was a thrill a minute; it was gaudy, and it happened so fast that it was almost over before it started, or before I even knew what was going on.
        You have heard about him from the books, and read all about him in the movies, but I'm here to tell you that they don't do him any justice at all. Now sir, that would be doing him justice if the movies were in 3-D smell-a-vision, or if they were always surprising and spontaneous and never boring. Of course, they're not, they mostly smell, but without any smell-a-vision, and they are mostly packed with more filth that one of Stink's shoes, but that's another story.
        What I'm about to tell you is something other than that. It is all about how we happened to visit the oldest fellow that we had ever heard about, or seen, or smelled, for that matter. He was somebody that I never dreamed I'd ever get to meet. I thought that he was dead, or was just a made-up creation of his author, but he wasn't after all (unless Egghead really is right with his wacky Fantastic Fiction Theory).
        I'm talking, of course, about our close personal friend, Huckleberry Aloycious T. Finn III, known to generations of readers as plain old Huck Finn, the semi-hoodlumic, rascallacious, red-blooded all-American mensch.
        We met him, and we liked him, and it happened something like this…