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By Root 1402 0

when he gits out his saw and hammer, start packin yore duds.” Jokers would catch a pair of snakes, male and female of each, and crate them, and present them to Noah as “voyagers.” Noah couldn’t even indulge his favorite pastime, whittling, without somebody saying to him something like, “Is that there the foremast or the mizzenmast?” and they would ask him things like, “Would you know an olive branch if you saw one?” and nobody ever even passed by his cabin without giving it a good kick and saying “Think she’ll float?” Noah bore all of this badinage in silence, until he decided it had gone far enough, and then one day, when the rain was coming down hard and the fields were nearly all flooded, he stepped outside and yelled, “ANCHORS AWEIGH!” as loud as he could, which seems perhaps a cruel thing to do, like yelling “Fire!” in a crowded theater, and as we shall see he will soon be punished for it, but it had its effect: all of the Stay Morons came running, carrying whatever small belongings they could gather, and crowded around his cabin. Inside it, he barred the door, but yelled, from time to time, “HEAVE HO!” or “HIT THE DECK!” or “HAUL THE YARDARM!” or “SAG TO LEEWARD!” until his brother Jacob banged on the door and threatened to keelhaul him if he didn’t avast this foolishness and cut off his jib.

But nobody bothered Noah after that. In fact, they wouldn’t have had a chance to, even if they wanted to, because that same night, in the middle of the night, all the beaver dams in all the hills around Stay More broke and washed out, and all the ponds spilled into the already flooded streams, and Noah woke to discover that his cabin, which was the lowest dwelling in Stay More, was not floating, but that its bilge was awash. He swam to the door, raised the bar, and a wave of cold water swept the door open and sucked Noah out of it and down the now broad river that had once been gentle Swains Creek. Swept along on the roiling crest, he clutched right and clutched left, for any limb to grab, but he was carried nearly halfway to Parthenon before his fingers finally seized a branch and stopped his course. He got both hands on the limb and hauled himself up. Judging from the feel of the bark, it was a sycamore tree. He sat on the limb and rested awhile, spitting out water and getting his wind back, but the water was still rising; he climbed to a higher limb, and then again to an even higher one, where he lodged himself in the fork between limb and trunk and spent the rest of the night. He began to worry about falling asleep and tumbling into the rising waters.

Groping around in the dark, he discovered that creeping blackjack vines snaked through the branches of the sycamore. He tore off several of these and used them in lieu of rope to lash himself firmly to the tree so that he would not fall out of it if he went to sleep. In fact, he tied himself so fast that he couldn’t have got loose if he wanted to. And yet he did not fall asleep; the roaring and bubbling of the cataract beneath him kept him awake until dawn. The sun’s early light revealed the whole valley under yellow-brown water. Considering the size of the big sycamore tree he was in, he judged that he must be some thirty feet (or two hats) above the ground, and yet the water was less than ten feet below him, which meant that the ground was covered with twenty feet of water. “AHOY!” he yelled several times, but there was no answer.

Meanwhile, Jacob’s dogtrot house, which was situated on higher ground than any of the other dwellings, became the ark of refuge for all of the other Stay Morons. They counted heads and discovered Noah missing, and began to grieve for him, and to be sorry that they had teased him, and even to be glad for the little trick he had played on them, because they had assembled their belongings when he had called “Anchors Aweigh!” so their belongings were all ready to go when the real flood came in the middle of the night. The religious ones among them prayed for Noah’s safety. Jacob had the opinion that maybe Noah was sitting on the ridgepole of his cabin,