A Campfire Story – by Dawn Rucker

I just got back from a quick sightseeing trip out, we were only out on the plain for just shy of three years. You would not believe the stories you hear coming in and off the plain. People are crazy.

This one farmer was on his way out to start up his family farm. His great, great, great… oh I don’t know how many greats, his great something had a stead but they came back out to soon so the money didn’t last long enough for him to really get a taste. His parents left him enough to get a fancy landship and a pretty decent crew if you ask me.

Yes, Ted, he was spoiled, we know.

Anyway, so he was heading out and decided that if this is the way his life was going, that they were gonna take their sweet time getting out there. Like it don’t take long enough already. Ha-ha! So, every so often they would stop and set up a small farm area on a nice plot and get a season of fresh veg stocked up for the next part of the trip. So, one stop he made, they set up the farm. Got all kinds of goodies planted up and his daughter decided to make a scarecrow.

No, Ted, I don’t know why they call it that. It’s just a name. Stop interrupting me.

Anyway, so she is making this scarecrow and she finds this shiny straw just laying around the edge of the nearby copse. So, she gathers it all up.

No, Ted! I have no clue why there would be straw near a copse. I am telling the story. Shut up!

She made up a little song while she was making him with that shiny straw to entertain herself. Just kept singing it over and over again. She found a great spot for him in the middle of their corn field and her dad came out to help her get it put up.

The next day, everyone was out working the fields and they starting finding little critters dead all over the place. Not a single one of them had any kind of mark on them at all. Worried it was poison or sick that killed them, the Farmer had his hands help him gather them all and burn the corpses in a pit. Then they finished their work that day and headed in for the night. They got everything locked up tight and hit the sack.

Later, the little girl woke up in the middle of the night screaming. She could hear something outside her room.

No, Ted, not outside, outside! As in outside her door, inside the landship. If it was outside the landship she would not have cared!

Anyway, they didn’t find anything and told her to go back to sleep but she slept with her parents that night. She was not sleeping alone.

This goes on like this for a month or so; wake up, dead things, go to sleep, something inside the landship trying to get to her. And finally, they decide this is not worth it. They start to pack it all up again, they are leaving. Day three of packing, they are just about done, and no one can find the little girl.

The mom said the girl had gotten up that morning and gone out to try to get the scarecrow.

Stop rolling your eyes at me, Ted.

The little girl was going to pack him up and bring him along because she had made him and he was hers. And that was the last they saw of her.

They searched for a few days before they left out again. It was the only kid with them, his kid, and that spoiled little baron still decided they’d looked long enough.

They didn’t find no blood, no body. The only thing they found was her hairbow and a few pieces of shiny straw where the scarecrow had been.

They said they thought they heard her singing one day in the copse. But every time they thought they had the sound pinned down, it seem to float away on the wind.

She sang her little song all the time. Mom asked her once about why she made it up. Little girl said she didn’t, the scarecrow taught it to her.

Pretty straw, pretty scarecrow.
You will keep everything out of our fields.
This is yours, you are mine.
Pretty straw, pretty scarecrow.
I made you, you are mine.
This is yours, you are mine.