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day was a Saturday, my busiest day in the field. I had plants starting to bud and I had high hopes of a good crop. I finished my breakfast and bounded out the back door. I grabbed some tools and headed to work.

I was shocked to see hundreds of birds flying all around my field and diving down to the crops. I ran as hard as I could and yelled at the birds and shooed them off. My scarecrow was limp; his arms sagged down by his side and his smile was gone. The sparkling eyes were now little black dots.

"He's lost his scare'. Must have been what all that hullabaloo was last night with those dogs" my father said. I had just come to terms with actually fitting my scarecrow with a scare'. Now I discovered that the scare' could be lost, or worse still stolen!

My father was a man of few words, but he did tell me that the scare' could be stolen and probably had been "Good scares' are valuable. If someone sees a good quality scarecrow, he might want to take advantage of him". Why did he always seem like he was about to burst out laughing when he was talking about my scarecrow? This was serious business.

"I'd look at the Smith's first of all, that little Tommy is a piece of work you know." Regardless of what my father thought of my scarecrow, it was good advice and I pedaled my bike straight over to Tommy Smith's house. I wanted to find out exactly what his dogs had been up to the previous night. On the way over, I past the Smith's scarecrow and he hadn't been affected at all, in fact his smile was as large as life, quite different from surly look I remembered.

Tommy had made a nice skateboard ramp at the end of his driveway. He could usually be found practicing there on the weekends. I quizzed him about his dogs and if he knew what they had been doing. "My dogs haven't done anything" he said and denied any knowledge about scarecrows. I didn't dare mention that my scarecrow had lost his scare'. Tommy had never raised a crop or built a scarecrow, he wouldn't understand. But I believed he may have meddled with my scarecrow, even jokingly, but I wasn't laughing.

I wanted to check out Tommy's dogs and I didn't have to look far. These normally fierce Doberman's were sitting in their kennels with their front paws over their ears. I knew there was something drastically wrong with those dogs. Ordinarily they would have barked at me as I approached, but that day there was not a peep out of them. "I think they're sick Flick, they haven't come out of their kennels all morning." Tommy groaned.

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