Six Sentence Story - Stick

Which direction should I go with this blog hop challenge?  I thought of several different ways the word is used, but a story seemed out of reach until tonight.  This took me back to childhood memories living out in the sticks.  I'm linking this post to Six Sentence Story - Stick at Ivy's Uncharted blog.


Her black rubber boots slipped on the muddy red clay bank of the creek behind the barn.  She almost plopped down right behind the cow she was herding, but she managed to stay upright as she gave the cow one last poke on the rump to urge her to climb up the bank.

Seeing that Bossy was contently grazing now, she turned her attention to the creek where sometimes she found interesting rocks, and if lucky, agates for her collection.  What really intrigued her about the creek were what lived in it:  mussels, tadpoles, an occasional trout, bullfrogs, slithering garter snakes, and crawdads, as most people called here, instead of crayfish.

The crawdads often went to the deeper areas of the creek where they weren't as easily seen, especially when they stirred up the mud underneath them.  She grabbed a narrow stick she found in the undergrowth, and slid it gently into the water toward what she thought were crawdad pincers and waited, hoping to carefully lift it up from the water when he took hold.