Maybe it’d be better, if you had someone, to help with what needs done.
Yeah, maybe it’d be better, to say hello, than to glare with a big ole frown.
Yeah, maybe it’d be better, with a friend or two, with a hand that’s helping you.
Yeah, maybe—just maybe, it’s a whole lot better, with a friend that’s helping you.
Chisel turned around and said, “Hey, seagull, look, I’m sorry for the ‘shoo’ remark. Please excuse me.”
The seagull looked at Chisel and then back toward the back of the raft and flew off. Chisel carefully looked above himself, hoping the seagull would not drop anything on him. After a while, he noticed the seagull had come flying back about thirty feet to the right side of the raft. She was squawking at something in the water like she was talking to it. Then she landed in the water—but not with her body—with her feet, so that it looked like she was standing on the water! Then she started moving through the water toward the raft like she was surfing—but with no surfboard, and with no waves! Chisel was amazed. This seagull was talented!
When she got close to the raft, the seagull jumped onto the end of it. A second later, Chisel suddenly felt the whole raft lift up into the sky and start going faster. Very timidly, he moved toward the side of the raft and looked over to see how he was flying. To his surprise, the raft was sitting on the back of a whale, which was swimming toward the Point.
Within fifteen minutes, Chisel could faintly see the Point approaching through the fog. When they were very close, the whale suddenly blew through his blowhole, sending Chisel and the raft flying through the air. The raft landed with a huge splash on top of a big wave, and Chisel rode it like a surfboard onto the sand.
He found a boat dock toward his right with a sail boat tied to it and some old wooden stairs on his left that led up the cliff. After climbing many stairs to the top of the cliff, he collapsed onto his back and rested on some grass.
A few seconds later without any notice, a loud flapping noise shook him awake, and he opened his eyes just in time to see the seagull land right on his stomach. Chisel was too tired to move or say “shoo!” so he just lay there and frowned up at the seagull.
He had made it to the lighthouse . . . but that is where the trouble would begin!
Chapter 4
Trouble at the Lighthouse
The seagull then squawked loudly right in Chisel’s face and Chisel decided that before he was squawked at again he’d better get up and find the lighthouse keeper.
He started walking over to the lighthouse, and the seagull hopped on the lawn in front of Chisel, moving forward as though trying to lead him somewhere. Chisel followed. The seagull veered to the left toward a large garage.
Chisel slid the garage door open, but it was still dark inside. He heard a voice in the back corner. “Who’s there?” And before Chisel could answer, the voice added, “And watchya doin’ there? And can ya help me here? Now do ya hear?”
Chisel answered, “I am here. And yes I hear. If I knew where, I’d help you there. It’s Chisel! And who is the voice?”
“Well, voices don’t have names, of course, but the animal behind the voice is Poompkin.”
“You mean Pumpkin, like the big orange things?” Chisel asked.
“Now a pumpkin wouldn’t be talking, would it? And I probably know my own name, don’t you think?”
At that moment, the seagull, who was behind Chisel, squawked loudly, and Chisel responded, “Okay, okay!” He entered the garage and saw that he had been talking to an older-looking rat with gray hair. Poompkin was sitting on the floor, and a huge tree had crashed through the ceiling and wall.
“Hoot Baloot! Are you okay?”
“Last night during the windstorm, this tree came crashing into the workshop and knocked me onto the floor,” Poompkin said. “I think I broke my hip.”
Chisel found a wheelbarrow and wheeled Poompkin over to the first floor of the lighthouse where he lived.
* * *
Meanwhile, the Mean Minks who were now walking down The Beach Trail, stopped when they saw a fat bobcat leaning against a tree and groaning.
“Have you seen a hedgehog?”
Bobcat just pointed toward the beach, still too full to respond.
* * *
Poompkin suggested tunafish sandwiches for lunch and Chisel said, “How ‘bout we add some peanut butter to make them extra good?” They talked as they ate, and then Chisel built him some crutches to get around with while his hip healed. Then Chisel told him all about his planned trip to Volcano Island.
Poompkin shuddered when he heard it and said, “I was sailing close to the island one day and there were monkeys out on the beach shrieking and shaking and showing their teeth—ready to attack me if I went ashore. And then that volcano erupted—rumbling and shaking and smoking terribly. Don’t go there!”
Chisel squinted, folded his arms, thought, and then said, “Volcano Island is my quest, and that is where I’ll go!”
Poompkin then said that he could use his sailboat, so they loaded it with all the necessary equipment needed for an early start the next morning, including a Super-Duper squirt gun that Poompkin gave Chisel for protection against the monkeys! Chisel then took the boat for a practice run.
That night after Chisel and Poompkin ate dinner, there was a knock at the door. Chisel answered and saw a nicely dressed animal with a hat pulled down low on his head, wearing glasses, and holding a briefcase. His three Mean Mink brothers smiled as they hid in the bushes.
The animal then started telling Chisel it was good to find him and that Chisel’s great-uncle had died and left him a lot of money. “Please come out to the bushes, and I will show you what is in my briefcase,” the animal said.
As he was talking, Chisel’s smile slowly straightened as he carefully studied the animal. Chisel did not have a great-uncle and this animal reminded him of someone—but who? As Chisel stepped out of the front door, he imagined the animal’s face without glasses. He took another step and imagined him without the hat. The image now in his mind was . . . his eyes popped open and a memory flashed through his mind about THAT THING that happened BACK THEN. And the words escaped from his mouth, “MEAN MINK!”
The Mean Mink brother grabbed for him, but Chisel ducked and the Mink’s arms went around thin air and then back around himself. The brothers all jumped up, and one yelled to the one by Chisel, “Quit hugging yourself and grab him!”
Chisel started running, and all four Minks followed. He ran around the lighthouse two times with the Minks getting closer and closer. After the second time around, one of the Minks stopped and ran in the opposite direction. When Chisel came around the lighthouse again and saw the Mink running toward him, Chisel had to turn and run across the lawn, looking for somewhere to hide, but there was no place to go. If he turned right or left, the Minks would catch him. He kept running straight—approaching the cliff. “What to do? Where to go?” he thought. When the cliff was only five feet away, he knew what he had to do and where to go—and with a lunge, he threw himself into the air—fifty feet above the sea below.
The Minks screeched to a halt and watched Chisel hurl through the air toward the water. He did a somersault in the air, raised one knee, put his hands around it, and did a perfect cannonball-splash into the water, sending a small tidal wave in all directions. The Minks were awestruck. “Ahhh, he’s good!” one of them said. “There’s some stairs. Let’s go!” yelled another.
As they got to the beach, Chisel was just climbing onto the boat dock. As he saw the Minks running toward him, he flung himself into the sailboat, untied it, and lifted the sail. By then, the Minks were sprinting and almost to the dock. As the sail filled with wind, the boat slowly started gliding out to sea.
Chisel looked behind him and saw two Minks about to jump off the dock toward him. Chisel turned back and started fanning the sail with both hands and looked behind him again. Two Minks had jumped and were no
w gliding toward him in the air, and the other two were just jumping off the dock. Chisel started puffing on the sail in hard, quick blows. The next time he looked back, the closest Mink was still flying toward him and reaching with one hand as far as he could until finally falling just short of the boat with his fingertips barely brushing the end of it, and splashing into the sea. The boat was sailing a little faster than the Mink could swim, and within a couple of minutes, the sound of hectic splashing behind the boat had faded into dark silence.
Chisel’s heart took several minutes to calm. He sat still, staring into the dark as the boat was pulled out to sea. He sailed for half an hour and then said quietly to himself, “I guess I’m in trouble! Any clues that are out there, please come my way, and make it fast. I need to solve a mystery!” Chisel knew that solving the mystery might be the only thing that would save him. Then, it being too dark to sail, he took down the sail, snuggled with a blanket down in the bottom of the boat, and lay looking up at the stars. As he lay, he thought about his situation and what happened four days earlier that forced him on this journey . . . running for his life, to Volcano Island. . . .
Chapter 5
The Flying Skateboard
Tuesday, June 1 (Four days earlier). The sun had risen that morning on a day that would forever change a hedgehog, a lady, and the world in which they lived.
The hedgehog’s name was Chisel. He lived in a pine-tree-shaded town called Shady Glen. The town was in a hidden valley which lay under a beautiful rainbow-colored sky that flowed and swayed like smoke in a breeze.
By 8:30, Chisel had woken up, eaten, walked down the dirt road to the one-room schoolhouse, and was sitting in class when the teacher started talking about volcanoes and lava and magma and explosions and escaping gases from the center of the earth.
After a few minutes, Chisel couldn’t contain his excitement anymore and blurted out, “LET’S GO!”
Everyone looked over at him, and, realizing what he had done, Chisel sank down in his chair, quite embarrassed.
The teacher laughed and explained, “The only volcano around here is on Volcano Island, and it is active, and far too dangerous to explore.”
Summer vacation was quickly approaching, and each student had to do a science project before school ended. Now Chisel knew what he would do. “I will journey to a distant island and look inside a volcano!”
After the science lesson, a rabbit on the far side of the room asked the teacher, “Who started our valley?”
The teacher smiled. “I wish we knew, but we don’t. There are no books that tell of the beginning of our hidden valley. It’s our greatest and saddest mystery in the valley. Animals tried to solve it for years—but couldn’t. It’s what we desire most but will never learn!”
Chisel sat staring at the ground in front of his desk, and thinking, while the other students left the room for recess. He slowly raised his head and looked across the room at his friend Bootle, the rabbit who had asked the question. She had also just slowly looked up and over at him, and they both smiled, nodding their heads up and down.
After school, Bootle walked home with Chisel. Her father owned the town grocery store. She was Chisel’s best friend. They walked behind Chisel’s house to a shed in the backyard, and from under a big pile of junk, Chisel pulled out an old dusty box with handwritten words on top that read: “Chisel and Bootle’s Detective Stuff.”
“Remember this?” he asked Bootle.
He opened it and pulled out two small black books to write clues in, a large magnifying glass, a container of white powder to take fingerprints with, a small telescope, and two detective hats.
Chisel looked at Bootle and asked, “Do you think we can solve the mystery of who started our valley?”
Bootle paused before answering, “I don’t know. The mystery is probably over a hundred years old.”
Then at the same time, they both smiled and said, “Why not?”
“I’m going to Volcano Island tomorrow after school,” said Chisel. “I’ll look for clues on the way.”
“And I’ll visit The Big City,” added Bootle.
The only question for Chisel was how to get to Volcano Island from his house. Bootle went home and Chisel found his younger brother and asked, “What do you think, Doof?”
“Well, you could make a flying skateboard,” Doofer replied.
“Well don’t be ridiculous! You can’t make skateboards fly!” responded Chisel. After he said it, though, his forehead wrinkled, and he started thinking. “Well, I guess you could put a little motor on it—and a pole with a handle on the front to hold onto—and some type of wings.” He looked over at Doofer, paused, and exclaimed, “Well, what are you waiting for? We’ve got a flying skateboard to build!”
They got Chisel’s skateboard and first put the pole and handle on. Then they found an old hair dryer to use for the motor but, when they connected it and turned it on, it made their feet too hot. Then they saw an old fan in the corner of the shed, and their eyes got really big, and they both smiled. They soon had the fan connected to the back of the skateboard.
Now it was time for the really tricky part—the wings. At first they used an umbrella like a helicopter. Chisel pushed the skateboard down the road with all the speed he could muster and then started opening and closing that umbrella really fast. One time, he got the skateboard off the ground but, after ten seconds, his arms were so tired that he stopped pumping and fell back down.
Then they looked at the umbrella and got an idea. They cut it in half and connected the two pieces underneath the skateboard and tied a rope to each new wing. Finally, they pulled the ropes up around the pole handle. Now, whenever they wanted the wings to open, they just pulled on those ropes.
They wheeled the skateboard out to the road in front of their house for a test flight. Chisel turned on the fan and started racing down the road on the skateboard. After picking up speed, he pulled the ropes, and, like a helium balloon someone let go of, he shot into the sky! Unfortunately, just like riding a bike for the first time, he had no idea how to control the skateboard, and was soon a hundred feet in the air flying wildly, yelling, “AAAAAHHHHH,” “WAHOWWWWWA,” “HOOT BALOOT!” while doing loop-t-loops, banking left and right, and flying upside down hanging from the handlebars.
Chapter 6
A People-Person!
That same morning, Francine Anabel had awoken, stretched, and smiled in anticipation of a wonderful hike in the woods. If she had known the terrible problems she would cause that day, she would have rolled over and kept sleeping. But she didn’t—and as she stepped from her bed, her life and world would change forever.
She lived in the people’s-city of Mayfield, many miles from Chisel’s hidden valley. She was a third grade teacher, age 25, and since her school year had just ended for the summer, she planned to go camping in the woods on the outskirts of town. When people heard where she was going, they said, “Don’t try camping in the outer woods, the wind there is unbearable. It’s like a hurricane.” But she decided to go anyway.
* * *
Meanwhile, that same morning, two of Miss Anabel’s third grade students, a boy and a girl, were reading their monthly edition of a magazine called “Junior Detective Club” together. They had been members since the previous December and read each monthly magazine, learning the latest secrets on how to spy on people and solve mysteries. “No case too small,” was their motto and they practiced on their families and friends.
They had found several “orphan” socks for the boy’s mother by using mirrors to look behind the washing machine. They found a lost wad of gum that their friend Keleny had been chewing on for two weeks, by using the keen nose of their dog, Squeeze, to smell it. He found it in her room on the windowsill behind the curtain. They found Mrs. Bennerly’s lost car keys in some pants in the dirty clothes hamper by using a metal detector. And lastly they had found Mr. Gable’s dog, Sparky, by barbequing steaks in his front yard (they unexpectedl
y found three other dogs, too, though).
The children’s names were Talkin and Root. Actually those were their nicknames, given to them, as Talkin explains, “to me by my third grade teacher Miss Anabel because that is what I was always doing in her class—now everyone calls me that. And to Root because one day when we were young (before kindergarten), he made fun of my long hair braids and ribbons so I pulled his hair so hard that he crowed like a rooster, ‘A-ra-u-ra-u-ruuuuu!’ That’s when I started calling him Rooster, and then I shortened it to Root because he loves root beer so much.”
They had just finished reading in their magazine about “spying techniques, taboos, and trickery,” when Miss Anabel, wearing a small backpack, walked by their house. They saw her from Talkin’s living room window just as they were talking about who they were going to spy on. Talkin and Root smiled at each other. “Mom, we’re going outside to do some Junior Detective stuff,” Talkin yelled to her mom in the other room.
“Have fun. Make sure you’re back for dinner.”
They secretly followed Miss Anabel successfully out of the city, along a country road, lined with trees, and eventually to a dirt trail leading into the forest.
* * *
After arriving in the forest in the afternoon, Francine Anabel fished along a river while moving upstream. Francine could indeed feel the wind becoming stronger and stronger, and finally had to stop at a log that lay across the river because the foggy wind was becoming unbearable. She almost turned back, but across the river, through the wind, she thought she could see something it looked like the faint form of a woman. Francine looked harder; the woman was facing her and was slowly motioning with her hand to Francine to come to her. As Francine watched, the lady moved to her left, until she became harder to see through the foggy wind and slowly disappeared. Francine stepped onto the log, sat down, and inched her way across it.