Meaning get up and get hiking.
Which I did.
But I’ve got news for you—moleskin doughnuts work about as good as they’d taste.
The last thing I wanted was to be a whiner, though, so I just cringed and shuffled along, trying to keep up.
“How you doing?” Robin kept asking me, ’cause obviously I was lagging.
“Fine,” I kept lying, ’cause I’m not used to lagging. I’m used to being the one going, “Come on! Keep up! Can’t you move a little faster?” But while the others were climbing up the trail like mountain goats, my feet were in pain, my thighs were aching, and I was so thirsty that all I wanted to do was stop and drink water.
“You’ve just got to keep moving,” Robin finally told me. “Stopping all the time makes hiking hard. Just go at a steady pace and don’t quit—you’ll find that it’s actually easier.” Then she added, “And go easy on the water. You’ll want some left for the last mile. It’s steep.”
“Steeper than this?” I choked out. And I wanted to kick myself for sounding like such a baby, but I just couldn’t help it. On top of everything else, it felt like someone had slipped big ol’ boulders into my pack. My hips were aching, but loosening the hip belt so the weight was on my shoulders just made things worse.
Robin smiled at me. “Quite an undertaking for your first hike, especially in somebody else’s shoes. But you’ll make it.” She handed me a piece of gum and said, “This’ll help.” Then she started hiking again and called, “When you get to the top, you’ll feel great!”
As I trudged along, the others kept me in sight. I could tell they were annoyed that I was holding them back, and I hated that. Why didn’t they just go on ahead instead of following their stupid safety rule that was making me feel like a complete loser.
Hmm. Maybe they were worried that I’d spot a condor without them.
Ha.
Like I’d even care?
Also, I didn’t want them to know, but I’d run out of water. My lips were flaky and cracking, my face was scorched and dry. . . . I felt like I’d been hiking up an endless sand dune in the Sahara Desert. Water, my mind kept saying, water. . . .
Then Cricket called, “We can see the Lookout, Sammy! You’re almost to the top!”
Thank God.
I plodded along, and when I finally reached the top, I felt like shouting “Robin Terrane is a liar!” because I did not feel great.
I felt destroyed.
The others were already heading up the stairs to the Lookout, so I twisted out of my backpack and dumped it alongside the lineup of other packs.
But as I started up the stairs, Bella, Gabby, and Cricket came pounding down, and I could see from the look on their faces that something was wrong.
Very wrong.
FIVE
Vista Ridge Lookout is a one-room, square metal building on stilts. It has a set of metal stairs leading up to a green door and windows all the way around that are protected by brick-colored shutters. The top half of each shutter swings up and attaches to the roof awning, and the bottom half swings down, practically touching a deck that goes clear around the building. The deck has a chain-link “wall” to keep you from falling over, but it makes the Lookout seem like a prison guard tower instead of a birdwatcher’s playhouse. A little barbed wire, a few guns . . .you’d be all set.
Anyway, there I am, parched and in pain, dying to get inside the Lookout for some water and shade, only the other girls are charging down the steps. Bella sees me and cries, “Someone broke in! Mom thinks they might still be inside!”
It didn’t seem very smart for Robin to stay up there alone, but less than a minute later she came through the doorway and called, “Nobody home. But the place is turned upside down.”
“But why?” Bella cried, heading back up the steps. “Why would somebody do that?”
“Is anything missing?” Cricket called as we followed Bella.
“It’s hard to tell.”
Inside, we all just stood around for a minute, trying to absorb the mess that surrounded us. There was broken glass from a window next to the door. You couldn’t tell from the outside because the shutter concealed it, but it had been busted so somebody could reach inside and unlock the door. There was enough light flooding in through the open door for us to see that desks and chairs had been flipped over and that cups and books and pictures and binoculars and beer cans were strewn everywhere. But the corners of the room were in shadows, and the whole place felt really eerie.
Gabby made a sort of hiccupy sound, and when I looked at her, I saw that she was crying.
Crying.
And then Bella broke down and wailed, “I can’t believe someone did this!”
“So what do we do?” Cricket asked.
Robin took a deep breath. “I guess the best course of action is to see if we can find the shortwave radio. If we can, I’ll get in touch with the sheriff and try to reach Quinn. He told me he was coming up last night, so I don’t know where he is. It’s not like him to be late.”
“There’s no cell service?” I asked, because Robin had a cell phone clipped to her pocket.
Robin shook her head. “But we’ll be able to radio down to the base station.”
“The base station?”
“The main fire station in Santa Luisa.” Then she added, “We can also reach the sheriff or Professor Prag at the college.”
Robin handed Cricket a small ring of keys and said, “Would you and Sammy go outside and open all the shutters?”
“Sure.”
The padlock of the broken window’s shutter had been put back through its latch so the shutter still looked locked, but the loop part of the lock had been cut near the base.
“Did they saw through it?” Cricket asked, studying it, too.
“I don’t think so. See how the metal looks pinched? I think they used bolt cutters.”
“What are bolt cutters?”
“My friend Hudson has a pair. They’ve got long handles for torque and a curved pincer-looking blade. I saw him cut open a rusted lock in his garage once—snapped right through it.”
Cricket moved to the next window and unlocked it, her lips tight, her nostrils flared.
“You okay?” I asked as I helped her hook open the top shutter.
“No,” she said, “I’m mad.” She went on to the next window. “You have no idea how upsetting this is. A lot of people work really hard to fix up this place and then some moron comes along and trashes it. Why? Why would anyone want to do this?”
I helped her with the next shutter. “Maybe because they’re mad at someone?”
At first she didn’t get it, but then her eyes got really wide. She dropped the shutter she’d been lifting and ran inside the Lookout crying, “Robin! It was Vargus! It had to be Vargus!”
“Calm down, Cricket. I know. You’re probably right.” Robin was collecting beer cans, potato chip bags, and other trash in a plastic bag. “But he’s long gone and will deny it, so we need to find the radio.” She took a deep breath and looked from Cricket to me and back. “It would help a lot if you could open the rest of the shutters.”
Gabby and Bella had filtered some water, so after I downed as much as they’d let me have, I made a quick stop at the area around the broken window. I didn’t see a thing. No snagged hairs, no clothes fragments, no blood . . .
Too bad for us, this was real life, not the movies.
So I went back outside and helped Cricket open the rest of the shutters. “Wow,” I said when we were all done and I finally noticed the view.
“Amazing, isn’t it?”
I nodded. It wasn’t that it was so beautiful, it was that you could see so far. The hills just seemed to roll away, getting soft and fuzzy in the hazy distance.
“Here, do this,” she said, grabbing my arm. “Walk around the whole thing. Don’t look down, just out.”
When we’d made it halfway around, I said, “Wow,” again, and it came out all breathy. Like I really mea
nt it.
“Doesn’t it feel like you’re on top of the world?” she whispered.
I nodded and watched a hawk riding a thermal along the canyon. It didn’t flap, didn’t seem to put in any effort at all. It just glided along, tipping slightly from side to side as it circled and swooped and rode the wind.
“You see hawks up here all the time,” she whispered. “Them and crows.” She laughed. “I hate crows.”
I laughed, too, because I’m no fan of crows myself. They’re big and ugly and oily and scary, and they caw. Like it isn’t bad enough to be big and ugly and oily and scary? You also have to caw?
But anyway, there we are, having a laugh about crows, when all of a sudden I see a little flash of light down in the canyon. Like someone signaling with a mirror. And then I notice a trail of dust rising into the air. “What’s that?” I ask, pointing.
Cricket squints, then runs inside the Lookout. “Someone’s coming up the back road!”
“There’s a back road?” I ask, following her.
Cricket grabs a pair of monster binoculars and races outside again, the rest of us right behind her. She studies the flashing puff of dust a minute, then squeals, “It’s Quinn!”
“Really?” Gabby says, grabbing the binoculars away. But before she can even get focused, Bella pulls them from her, saying, “Let me see!”
“How can you tell it’s him?” I ask Cricket.
She grins at me. “Red truck, condor flag . . . it’s him!”
Robin heaves a sigh of relief and says, “Thank you, Lord,” then goes back inside the Lookout.
It took about twenty minutes for Quinn’s truck to finally reach the Lookout. There was a blue and orange mountain bike in the bed of the truck, and he had a passenger with him—a woman with amazingly long honey blond hair.
Gabby and the other girls raced down to greet Quinn, but I stayed upstairs with Robin. She’d cleaned up the room a lot but was still very firm-lipped.
“Do you think it was Vargus?” I asked.
She nodded.
I shook my head. “But you know what? He didn’t seem drunk, and he didn’t smell drunk. Did you smell anything? Like when he blew that breath in your face?”
She stopped and stared at me, then frowned. “And I got a good whiff, too.”
I went over to her trash bag and pawed through it. “There are at least ten cans in here. And all these chip bags? It’s like there was a party up here.” I took a leftover chip and bit into it. “These are totally stale.”
Just then the girls came in and announced, “Quinn’s here!” and then in strode . . . a samurai.
Wearing hiking boots.
And jeans.
And a T-shirt.
Okay, so it was just his head that looked samurai-ish. Dark hair held in place by a tattered strip of black fabric tied around his forehead, deep brown eyes . . . But the way he carried himself was very fluid. Very light. Like he was walking on a stream of air.
He got directly to the point. “The girls think it was Vargus. Do you agree?”
“I don’t know who else. But”—Robin showed him the trash sack—“not even Vargus could down a case of beer and not be drunk.”
“Maybe he came up last night?”
“He said he came up this morning to talk to Dennis about not passing his course, but he could have been lying. He was in a hurry and very agitated.”
Quinn nodded. “I’ll radio the sheriff.”
“But we can’t find the radio!” Robin said.
“It’s in my truck.”
“Oh, you’ve got it . . . !” Then she asked, “Were you up here at all yesterday? Was Dennis?”
He shook his head. “I was running behind all day, and I’m pretty sure Dennis had meetings.” He glided toward the door. “I’ll call the sheriff. We need to have Vargus questioned.”
So Quinn went down to his truck. His long-haired friend was leaning against the tailgate and looked really outdoorsy—tan skin, good muscles—like she was ready for anything.
She hung out with him as he used the shortwave radio, but she didn’t come up to the Lookout afterward, which Gabby and Cricket sure didn’t mind. They sort of melted at Quinn’s feet when he returned, and Gabby said, “We’re really hoping to see a condor this time, Quinn. Do you think we will?”
“Pretty good chance, I’d say!” He smiled at her. “I checked on JC-10 and AC-34 last week. They’re doing great.”
“Who are JC-10 and AC-34?” I whispered to Cricket.
“Juvenile Condor Number Ten and Adult Condor Number Thirty-four,” she whispered back.
“You saw them?” Gabby squealed. “At their cave?”
Quinn nodded.
They were all so excited. And not only did the switch in mood feel weird to me, it also seemed strange that all of them were so attached to birds that didn’t even have real names. I mean, ugly or not, if they’d named them something like Swooper or Flygirl or Buzzilla, that would be one thing. But AC-34? How could anyone care about a big ugly bird named AC-34?
“Can you take us to the cave?” Gabby was asking. “Can you please?”
Quinn hesitated, then gave her a bit of a samurai squint. “Too much human contact is not a good idea. I’ve been up there twice in the last month, but that’s because I wanted to make sure their roost was still free of glass and bottle caps.”
“Glass and bottle caps?” I whispered to Cricket.
Cricket whispered back, “Condors feed that stuff to their young.” She shrugged. “Nobody really knows why.”
“Wouldn’t that kill them?”
“Exactly,” Quinn said, extending a hand as he did a samurai glide over to me. “Quinn Terrane. And you are . . . ?”
I put out my hand, and all of a sudden I understood what made Cricket and Gabby so . . . buttery over this guy. He was like a black hole of magnetism, his eyes sucking you in, not letting you go.
“S-Samantha,” I stammered. “Samantha Keyes.”
My own voice kind of snapped me free of his magnetic pull. Samantha? Samantha? I never introduce myself as Samantha. That’s how my grandmother introduces me. Did I think it made me sound older? More sophisticated? Smarter?
What kind of embarrassing moron was I?
I pulled my hand away and said, “But I go by Sammy.”
“Well, Sammy,” he said, “Cricket is right. Why condors feed their young dangerous shards and bottle caps is unclear. What is clear is that human influences have compromised the condor’s safety for over a century.” He flashed a glistening white smile. “I take it you’ve joined the ranks of those committed to fighting back these influences?”
Now I was mad at him. What did he take me for? Some gooey-eyed teen who’d swoon at his eco-happy feet?
Please.
So inside I’m going, Yeah, dude. I’m here to help save that rare, intelligent species that feeds glass and bottle caps to their young. I can’t think of a more worthwhile cause to devote myself to. . . .
But outside I nodded.
Like a hypnotized idiot, I nodded.
SIX
Robin shooed us outside to set up our tents. I think she wanted to discuss the break-in with Quinn without a gaggle of girls interfering. So Cricket and I picked a spot near a big fire ring on the back side of the Lookout, while Gabby and Bella set up their tent about twenty feet away.
We started by kicking away rocks and big pebbles, then unrolled the tent so the doorway faced the fire ring. After that we popped together sections of lightweight tubes that were connected by a long elastic cord running inside them. Very ingenious. Imagine a little bundle of metal tubes that turns into one long, sort of bendy tube that you then thread through cloth tabs on the top of your flat tent. You do that twice, so you have a big metal X lying on top of your tent. At this point it just looks like a mega-mess spread across the dirt, but all you have to do is put the ends of the long, bendy tubes over pegs built into the corners of the tent and voila! The mega-mess magically transforms into your home a
way from home.
“That’s amazing!” I said when it had sprung to life.
“And look,” Cricket said, lifting the whole tent by the tubes. “If you don’t like the spot you picked, you can move it anywhere you want.”
I laughed. “Wow.”
She put it back where it had been. “The bad thing is that the wind can upend it, too, so we do have to stake it down.”
So we found some rocks, used them to drive in stakes at the corners, then started moving in. We rolled out our pads, unstuffed our sleeping bags, and unpacked our clothes.
“Ah,” I said, diving onto my “bed.” “This feels so nice!”
“You shouldn’t be half in and half out,” Cricket said. “You should always click the dirt off your boots like this, then get inside.” Then she added, “And close the screen. Always close the screen. All the way.”
The way she said it sounded very . . . ominous. So I clicked the dirt off my boots, pulled my feet inside the tent, and said, “Or what?”
“Or flies get in.”
But it wasn’t just flies, I could tell.
She saw the way I was looking at her and said, “Or mosquitoes. One little mosquito in the tent can make you itch for a week.”
But it wasn’t just mosquitoes, either.
“Look,” she said, because she could see my mind was coming to its own conclusions, “just don’t leave the screen open or bugs get in.”
“Bugs like ticks and scorpions?”
“All bugs.” She started scooting out of the tent. “Hey, I’m starved, aren’t you?”
I scooted out of the tent behind her and zipped the door closed tight. “Are you kidding? I’m in an eat-a-cow-now mood.”
Unfortunately, there were no double cheeseburgers up at the Lookout. And since it was roasting hot out, none of us really wanted to collect wood, start a fire, and cook lunch. So Bella, Gabby, Cricket, and I sat on an outcropping of rocks that overlooked the canyon and ate trail mix, beef jerky, and dried bananas.
Now, while we’d been setting up our tents, Quinn’s long-haired friend had sort of made the rounds, saying hello to everyone and checking out the views. She seemed nice enough, but she’d put Gabby into a serious frump.