I scowled at her. “Creatures like ticks and scorpions and rattlesnakes?”
“They’re all part of the balance of nature, Sammy. Birds eat bugs, snakes eat rodents . . . it all balances out.”
I sighed and muttered, “I still can’t believe he gets paid to make lists of bugs.”
Cricket held the binoculars to her eyes and muttered, “And I wish he would just show up.”
I let her scan the area for a minute, then asked, “So where else could he be? Or maybe he already ran into them on the way up?”
She shook her head. “He went down that way,” she said, pointing toward the road we’d hiked the day before.
“The roads don’t connect?”
“It’s a long way around.”
“But it is possible?”
She nodded, then said, “I guess so.”
After another minute, I said, “You want to go to Echo Rock and make a call?”
She laughed. “Sure.”
So we got down to the outcropping of rocks and called, “HELLO!” and waited through the echoes.
There was no answer. The wind was gusting upward, out of the canyon. It was warm and dry and didn’t seem to know where it wanted to go. First it gusted to the left, then the right.
“HELLO!” we shouted again.
Again, no answer.
“NO . . . QUINN,” we yelled, hoping that Robin and Bella might hear us and that they’d understand.
After that we took turns scouring the canyon with the binoculars for signs of life, but all we saw were a few birds flapping by.
“Hey, look!” I said. “There goes a condor!”
“That’s a crow.”
I laughed. “No, it’s not! It’s a condor!”
She tossed me a grin. “Very funny.”
Then all of a sudden we looked at each other, our eyes wide.
“Did you hear that?” Cricket whispered.
I put up a finger, and we both held our breath and waited. And there it was again, riding the winds up, out of the canyon, “Help!”
Cricket shouted, “GABBY?”
There was no answer.
“BELLA?” we both shouted into the canyon.
We waited, but again, all we heard was the wind.
Finally Cricket said, “We did hear ‘help’ . . . didn’t we? Maybe we imagined it?”
“We both imagined the same word?”
“Maybe it was just the wind?”
I shook my head. “It was someone calling for help.”
“Do you think it was Gabby?”
“I have no idea.”
“What if it was Bella or Robin? What if something happened to them? What if . . .” She was looking really panicky. “I hate this feeling. And I hate doing nothing! Why isn’t Quinn showing up?”
We scoured the area with binoculars some more but saw no sign of Quinn. And even though it didn’t make any sense, even though I knew I shouldn’t say it, it was nearly noon and I was sick of standing around in the dusty heat doing nothing. “You want to go try to find her?”
Cricket’s eyebrows flew up. “And leave you here? No way!”
“I meant both of us. My blisters don’t hurt that bad anymore.”
“So why do you shuffle around like you do?”
“I’m thinking I could put another level of moleskin on. You know, build it up? Pad it more?”
Cricket hesitated, balancing what we should do against what she wanted to do.
“Get me some moleskin,” I said, plonking down on the ground to unlace my boots.
“It makes more sense to st—”
“Get me some moleskin.”
Ten minutes later I was patched up, and we both had food, water, and emergency supplies in our daypacks. Then we left a note for Quinn inside the Lookout, locked the windows and the door, and took off. We didn’t even bother to think through the reasons we were going. Neither of us tried to talk the other one out of it. After all, what was there to discuss?
It was a mistake, and we both knew it.
NINE
We’d been hiking all of five minutes when I knew that the extra moleskin wasn’t going to do much good. And after a while, the pressure from it pushed my feet forward and started giving me blisters on my little toes. But I decided, Forget it! What’s a little pain in the foot?
Better than a pain elsewhere, which is what I would be to Cricket if I complained or slowed her down.
So I played with new ways of walking and just toughed it out.
I also took it easy on the water.
It helped that we were going downhill and that there were stretches of shade. It also helped that Cricket stopped every twenty minutes to look through the binoculars. And the fact that we weren’t just standing around twiddling our thumbs made us feel better, which got us to thinking more positively. “That was probably Gabby calling for help,” Cricket said at one point. “And that’s a good thing! Bella and Robin have probably found her and they’re all fine.” She turned to me. “Right?”
“Right!” I said, like I believed it. But in my head I’m going, So why am I torturing my feet, hiking into this canyon?
In a lot of places the road seemed more like a deer path than something trucks could drive on. There were scrub oaks and prickly bushes everywhere, and sometimes the road was so overgrown that Cricket and I had to walk single file to avoid the wicked poison oak plants that were everywhere. Cricket gave me an education on how to identify the stuff, then instructed me not to touch it, burn it, or eat it.
Like I would want to?
Anyway, we continued hiking along, and after a while Cricket said, “Up here a little ways you’re going to have to decide how adventurous you want to be.”
She seemed to be in such a good mood. Like being out in the woods hiking had made her forget all about that cry for help. I shuffled faster to catch up with her. “This seems pretty ding-dang adventurous to me!”
She laughed, and when we rounded the next bend, she swung off her daypack and came to a halt. “How do you feel about taking a shortcut?”
“A . . . a shortcut?” I blinked at her. And all of a sudden I realized what this was.
It was cosmic revenge.
I mean, I’m always dragging Marissa on shortcuts, over fences, through dangerous territory. . . . I’m always making her follow people she doesn’t know and go places she hates being. And lots of times we wind up in situations where there are creepy-crawly bugs. She freaks out and I always tell her to chill out—that they’re just bugs. One time we were trapped in a basement with evil, dangling black widow spiders and I told her she was overreacting!
Yes, this was definitely payback. Marissa had prayed to the Gods of Revenge and said, “Please, please, please teach Sammy what it’s like to be me!” and they had listened!
Man, had they listened.
“Sammy?” Cricket said, sort of cocking her head at me.
“Huh?”
She had smoothed out a strange-looking map on the ground and was on her knees in front of it with a compass in her hand. “I asked you how you feel about taking a shortcut.”
I wasn’t really ready to answer the question, so instead I pointed to the map and asked, “What’s that?”
“A topo map. You’ve never seen one?”
I rearranged my ball cap, anchoring all the hairs that had escaped. “Not like that.” The map was mostly tan and olive green, and it looked like someone had drawn a bunch of squiggles and peanut-shaped designs, then traced larger and larger circles and peanut-shaped designs around them. Some of the lines were close together, some were farther apart . . . and the tracings were kind of sloppy. Like whoever had done it wasn’t very good at it.
“It shows the topography of the area,” she said, twisting the outside part of her compass and positioning it on the map. “You know, the lay of the land. Hills, valleys, elevations, distances. . . . Once you figure out what everything means, it’s really easy to read.” She smiled up at me. “And it’s very hand
y for taking shortcuts.”
“Why are we taking shortcuts?”
She laughed. “Because shortcuts are shorter.”
I squatted beside her and muttered, “Not always.”
“Well, in this case, they are.” She adjusted the map a little, then pointed to places on it as she said, “This is where we are, right here. And this area over here is Chumash Caves. We could follow the trail clear around this way—which is how Quinn gets near it in his truck and the way Bella and Robin are most likely hiking. Or we can cut down through the valley this way, shortcutting over to Miner’s Camp here, then take the trail south through Hog Heaven.”
I squinted at her. “Hog Heaven?”
“The real name is Hoghead Valley, but I call it Hog Heaven.” She smiled at me. “Better, don’t you think?”
“Because hogs love it?”
She laughed. “They’re actually wild boars, and they’re mean.”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, great.”
She folded the map so our location was still showing, then wiped the sweat off her brow. “So? What do you think? It’ll save us at least an hour. Maybe two.”
“Which means it’ll save us two hours, maybe four round-trip?”
She nodded.
My feet were all for that. “Then sure.”
She pointed across the valley. “See that outcropping of rocks near that big dead oak?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s our site point. Once we reach it, we’ll take out the compass again and pick another site point. If all goes well,” she said, cutting off the trail and down the mountainside, “we may even beat Bella and Robin to Chumash Caves!”
Now, maybe in her mind this was a race, or maybe she was trying to prove something, I don’t know. But she was in a great mood, so I just tagged along, trying to adopt some of her positive vibe.
In the process I discovered some interesting things about hiking cross-country. For one thing, what you see clearly as a big dead oak with an outcropping of rocks from the trail above becomes almost invisible as you drop down the hillside. And the little scrubby oaks between you and the big dead oak become enormous trees that block your view. Nothing actually changes size, but it sure seems like it does.
Also, what looks like a straight shot to a big, dead oak with an outcropping of rocks winds up being a series of zigzagging steps around shrubs and trees and conspiring arms of poison oak.
Much tougher than sticking to the beaten path.
But when we finally reached the big dead oak, Cricket seemed pleased. “We made good time. You’re doing great!”
She didn’t ask about my feet, and I was glad. They felt like bloody stumps of pain.
We took a few swigs of water, found a new site point, and took off again. This time we were on fairly flat terrain, and except for my feet screaming at me, things were going pretty smoothly. That is, until I heard this deep, kinda rough cracking sound.
I stopped short. “What was that?”
Crrraaaack!
Cricket looked around, her eyes wide. “I don’t know.”
CRRRRRAAAACKKKK!
We both screamed and charged forward as the oak tree we’d been standing beside suddenly split near the base and thundered to the ground.
My heart was pounding and we were both shaking as we looked back at the enormous heap of shattered oak, which was still quivering from the fall. “Holy smokes! That coulda killed us!”
Cricket was holding her heart, panting for air. “Sudden oak death,” she gasped.
“Sudden oak death?”
She nodded. “Must be. It’s a disease. Kills trees. I’ve heard about it, but I’ve never actually seen it happen.” She shook her head. “Wow.”
I looked around. We were surrounded by oaks. “Can you tell which ones have that disease?”
She looked around, too. “The ones with brown leaves . . . ?”
“These all have brown leaves!”
We got out of there quick, steering as clear of oaks as we could. But no other trees came crashing down, and after we reached the next site point, it was only about ten minutes more before we found Miner’s Camp.
Now, you’d think that finding an official campground would have been a relief, but we were in the Phony Forest, and the definition of “camp” in the Phony Forest is a place where they post a sign. They don’t have picnic tables or outhouses or faucets or water pumps . . . just a sign.
Miner’s Camp.
I was dying to sit down and take off my boots, change the moleskin or add some more, then maybe have a snack and, you know, rest. But before I could present this decadent little scenario to Cricket, she nodded toward a grove of oaks about fifty feet away and whispered, “Let’s get out of here.”
I hadn’t noticed the three men or their camp, because they blended into the scenery perfectly. Their tents were tan, their backpacks were tan, and the men looked like trees in their green-and-tan camouflage shirts, pants, and hats. They were sitting on tree stumps around a fire ring, stock-still, studying us. I felt like a deer being watched through the scope of a rifle.
“Right,” I whispered.
Cricket pretended not to see them, keeping her eyes locked on the trail as we moved through Miner’s Camp. I pretended to do the same, only I had my eyes cranked to the side, trying to see if they had guns.
“That was so scary,” Cricket whispered when we were a safe distance down the trail. “Three of them, two of us, no one else around . . .”
I nodded. All of a sudden ticks and scorpions and rattlesnakes seemed like little-kid fears.
Cricket glanced over her shoulder, then yanked me off the trail and behind some trees. She squatted and whispered, “Let’s wait here for a minute and make sure they’re not following us.”
So we waited and watched.
And waited and watched.
And again, I was reminded of Marissa.
How many times had I done the same thing to her?
Finally I whispered, “Do you think they’re the ones who fired those shots last night?”
“I wouldn’t be surprised.” Cricket stood up like she was getting ready to go, then did a quick double take at my shirt. I looked, too, as she flicked a little bug off my shoulder. It was small—maybe a quarter of an inch—almost round and smooth, with a teeny-tiny head and short little legs.
“What was that?” I asked.
“Just a bug,” she said, but she was checking out her own shoulders, moving away from the tree we’d been hiding behind.
I caught up to her. “What kind of bug?”
She laughed, but it was a forced laugh. “You worry too much—it was just a bug.” Then she tried to change the subject. “Are you thirsty?”
“It was a tick, wasn’t it?”
She looked away. “Yeah. I just didn’t want to freak you out.”
All of a sudden I itched all over. I started swatting at myself and inspecting my clothes, and finally she said, “Sammy, I want to get farther away from those men, okay?”
Oh, yeah. The men.
So I trudged along after her, feet screaming, itching from imaginary ticks, dying of thirst because it was hot and dusty and I was running out of water. And just when I thought I couldn’t get any more miserable, the trail took us through a meadowy area that was swarming with those stupid kamikaze flies.
I pinched my nose safely closed with one hand and swatted around my face like crazy with the other. “What’s with these flies?”
“Cow pies,” Cricket answered.
And sure enough, there were big dried splots of cow plops dotting the meadows. “There are cows down here?”
She laughed. “Yup.”
Then I practically stepped in some nuggets of fresh, grassy poop that were right in the middle of the trail. “And horses?”
“Pack animals, not wild ones.” She swatted away some flies. “But that would be so cool, wouldn’t it? To see wild mustangs race through the valley?”
Right. Like wild mustangs w
ould come anywhere near a tick-infested, gnatty-flied forest of scorpions, rattlesnakes, and scary men with guns pretending to be trees?
I made it through the meadow without getting any flies up my nose, but even in the luxury of fly-reduced air, I guess I started lagging. Cricket had to keep waiting for me, and finally she asked, “Are you doing okay?”
I made myself not complain. “Where’s the next water?”
She said, “It’s coming up soon,” but when she saw me start to guzzle from my canteen, she pulled it away from my lips. “Not that soon! And after we get there, we’ll have to treat it, which takes about twenty minutes.”
I moaned and broke down, saying, “My blisters are killing me. I’ve been trying so hard not to complain, but I need to change the moleskin or something.”
“Uh-oh.”
Something about that uh-oh really tweaked my beak. I mean, here I’d been toughing it out for hours, and my reward was an uh-oh? An Uh-oh, you’re slowing me down uh-oh?
I plopped down on a big rock that was in the shade and said, “Don’t worry. I’m not going to strand you down here. And I won’t hold you to your buddy system. I just need to do something about my blisters. They hurt.”
So off came the first boot. And I literally had to peel off the sock because it had sort of rolled together with the second layer of moleskin on my back blister and was cemented to my little toe, where a blister had ruptured and oozed and bled all over the place.
“Eew. Eew-eew-eew!” Cricket said when she saw my foot. “That’s bad . . . !”
No kidding.
It was the same story with my other foot, only worse. I shook my head and said, “I don’t know how I let you talk me out of my high-tops.”
Cricket’s face was all contorted as she looked at my feet. “I don’t know how you’ve been walking on those!”
I rested my feet on top of my boots and looked up at her. “With great pain.”
“I’m sorry.” She sat down on a rock next to me. “I’m so, so sorry! I had no idea they were this bad! We should never have left camp . . . !”