But then I heard something. Something off in the distance. And at first I thought it was a cat, but a cat?
Mewing?
Out here?
So I stopped short and said, “Shhh!” and there it was again.
Through the brush.
Off the trail.
Somewhere in the distance.
A voice crying, “Help!”
ELEVEN
“Help! Somebody, help!”
“That’s her!” Cricket cried. “That’s Gabby!”
We cut off the trail toward the voice, calling, “Gabby! Gabby, where are you?”
She didn’t seem to hear us, though. And it felt like we were chasing a voice mirage. “This way!” one of us would say, and we’d go that way for a bit, then hear, “Help! Somebody, help!” coming from a different direction.
“Maybe she’s not here at all!” Cricket finally said, sort of panicked. “Maybe we’re hearing an echo!”
“We’re too low for that to be an echo.” I looked around at the others. “Aren’t we?”
“Help! Somebody, help!”
“On the count of three,” I said, “everybody shout, ‘Gabby,’ as loud as you can.”
So I counted off, and we all shouted, “GABBYYY!”
There was a moment of silence and then, “Over here!”
“It’s her!” Cricket squealed. Then she shouted, “Over where?”
“Here!”
Whole lot of help that was. But we kept shouting back and forth, and finally Casey pointed and said, “There!” as the back end of her disappeared behind some trees about fifty yards away.
“What are you doing?” Cricket shouted. “Hold still!”
“I can’t!” Gabby called. “He’ll get away!”
We all looked at each other like, Huh? then charged on.
“You think she’s chasing a condor?” I asked Cricket.
“You can’t chase a condor . . . it would fly away!” Then she called, “Gabby! Where are you?” because we’d lost her again.
No answer.
“Gabby!”
Still no answer.
“GABBY!”
“Shhh! Over here!” came a hoarse whisper.
We hurried around a group of scrub oaks and ground to a halt right beside Gabby. She looked bedraggled and ruddy-faced and was holding the transmission receiver she’d taken from the Lookout across her chest like a shotgun. It was a strange sight. She looked like a warrior who’d lost her mind and thought she could blast her way to freedom with an old-fashioned TV antenna.
But then, across a small clearing, we saw what she’d been tracking.
It was big.
Black.
Hunchy.
But the head wasn’t red, it was black, and honestly, there was nothing magnificent about it. It looked like some sort of oversized turkey vulture with a big number tag on its wing. So I asked, “Is that a condor?”
Gabby whispered, “It’s JC-10.”
“But why isn’t his head red?”
“’Cause he’s a juvenile. They don’t turn red until they’re full grown.” Then she added, “He’s hurt.”
“What’s wrong with him?” Cricket whispered.
“I’m not sure, but he can’t really fly. And he’s separated from his mother, which is not good.”
“Why’s a bird that big need to be with its mother?” I asked.
“Offspring stay with their parents for about two years,” Gabby whispered. “They don’t become mature until six years. They learn how to survive from their parents, so it’s real important to keep them together.”
“So where’s the dad?” I asked.
This time Cricket answered. “Dead. They found him about six months ago—some kind of poisoning.” She turned to Gabby. “Are you sure he’s hurt?”
“Watch.”
Just then the bird whooshed out his wings, making a roadblock of feathers. My jaw dropped, and Billy whispered, “That baby is huge.”
The bird tried to fly, but it didn’t really go anywhere.
“See?” Gabby whispered. “I think it’s the right wing.”
“It doesn’t look broken,” Cricket whispered. “But you’re right—something’s wrong with him.”
“And he’s not going to survive very long if he can’t fly.”
Cricket nodded. “The coyotes will get him.”
“Or the mountain lions.”
“Or the—”
“Stop!” I whispered. Like I needed to hear about more ways the Phony Forest could kill you?
Gabby blinked at me like she hadn’t realized I was there. “Oh, hi, Sammy.” Then she saw the boys. “Who are you?”
Cricket hurried to make introductions. “Billy, Casey, Gabby. And a formerly fierce rattlesnake.”
Gabby’s eyes lit up. “Hey! We can use the snake as bait!”
“No way!” Billy said, pulling back. “This sucker’s my dinner!”
We all scowled at Billy like, C’mon . . . !
“And so what if you bait it,” Billy said. “You may get close, but he’s not going to let you catch him. Look at that beak!”
The bird did have a fierce-looking beak. Not quite as big or as curvy as a parrot’s, but still, not something you’d want to mess with.
Then all of a sudden runny white stuff came shooting out of his backside, right onto its legs and feet. I pulled a face. “Oh, man. Something really is wrong with him.”
Cricket kinda eyed Gabby, who kinda eyed Cricket.
“What?” I said, because they were obviously both thinking something.
Finally Gabby said, “That’s nothing to worry about.”
“Really?”
Cricket nodded. “He’s just cooling himself off.”
I blinked at her. “With poop?”
She gave a little shrug. “Gross, but that’s what they do.”
I eyed Casey, who kinda smiled and said, “Guess he’s just cooling his heels.”
Apparently the bird was all through cooling his heels because he hippity-hoppity-flippity-flapped away from us, making surprising time for a cripped-up bird.
“I wish we had that shooting net,” Gabby grumbled.
“I wish we had the radio,” Cricket muttered.
“And I wish we knew where the trail was,” Casey said, looking around. “Billy and I could hike out and get some help, but I have no idea which way to go.”
“I’ve got a topo map, so I’m sure we can find it,” Cricket said. “But I really think we should all stick together.” She looked at the sun and then checked her watch. “It’s a good thing it’s summer—we’ve got about four hours to figure this out and get back to the Lookout.”
Half an hour later we were still just following that behemoth bird. So I finally said, “We’ve got to either do something or let him go.”
“We can’t just let him go!” Gabby snapped.
“So let’s do something.”
“Like what?”
I shrugged. “I don’t know. Tackle him.”
“Tackle him?” Cricket and Gabby cried together.
“Look. He’s just a big bird. There are five of us! Billy can bait him with some snake meat, then we can grab him.”
“It’ll hurt him!” Gabby cried.
“He’s already hurt . . . !” I said back.
“We might kill him!”
I rolled my eyes. “Oh, please. You said he’s going to die out here if we don’t do something, and I’m sorry, but I don’t consider following him around the forest doing anything. Let’s just tackle him and bring him in!”
“No!”
Now, if it had just been Gabby saying no that would have been one thing. But it was Cricket, too. So I rolled my eyes again and said, “Whatever,” and followed them as they followed the bird.
After another fifteen senseless minutes, I got a little flash of an idea. “How’s a shooting net work? Is it just a net that shoots out of a barrel and holds down the wings so the bird can’t fly?”
r /> “Yeah,” Gabby snapped. “And we don’t happen to have one.”
“But we do happen to have a tent.” I looked at Casey. “Right?”
Casey nodded. “Actually, we have two.”
“Two?” Cricket asked, looking from Billy to Casey. “Why two?”
Casey snorted and looked at Billy. “He crawls around at night. And he punches.”
“In his sleep?” I asked.
Billy gave me a goofy grin. “I sleepwalk at home, but there’s not enough clearance in a tent.”
“Which confuses him,” Casey said. “So he turns into the Sleep Zombie and tries to kill me.”
Billy put his arms in front of him like Frankenstein. “Sleep Zombie . . . wants . . . out!”
Even Gabby was losing her bird-stalking concentration. “You’re a Sleep Zombie?”
Billy wiggled his eyebrows. “Only at night.”
“Which means,” I said, “that we really want to get back to the Lookout before dark. And since these guys have tents, I’ve got an idea.”
“Yeah?” Casey asked. “What’s that?”
“Billy baits the bird with the snake—”
“Hey—that’s my dinner!”
I turned to him. “Listen, Mr. Sleep Zombie, I don’t want to play chase-the-condor all night! We’re out of water, Cricket, Gabby, and I don’t have much food. . . .”
“Dude,” Casey said to him, “let’s hear her idea, okay?” He turned to me. “All right. Billy baits the condor, and we . . . ?”
“We each take a corner of your tent and use it like a net.”
“You mean drop it over the bird while it’s eating?”
“Right. It can’t spread its wings, it can’t go anywhere. . . . We wrap it up and carry it out.”
Everyone looked at everyone else, and finally Cricket said, “It might actually work.”
We were chasing after the bird again, and this time it seemed to take forever for it to stop, so when it finally did, I said, “Okay. Billy, get some of that snake ready. Casey, get your tent out. Cricket, stick with Gabby if the bird starts moving again.”
“His name’s JC-10,” Gabby snipped.
“JC-10 is not a name,” I snipped back. “It’s an alphanumeric designation.”
Billy had produced a knife from his pocket and was starting to slit the snake. “So let’s name the beast!”
I hesitated. “Which beast? The snake or the bird?”
“JC-10 is not a beast!” Gabby said.
Billy looked over his shoulder at the condor. “Oh, yes, he is. And I think his real name’s Bubba.”
“Bubba?” we all cried. “No way!”
“How about Flyboy?” Casey said.
I said, “Or Birdzilla?”
“Meathead!” Billy cried. “Meathead is a perfect name because—”
“Shut up!” Gabby snapped. “Don’t even go there!” Then very quietly she said, “I think we should name him Marvin.”
“Marvin?” We all kind of looked at her, then looked around at each other like, Why not?
So JC-10 became Marvin, Billy got a hunk of snake ready, and the rest of us worked fast to prepare the tent, tying lengths of rope through the corner grommets so we’d be able to stand as far away as possible. And when we were all in position, holding the tent up as high as we could, Billy put the chunk of snake on the ground underneath it.
Then we held very, very still and waited. And waited.
And waited.
Marvin didn’t budge.
For ten minutes we stood there. And watching Marvin, I figured out that the little black box near the number tag on his wing was the transmitter. It was only about the size of a nine-volt battery, and it had a little tail on it, which was probably the antenna.
My arms were starting to ache. Cricket and Gabby were shifting around a little, and I could tell they were really tired, too. And just when I was thinking we wouldn’t be able to hold the tent up much longer, Marvin did a little hop-flap forward.
We all held our breath.
He did it again. And that was it—he gave in to the mouthwatering aroma of dead snake.
We all looked at Cricket, and when she nodded, the four of us pulled down on the tent, blanketing Marvin beneath it.
“You got him! You got him!” Billy cried, hopping around. But Cricket had left her daypack in the way, and in all the commotion of catching the bird, she managed to step on it and fall over.
Quicker than I could’ve cried, Help! Billy grabbed her end of the tent and pinned Marvin down. And when we’d wrapped him up and knew he couldn’t get away, we took a minute to be ecstatic and relieved and amazed that we’d actually done it.
But then Cricket and Gabby started worrying that we were suffocating him. And then when we tried to give him some air, he attacked us with his beak. Man, what a weapon! He hammered around like crazy, so we just covered him back up.
After that I said, “Okay. Let’s pack him up and go. We’re running out of daylight.”
Trouble is, Cricket first had to figure out where the heck we were. And because there were no obvious peaks or valleys or, you know, site points in our vicinity, she was having trouble placing us on the topo map.
But since we all knew it would be stupid to start walking aimlessly through scrub oaks and scorpions, the guys and I just paced around for half an hour waiting for her to figure it out, while Gabby cooed at Marvin through the tent.
Finally Cricket threw her hands in the air and said, “I don’t know. I can’t tell, I don’t know.” She pointed behind us. “That’s north, and I think the trail’s to the west . . . but I’m not sure.” Then she snapped at Gabby. “Stop talking to him! He’s supposed to have limited human contact!”
“It’s a little late for that!” Gabby snapped back. “And we’ve got to do something. He’s going to suffocate in this tent!”
Casey went over and rearranged the tent so Marvin could breathe through the screening, then picked up the bird bundle and said, “Lead on, Cricket. We’re burning daylight.”
So we walked and we walked and we walked, and we stopped twice to let Cricket try to figure out where we were, but it didn’t help. All we could see in every direction were thorny bushes, weeds, and scrub oaks.
Then the sky got dusky and the air cooled off, and finally Casey stopped and said, “I hate to be the one to say it, but we’re down here for the night. We need to pick a spot and set up camp.”
“But we don’t have our sleeping bags,” Gabby said. “Or water!”
Casey scratched the back of his neck. “The five of us can fit in the tent and we’ve got two bags. We’ll survive.”
“But . . .” Gabby’s eyes got huge. “Oh, Robin’s not going to like this! She’s not going to like this at all!”
“What are we going to do with Marvin?” Cricket asked. “He can’t stay in the tent with us—he won’t fit!”
“And he’s a stinker,” Billy said. “Man, he’s rank!”
I looked at the others. “What if we set up the second tent and put him inside it?”
Casey nodded. “That should work.”
“If he doesn’t claw his way out,” Billy said.
“They don’t have talons,” Gabby said like a know-it-all. “They’re not predators. They’re scavengers.”
“Yeah. They’ve got to eat other people’s snakes,” Billy grumbled. He was still hauling his stupid snake around, only now it was about five feet long, with about a foot of skin dangling. “And maybe that thing doesn’t have talons, but I bet it hammerheads out of the tent in five minutes.”
Cricket took a deep breath. “Let’s not fight.” She turned to Gabby. “We’re lucky we ran into these guys, okay? They helped us catch Marvin, they’re sharing their supplies . . . they’re being really nice. We need to just set up camp and make the best of it.”
“I agree,” I said. “And if anyone’s got a better idea, let’s hear it.”
No one did. So we put Gabby in charge of Marvin, while Billy made a
fire ring, Cricket gathered wood, and Casey and I put up the second tent.
When everything was set, we all worked together to get Marvin inside the tent. He was really stinky, but it was actually easier than it might have been because he was pretty subdued. And after we unwrapped him and closed the screen, he just sort of stood there while we crouched in front of the tent and looked at him with a flashlight.
Now, maybe we shouldn’t have been using a flashlight on him at all, but it’s not like we were putting it in his eyes or anything. And Cricket and Gabby were in obvious awe over the fact that right there, right through the mesh, was a real, live condor. And I don’t know, it was sort of contagious.
Then Billy said, all matter-of-factly, “What if he’s sick from the bird flu?”
We all pulled a face at him like, Oh, nice, and right then Marvin tried opening his wings. He couldn’t raise them very far, but I was close enough now where I could see that he had some kind of rash that ran under one wing and along part of his chest.
I took the flashlight from Gabby and shined it directly on the rash. “What’s that?”
“What’s what?” Cricket asked.
“Those spots.” Marvin’s wing was down now, but I could still see some of the spots along his chest. “They’re brown.”
Almost like he was trying to show her what I was talking about, Marvin turned and raised his wing again. And that’s when I saw that it wasn’t just spots. There was a whole area of patchy, crusty brown.
It wasn’t some weird bird rash.
It was blood.
And in the pit of my stomach I knew—Marvin had been shot.
TWELVE
Casey confirmed it. “It looks like he was hit with birdshot.”
“Somebody shot him?” Gabby gasped. “What kind of idiot would shoot a condor?”
Cricket’s eyes were huge. “They must’ve seen him and thought he was something else. Like maybe a turkey vulture sitting in a tree? Nobody would shoot a condor on purpose.”
We were all quiet a minute, then I asked Casey, “Is birdshot meant specifically for birds?”
He kinda grinned. “That’s why they call it birdshot.”
“But you wouldn’t go hunting, say, rabbits with it?”