“Hey!” I called down to Cricket. “What do those Chumash Caves look like?”
“Can you see them?” she called back, already charging up the rock to join me.
“Do they look like fat-guy bellybuttons?”
She stopped, then raced up the rest of the way. “Yeah!”
I handed over the binoculars when she reached me and pointed. “Over there.”
“That’s them!” she squealed. Then she lowered the binoculars and said, “We passed them?”
“What do you mean, we passed them?” Gabby asked, coming up the rock. “How could we have passed them?”
Cricket didn’t answer. She just handed her the binoculars, saying, “Wow, were we ever lost!” She jumped up and down a little. “But now I can figure out where we are!”
“Without a compass?” I asked.
She nodded. “I’ve done plenty of hiking down here. I just needed a bearing!” She started pointing around. “The trail’s somewhere over that way, but Deer Creek winds around that way, and we really need water!” She took her binoculars back from Gabby and started down the rock, crying, “Deer Creek, here we come!!!”
Billy and Casey had been taking care of the behemoth bird and were looking kind of worried when we joined them. “I don’t think he’s doing too well,” Casey said. “He’s really lethargic.”
“Water!” Cricket said. “We’ll get him water and get him out of here!” She was acting all hyper. All happy.
“Huh?” Billy and Casey said.
“Sammy spotted Chumash Caves. I know exactly where we are! Well, not exactly, but close enough! Come on! Let’s go!”
So Casey and Billy strapped on their packs, and since my daypack was practically empty, I went up to Billy and said, “Hand over the bird.”
He eyed me.
“I’m serious, Billy. You’ve got a full pack; I’ve got next to nothing.”
“Is this a stickup?” he asked, one eyebrow arched high. Then his eyes popped and he said, “Aaagh! She’s got drool!” and shoved Marvin into my arms.
“Yeah, I’ve got major drool,” I told him across the top of the wadded-up tent. “And I’m not afraid to use it!”
After that, everyone seemed to be feeling better. Even Gabby. She started apologizing to Cricket as we were hiking along, so I dropped back and let them have some privacy. I think I heard Gabby crying some, and I think she also gave Cricket a hug, but it was hard to tell with a big ol’ bird in my arms.
Casey offered to carry Marvin a couple of times, but I told him, “Back off, buddy, or I’ll hose you down!”
The truth is, though, Marvin was heavy. He felt like fifty pounds, but that was partly because the combination of him and tent was so bulky and hard to handle. I was wishing someone else would carry him, but I wasn’t about to ask.
I was through being the weak link.
By the time we found Deer Creek, I was exhausted, sweating, and parched. I put Marvin down and I was about to throw myself into the creek, but Cricket held me back.
“What? I’m going to drown in that?” It was all of a foot deep. Maybe.
“Wet feet will give you big blisters. Just splash some on your face and neck. You’ll feel a lot better.”
So that’s what I did. That’s what we all did. And it turns out that Billy and Casey had a portable water-purifying pump, so we didn’t have to wait twenty minutes for the purifying tablets to work before drinking. They just pumped it through their purifying gizmo and passed it around. And you know what?
Water is wonderful.
It’s the nectar of the clouds!
Man, is it good.
Anyway, after we were done splashing in water and eating a bit, we gathered our stuff and followed Cricket “thataway!” We hadn’t found the trail yet, but she seemed really confident about where it was.
And I was really hoping she did know, because Marvin wasn’t doing well. We’d tried to get him to drink at the creek, but he’d barely taken in any water. And he was feeling heavier by the minute.
Not that I was going to complain . . .
Anyway, there we are, just hiking along in a file—Cricket, Gabby, me, then Casey and Billy—hoping that we’ll find the trail, when Cricket points and calls out, “Chumash Caves, on your left!”
Casey says over my shoulder, “Hard to believe Indians used to grind their acorns up there, huh?”
I nod and keep looking at the caves. “You know, before this trip I never thought of myself as being even remotely wimplike, but after the two days I’ve had out here, I can’t imagine living like they did. It must’ve been so hard. What’s there to gather around here besides acorns? I haven’t seen a single berry. And what did they hunt? Venomous snakes? Boars with killer tusks?”
“Condors!” Billy calls from behind us. “Hey, they could tell ya they taste like chicken!”
Gabby shouts, “They didn’t even know what chicken was!”
Cricket stops and turns around. “They did not eat condors, Billy. They revered condors. They saw them as a symbol of power. They painted them on their cave walls and on their pottery, and they wove them into their blankets.” She takes a deep breath, then says, “Native Americans believed that the beating of the condor’s wings brought thunder to the skies. Which is why they call it the thunderbird!”
My jaw dropped. The thunderbird?
All of a sudden the bundle in my arms felt radically different.
I was hauling around a thunderbird?
I told myself I was being stupid. What difference did it make what you called it?
It was still a big ugly bird.
But . . . a thunderbird?
Cricket had started hiking again, so we all fell in line behind her. And we’d only been hiking another five minutes or so, when all of a sudden she cries, “Trail!”
At that point she’s probably forty feet ahead of me, and believe me, no one’s more anxious to get a glimpse of the long-lost trail than I am. But as I’m hurrying along, the toe of my boot kicks into a little pile of horse poop.
Now, I may not know piggy poop from coyote poop, but horsey poop is a different story. If you’ve ever been to a parade, you know what it looks like and you know what it smells like. It’s just processed grass, usually done up in tidy nuggets.
Like barbecue briquettes, only bigger.
And made out of grass.
Or hay.
Or, in this case, Phony Forest foliage.
Anyway, at first I’m like, Horse poop, so what? But then something clicks.
Hard.
I screech to a halt, do a U-turn, and bumper-car Marvin right into Casey.
“What’s up?” Casey asks as Billy bumper-cars him from behind.
“Uh, I’m not sure.” I kick over a few horsey briquettes, scout around a little, and hand him the bird. “Could you hold Marvin for a sec?”
But when he sees me following a faint trail of crushed grass toward a ring of trees away from everyone else, he passes the bird over to Billy and calls, “Hey, Cricket! Wait up!” as he hurries to join me. “What’s going on?” he asks me.
I keep on walking. “That horse poop’s not very old.”
He doesn’t say it right away, but eventually it comes out: “So . . . ?”
“So I saw some on the trail yesterday.”
Another pause. “And . . . ?”
“And there are no wild mustangs around here.”
We’re at the ring of trees now, and when we step inside it, I see that, sure enough, someone’s used the camouflaged area as a camp. There’s a crude fire ring with a pile of ash and a small area of flattened dry grass where a tent used to be.
“Where are you guys going?” Cricket calls. “The trail’s over here!”
Casey calls back, “We’ll be there in a minute! Sammy’s found a campsite!”
“We don’t need a campsite!” Gabby shouts. “We need to get back to the Lookout!”
“Give us just a couple minutes, okay?” Casey calls. “We’ll be right
there!”
I poke through the ashes in the fire ring with a stick. No smoldering embers or heat at all. And I unearth two burnt-clean cans, a wad of aluminum foil, part of a protein bar wrapper . . . and no bones.
So I give up on that and pace off the size of the flattened area where the tent used to be. Four feet by six feet. About. Then I find more horse poop near one of the trees. Quite a bit more. And there’s poison oak galore. I’m doing my best to avoid it, but it’s under every tree, popping up everywhere, lovin’ life.
A crow caws at us from the top of a tree, then flaps kind of awkwardly as it takes off. And that’s when I see something long and black on the ground across the camp area. I rush over, and what I find is the biggest feather I have ever seen. “Casey!” I gasp. “Look.”
“Sammy, I don’t get it. Why are you so spun up?”
“They don’t make crows this big—this is a condor feather!”
“But . . . we’ve got the condor! And they do lose feathers, right? Like any other bird? And we’re right near Chumash Caves . . . which is where they roost, right?”
I nod because he is right.
But still, something feels wrong.
Casey follows me as I wander along the outskirts of the campground. There are hoofprints in the sandy dirt in a lot of places, but they get more concentrated as we near an opening between two large oaks on the far side of the camp.
I point at the dirt and say, “I think they came in and out through here. Quite a few times.”
“You part Indian?” Casey asks.
I almost tell him, “No,” but then it hits me that I don’t know—seeing how my mom won’t tell me who my dad is. Then I get distracted by a large patch of flattened grass on the back side of one of the trees we’ve just passed, and when I check it out, I discover a large, dark brown spot on the ground. I squat down to get a closer look, then ask Casey, “Is this blood?”
He inspects it, and says, “That would be my guess.”
“Hey, you guys! Where are you?” It’s Cricket’s voice, and it seems more worried than irritated.
Casey waves across the clearing at her and calls, “Back here!” while I start to follow a sort of choppy streak of flattened dirt and grass that’s leading away from the camp. “See these hoofprints?” I whisper to Casey. “And this flattened path? It’s like something got dragged along through here.”
“Must’ve been heavy,” he says.
And that’s when I hear a buzzing sound in the air. It’s not loud or scary or weird. It’s just one of nature’s sounds. Like a bee buzzing. Only it’s not just one, it’s several. No, not just several, bunches. Like a big ol’ swarm of buzzy bees.
I look up and around, suddenly worried that this forest also has beehive bombs hanging from trees. “You hear that?” I ask Casey.
Just then Gabby calls, “Where are you guys going?” and when we turn around, all three of them are coming toward us, Billy waddling along with his backpack and Marvin.
“I just want to check something out!” I call back. “It’ll only take a minute!”
So I hurry along, following the choppy streak of flattened dirt and grass between shrubs and trees and nasty prickery plants pretending to be flowers. I’m still dodging poison oak because it’s still everywhere, and the buzzy sound is getting louder.
“You think it’s a beehive?” I ask Casey.
“If that’s bees,” he says, “we’re outta here.”
But then we come to a large clearing beneath the steep white face of Chumash Caves and discover that it’s not a beehive.
It’s something much bigger.
Much weirder.
Much grosser.
FOURTEEN
Casey and I just stare at what looks like a giant flyhive that’s dropped out of the sky. It’s big and black and buzzy and just nasty. And what flashes through my mind is that we’ve discovered the mother ship of gnatty flies. You know, like a giant flying cow pie from space! But then I realize that this giant flying cow pie has cloven hooves.
And tusks.
“What is that?” Gabby asks as the others join us.
“It’s a bug blitz!” Billy cries. “Those buzzy boogers brought down a boar!” Then he grins and adds, “Cool.”
I pick up a rock and chuck it at the mother ship, and we all watch as the invasion of flies lifts off and swarms noisily above it.
The ship has hooves and tusks, all right. Plus a wiryhaired body with a big hairy head, pointy hairy ears, and a huge round snout. It’s like a cross between the Big Bad Wolf and one of the Three Pigs.
The flies come back in for a landing, so Casey moves a few steps closer to the dead boar and chucks another rock at it. “The stomach’s been slit open and the guts are pulled out, which is what’s making these flies so crazy.”
“Any arrows?” I ask.
He chucks another rock, takes a few steps in, and swats flies from around his face. “Not that I see.”
“Was it shot?”
“I can’t tell!”
“No little pellets?”
He kicks the carcass, shooing flies away and waving them from around his head. “Don’t see any!”
“Why are we doing this?” Gabby asks. “Can we please just go?”
Casey hurries back toward us as Cricket says, “We really do need to get going. Robin and Bella are probably worried sick about us.”
So we move away from the mother ship, and as I relieve Billy of his bird burden, I say to Gabby, “Can you try to get a reading on Marvin’s mom while we’re hiking?”
“Why? What’s that got to do with anything?”
But Cricket grabs her by the arm and says, “Yes, she can do that. Now let’s get moving.”
So we fall in line, and as we’re hiking back toward the trail, Billy starts chanting:
“Hup, two, three, four!
Hup, two, three, four!
Keep an eye out for the flies,
They will eat you up alive,
Watch your face, dude, watch your back,
Buzzy boogers will attack!”
When he starts on the second verse, Casey moves up next to me and says, “Tell me what you’re thinking.”
I take a deep breath. “Okay. Yesterday when we were walking through some meadow covered in cow pies and swarming flies, I saw horse poop. Fresh horse poop.”
“Still steaming?”
I laugh. “Not that fresh, but you know . . . still moist.”
“Yum.”
I laugh again. “The point is, I didn’t see a guy on a horse, did you?”
He shakes his head.
“But the person who camped back there had a horse. And I think he used the horse to drag that boar from the place where he shot it to that clearing.” I look at him. “What do bow-and-arrow hunters do with a boar when they kill it?”
“Butcher it for meat. Or mount the head on their wall.”
“But this one was killed, slit open, and left behind. I think it was used as condor bait. The campsite was near the caves where Marvin and his mother were roosting, and I’m sure that’s not a coincidence. I think someone camped there so they could catch or kill a condor. Marvin got away, but I have a bad feeling about his mom. Especially since there was a condor feather in that camp.” I sort of scowl and say, “What’s bugging me is the shots. We only heard two shots, and they were in a row. I’m guessing those shots killed the boar. Then it would take time to drag a boar into a clearing and gut it, and even more time after that for it to attract a condor, right? But we didn’t hear shots after those first two.” I look at him. “So when did Marvin get shot?”
Casey scratches the side of his head. “Maybe you just couldn’t hear it? Maybe they used a rifle on the boar and something smaller on Marvin? Or maybe the person who killed the boar didn’t have anything to do with Marvin getting shot. The feather in the camp could just be a coincidence. Or maybe the boar was killed before you even got here and one shot was for Marvin and the other was for his mom?” He sort
of frowns and says, “But why would anyone bait and shoot a condor?”
“It doesn’t make sense to me, either.”
“And how would they know there were condors living in those caves? I sure didn’t.”
“You don’t watch the local news?”
His eyebrows shoot up. “You do? And what’s the local news got to do with this?”
“Actually, I try not to, but you know that reporter with the swoopy hair? Grayson Mann?”
“I know who you’re talking about. My dad calls him Pretty Vegas.”
I laugh because somehow the name is perfect. “Exactly! Well, apparently he did a whole series of spots on the condor for KSMY. So anyone who saw the show knows that there were condors living in those caves!”
“But I still can’t believe someone would go through all this trouble to kill one.”
Billy had gone through about five verses of his fly march but had finally quit. And I guess Casey and I had raised our voices, because Gabby calls out, “You’re paranoid, you know that? And you’re flat-out wrong!” She turns to face us. “I’ve got a signal on AC-34 right now! She’s actually pretty close by!”
“Really?” Cricket says, hurrying over to check the receiver.
I look at Casey.
He looks at me.
We both shrug and I call, “I’m glad, Gabby!” but inside I feel kinda weird. I mean, I want to be wrong, I just can’t quite believe that I am.
We headed back toward the Lookout the same way we’d come, only everyone agreed that without a compass, we wouldn’t be taking any shortcuts.
We did try shouting up to the Lookout a few times, but since we couldn’t see it or hear our voices echo, we quit. What was the use?
When we got to Miner’s Camp, the Camo Creeps were still there. It was like they hadn’t budged since we’d been there the day before. I took one look at them and kept on trucking, but Casey called, “You guys see anyone on horseback come through here yesterday?”
They just stared.