To their credit, they didn’t act all standoffish, despite my having pissed off both of them. I needed them, and they were right there for me.
“The other counselors and I will watch your kids,” Min said. “You guys go see if you can catch them.”
Gunnar nodded and stepped up next to me.
“Wait,” Em said from nearby. “I’m coming too.”
“Me too,” Otto said, also stepping forward.
I looked back at Min. “When Mr. Whittle gets here, tell him where we went.”
And then Gunnar, Em, Otto, and I ran off across the camp grounds for the trail.
“What’s going on?” Otto asked me when we reached the trailhead.
As we ran, I explained to the others my theory of what had happened.
It was that damn Outstanding Camper award. My mistake had been telling Trevor I was giving it to him, and how proud it would make his parents.
Trevor didn’t want to make his parents proud! As Beautiful People, they resented their scarred son for smudging up the perfect Christmas-card photo that was supposed to be their family. For that, Trevor resented them—who wouldn’t? As a result, the last thing in the world he wanted was to make them “proud.” If they couldn’t accept him for who he was, he wanted to punish them. And how would he do that? By going to Kepler’s Homestead, a place where the kids had been warned never to go! In fact, now that I was reciting my theory out loud, I even remembered Otto saving to the kids how going to Kepler’s Homestead without an adult was so serious that any kid who did it would immediately be reported to his parents and expelled from camp!
As for Ian, he’d gone along with Trevor to try to talk him out of it.
I knew my theory made perfect sense. I had seen Trevor’s parents act uncomfortable around burn survivors, and I’d seen Trevor act resentful in front of them. I also remembered how quiet he had been when I’d told him about the Outstanding Camper award. As for Ian, I knew how seriously he had taken that Order of the Poison Oak thing. And I had specifically said that part of the Order’s code was helping out other members—members like Trevor, who was planning to do something as stupid as going to Kepler’s Homestead just to embarrass his parents.
Somehow I knew my theory was right. I knew these kids inside and out, body and soul!
Five minutes later, we ran smack into Trevor on the trail. He’d been running back toward us.
“Oh!” I said, surprised. “You’re here! You’re okay!”
“Huh?” he said.
“You came back from the Homestead!”
He looked at me like I was crazy. “What homestead? I went after Ian. To stop him. But then I saw the fire, so I turned around.”
“Fire?” Otto said. So it had already jumped the lake!
“Ian!” I said. That’s when I realized—duh!—that Trevor was alone. I froze, puzzled. “But why is Ian going to Kepler’s Homestead?”
“Why do you keep saying Kepler’s Homestead?” Trevor said. “Ian wasn’t going there.”
My theory was wrong? I thought, So much for my knowing my kids inside and out, body and soul!
“Then where?” I said. “Where’s Ian?”
He hesitated, glancing at Em and Gunnar.
“Trevor!” I said. “This is really, really important! Whatever it is, you’ve got to tell me!”
Trevor stepped closer to me and lowered his voice. “To the poison oak patch. He lost his leaf.”
“What?” I said, still confused.
“His magic poison oak leaf. He lost it, but he didn’t want to leave camp without it. So he went back to get another one.”
I clued in at last. None of this had anything to do with Kepler’s Homestead (now that I thought about it, how would anyone have known that Trevor was there, anyway?). No, it was about Ian having lost his magic leaf. Actually, I thought, this made a lot more sense than my theory about Trevor and his beautiful parents. I had told my kids to keep those leaves forever, to press them between the pages of a book, and Ian had said how important the Order of the Poison Oak was to him. And he definitely tended to lose things!
I turned to Otto. “Take Trevor back to camp. Tell Mr. Whittle what’s happened.”
He nodded, and the two of them ran off down the trail.
Then I looked at Em and Gunnar. “I know where Ian is. This time, I know I’m right. It’s not too much farther. But it sounds like there’s fire ahead. This could be dangerous. Are you coming?”
Neither one hesitated an instant.
“I’m in,” Gunnar said.
“Me too,” Em said.
We started down the trail again.
Ten minutes of hard running later, we reached the fire. It wasn’t at all how I imagined it would be, or like a forest fire always is in the movies. It was ahead of us on either side of the trail, but it wasn’t one big fire burning everything in sight. Instead, it was a bunch of little fires—a stump burning here, a branch burning there. True, sometimes there were bigger patches of fire. But none of them were connected, except by the fact that all the flames were caught in the same breeze, so they would all blow in the same direction with each new gust of wind. Sparks and floating embers whirled around in that wind like a blizzard of burning snow.
The other thing that surprised me was how loud the fire was. It was a cross between a roar and hiss, like the sound of a white noise machine turned way up high.
Up ahead on the trail, maybe twenty yards away, I could see the giant tree that I had used as a marker the night I’d done the ceremony for the Order of the Poison Oak. If Ian had been coming back here to get a poison oak leaf, he had to be around here somewhere.
“This is it,” I said to Gunnar and Em. I pointed off to the right, over by where I thought the patch of poison oak would be. “That’s where he was going.” What with the sound of the fire, I almost had to shout.
We all scanned the undergrowth. But I didn’t see anyone.
“Ian!” I shouted. “Ian!”
There wasn’t any answer, but I doubted he could hear me anyway over the roar of the flames. Should I go farther down the trail? That would mean entering the fire area. And it wasn’t like the trail was some protected pathway—there were plenty of fires burning right on the trail itself, on fallen branches or tree roots. If I was going to go in looking for Ian, that meant walking right among those fires, and that seemed really risky.
Maybe Ian was long gone, I thought. Maybe he’d gotten his leaf before the fire had even spread this far. But then I remembered that Trevor had said he’d seen the fire too, which meant that it had to have spread this far by the time he’d arrived here with Ian. And if Ian had found a leaf and headed back for camp, why hadn’t we met him on the trail? There was only one Waterfront Trail, and the undergrowth along the lake was too thick for him to go bushwhacking.
The lake! If I were Ian and I’d somehow found myself trapped by a forest fire, I would have headed straight for the water. Once in the lake, I could swim to safety.
Was that it? Had Ian swum to safety? At the point where we were, it was about fifty yards from the trail to the water. The fire must have spread up from the shore, I decided, because there were even more of the little blazes down there.
But even as I scanned the area between the trail and lake, Em was pointing. “There!” she said.
And just twenty or so yards beyond and to the left of the big tree trunk, I saw the unmistakable blue of a T-shirt, topped by the face of a bewildered ten-year-old boy.
Chapter Fourteen
I turned to Em and Gunnar. “You guys should go get help!” I said.
“Otto went to get help,” Gunnar said. “I’m staying with you.”
“Me too,” Em said.
To tell the truth, this was what I’d hoped they would say.
“I’m going in for him,” I said. “And this I am doing alone.” What went unstated was the rest of the thought: that if things went wrong, I would need Gunnar and Em to rescue me.
In my mind, I tried
to pick out the clearest path through the fires to Ian. It would mean staying on the trail part of the time, but swerving off it at times too.
“Russ?” Gunnar said.
I glanced over at him.
He put one hand on my arm and squeezed. “Good luck, buddy.”
So Gunnar and I were friends again. That was good. What was bad was how solemn he sounded. Gunnar was a pretty serious guy, but I’d never heard him sound like that before. He was like a sergeant in some war movie talking to another soldier right before he leaves on some suicide mission. And the thing was, this was almost that serious. I was trying to save someone from dying. And if something went wrong, I could die too. I’d sure never done anything anywhere near this serious before.
But I wasn’t scared. I knew what I had to do. Now it was just a question of doing it, and seeing how things turned out. In fact, in spite of the high stakes— or maybe because of them!—I couldn’t remember ever being quite so calm. This was worth remembering the next time I got all bent out of shape because I found myself wearing the “wrong” pair of underwear in the locker room after P.E. class.
I nodded to Gunnar, then turned and started running toward Ian. I was immediately reminded of Rainbow Crow and his three-day journey back from the land of the Creator with a burning branch in his beak.
Like Rainbow Crow, I had smoke in my face. It was thick and dirty, and I felt like a vacuum cleaner, sucking in particles of grit and ash. But I was a living vacuum cleaner, so I could also feel and taste the stuff It scraped the tender linings in my nose and throat, and also stung my eyes.
And like Rainbow Crow, I felt heat. It came at me in waves, these intense blasts unlike anything I had ever experienced before. It was the heat that explained why a green forest was even burning in the first place. After a while, anything would catch on fire in heat this strong—not just deadwood and pine pitch, but living wood, ferns, and bushes. Sure enough, little fires were exploding into being all around me (like I really was a soldier on a suicide mission, and was now on the receiving end of enemy artillery).
Eventually, I would burst into flames too. That’s what it felt like, anyway. Already I knew I was going to have one hell of a “sunburn.” Even the rubber in my tennis shoes was melting, making it feel like I was walking on sticky gum.
The heat was too strong—and it looked like the worst of the fire was still ahead. Unlike what the burning torch had done to Rainbow Crow, this fire wouldn’t just turn my feathers black. It felt like if I didn’t stop, my skin would burst into flames. I thought that would be ironic—that then maybe Otto and I really would end up being the perfect couple.
I couldn’t go on. I had to stop. But I’d only just made it to the giant tree trunk—not even halfway to Ian.
I thought about returning to Em and Gunnar and waiting for the firefighters who were sure to come. But they might not be there for an hour or more—not until Otto got someone to call the firefighters and they somehow managed to make it to Camp Serenity, then all the way down the trail. Even the helicopters couldn’t save us, because they wouldn’t be able to see where we were. But if we had to wait an hour or more for help, Ian would die.
The problem was, if I kept going forward, I would die too. I might have kept going anyway if my dying would save Ian. But it wouldn’t. If I went down, he would too, for sure.
I didn’t know what to do. Helplessly, I searched the area, as if for an answer. Incredibly, I immediately found the answer I was looking for.
The tree bark! The giant tree that I had used as a marker on the trail a few days before? The bark was loose. Big hunks of it littered the floor of the forest around the base of the trunk. What had Otto said that time about the bark of old-growth trees? That they had fire-retardant properties! Sure enough, none of the pieces of hark were burning.
I picked up the largest scrap of bark I could find and held it up like a shield. It was no help against the smoke, but it did seem to deflect some of the heat.
I started forward again. I found that if I crouched down low while I ran, the heat was less intense, and the smoke wasn’t as thick either. My tennis shoes were still melting, but hey, I couldn’t have everything.
I reached Ian at last. He wasn’t crying, which meant he was more butch than I would have been in his place, especially at age ten. Of course, the heat was so strong that maybe his tears were drying before they even had a chance to fall.
“Are you okay?” I said to him. It was even louder inside the fires than it was at the edge, so this time I really did have to shout.
Ian didn’t answer me or even look at me. That’s when I wondered if maybe it wasn’t that he was so butch. Maybe he was in shock—in some place beyond tears.
“You’re going to be okay!” I said to him. “I’m going to carry you out of here!”
He still didn’t move, or even react. He looked sad but helpless, like one of those starving children on the commercials for sponsor-a-kid charities.
I squatted down in front of him and threw his limp arms around my neck.
“Hold on to me!” I said, and fortunately he did. Then I reached for my shield of tree bark, which I used to cover us both. With that, I stood up a little-enough to be able to walk, but not so much that I’d have to face the full brunt of the smoke and heat again.
I turned back the way I had come.
A bush exploded into flames in front of me. A fern went up next to it. Then, right in a row, a tree branch flared up like a torch. The fire was spreading, being driven by the wind. But that meant it wasn’t just like being on the receiving end of enemy artillery. It was more like being attacked by an evil wizard—like some fire-wielding spell-caster was using magic to cut off my escape. If I tried to walk through these new blazes, I’d be burned for sure.
The fires were blocking me. I couldn’t go back the way I’d come.
I turned to the left, in the direction of the poison oak patch, but other fires raged there. It was impassable too.
The lake! I needed to do what Ian had been trying to do and get to the water.
But when I turned in that direction, I saw that the fires were still thickest there. There was absolutely no way I’d make it the forty yards to the lake.
The whole area was going up in flames, like the forest was a grid and each square was slowly being filled in with fire.
There were blazes all around us now. That meant there was no way out. That meant Ian and I were trapped.
Chapter Fifteen
Suddenly, a great wave of water rolled over the fires in front of me. It splashed everywhere, dousing the nearby flames and even spattering up onto me, cooling the blistering skin on my bare calves and thighs. As water met fire, it created one of the most satisfying noises I’d ever heard—a loud, angry, but quickly fading hiss.
What in the world—? I had absolutely no idea what was going on!
But as the steam and smoke cleared, I saw the source of that mysterious and wonderful wave of water. Em and Gunnar were just beyond, standing behind a rusted metal trough, which was now on its side on the ground. They must have run back and grabbed that old trough from Kepler’s Homestead, filled it with as much water from the lake as they could carry, and brought it right into the fire. Then they’d poured the contents onto the flames.
Unfortunately, they hadn’t put out all the fires—just the ones right in front of Ian and me.
“Come on!” Gunnar shouted. “Let’s get out of here!”
I didn’t need to be told twice.
But as I tractored Ian forward, Gunnar shouted, “Em!”
I looked over at where she was standing, several yards to one side of the upturned trough. But the evil fire-wielding wizard was back at work again; little fires leaped up right in front of her.
Now Em was the one who was trapped. But the trough was empty—they’d used all the water to save Ian and me!
Without thinking, Gunnar reached down and lifted the trough up again. Then he turned and slammed it down on top of the fi
res. Once it was in place, he clambered into it, using it like a bridge across the flames.
When he reached Em, he said, “Are you all right?”
“Huh?” she said. She’d been so surprised by the fires that she was in something of a state of shock now too. So Gunnar didn’t say another word. He just grabbed her around the waist and lifted her onto his shoulder—which is saying something, since he isn’t known for his upper-body strength. Then he carried her back over the trough-bridge.
“Come on!” he said to me. “We need to get out of here!”
And that’s exactly what we did.
* * * * *
Safely away from the fires, Gunnar and I put Em and Ian down in the middle of some bushes.
“Are you okay?” Gunnar asked Em.
“You saved my life,” she said. She still looked stunned, but in a good way now.
“Huh?” Gunnar said.
“You saved my life! If not for you, I would have died back there!”
“What? No.” We were all red-faced from the heat, but suddenly I think Gunnar’s face was a little redder than ours.
“You did!” Em said, and the only word I can use to describe her expression is to say she was beaming.
Meanwhile, I turned to Ian. There were signs of life in his eyes now too, but he still wasn’t crying, which told me that maybe he was just as butch as I’d thought at first.
“Are you okay?” I asked him.
“Yeah,” he said. “I’m sorry. That was so stupid!”
“It’s okay. It doesn’t matter. All that matters is that you’re okay.”
“I just wanted a leaf,” he said. “But I didn’t know there was a fire.”
“I know. That was my fault. I should’ve told you.
“I shouldn’t have gone in. Trevor told me not to. But when I got there, the fire hadn’t spread yet. It was the wind! It was like the fire just surrounded me. It’s funny. The last time I listened to someone, my teacher, I got burned by the steam. This time, I didn’t listen, and I almost died.”