“It doesn’t taste like vegetables,” Lizzie reassured him.
He sniffed it. “Smells good,” he said.
“I hear you rescued my granddaughter from a raging torrent,” Grandma May said, handing him a heaping plate.
“The creek,” Lizzie explained.
Tyler sat at the table, sampling a forkful. “Hey, this is pretty tasty,” he said in surprise. “Yeah, she fell in the creek and I had to pull her out.” He shrugged nonchalantly.
“And weren’t you soaking wet?”
“We had blankets with us,” Lizzie said. “And I wore Tyler’s extra clothes.” She turned to him. “I have them for you upstairs.”
“But then you had to spend the night!” Grandma May said. “Weren’t you cold?”
“Well, we found a…” Tyler stopped, looking at Lizzie, and the secret shivered in the air between them.
“Kind of a hiker’s lean-to,” Lizzie said. “Old and fallen down, but it was something. We crawled in there.”
“And where were you in the park?” Grandma May asked. “Which creek?”
“Tenaya Creek. In Tenaya Canyon,” Lizzie said.
“Can you believe that?” her father asked Grandma May incredulously. “Tenaya Canyon! One of the most dangerous areas of the park.”
“Because of the curse,” Lizzie said. “But we figured the curse was just on white people. So Tyler would be okay.”
“And I was!” Tyler added enthusiastically. “Lizzie fell in the creek, but I was fine.”
“Great,” Mike said.
“Well, it was great,” Lizzie pointed out, “because that’s why he was able to rescue me.”
Finished with the cake, Tyler stood up and licked frosting off his fingers. “So can we go over to the apartment now? To look at the old pictures?”
“Of course,” Grandma May told him. “Lizzie, why don’t you show Tyler where he’ll be staying and he can leave his backpack there.”
Lizzie led Tyler upstairs to the guest room, which was next to her bedroom. It doubled as her father’s study, so it had a twin bed against one wall next to a desk and two big bookcases. Tyler sat on the edge of the bed and bounced.
“Cool,” he said. He looked out the window. “I can see the apartment from here.”
Lizzie smiled. “And over there if you look hard, you can see the elephants.” Past the rooftop of the garage, on a hill behind some trees, was the elephant house. In the distance, the gray backs of the elephants moved through the bushes, dappled by sunlight.
“I can’t believe you’re here,” Lizzie said.
He grinned at her, and for the first time, he looked fully himself. “Me neither. I thought I’d never see you again.”
“I told you!” Lizzie protested. “I said we’d still be friends.”
He shrugged, still smiling. “Yeah, I know. But I didn’t believe you.”
“Do you still have the coin?” she asked.
“Sure I do. It’s still in my backpack pocket.” She felt again the thrill of finding it in the shallows of Tenaya Creek.
They ran downstairs to Grandma May, and then the three of them walked across the yard to the apartment.
“I have something to show you,” Grandma May said as she climbed the narrow stairs to the second floor.
“What?” Tyler asked. “Another Yosemite photo?”
She smiled at him, raising her eyebrows. “Even better.”
In the bright little living room, the sun poured through the windows, and Grandma May sat on the couch. Tyler sat next to her, and Lizzie knelt on the floor at her feet. Grandma May leaned over to the cupboard under the bookshelf and took out the folder of Yosemite photos that Lizzie and Tyler had found.
She held up a tattered, brownish square of paper, covered in faded cursive handwriting. “I discovered this when I was going through some files at my house. I brought it with me when I came.”
“What is it?” Lizzie asked.
Tyler leaned closer for a better look.
“It’s a letter to … Jeanne? Is that what it says?”
Grandma May nodded cryptically. “Jeanne Carr. A friend of John Muir’s.”
Tyler bounced forward excitedly. “Who’s the letter from?” he demanded.
“Who do you think?” Grandma May asked.
“Not … John Muir,” Lizzie whispered. “But how do you have it?”
“I think cousin Clare must have gotten it somehow. From one of her friends in Yosemite. Jeanne Carr visited the park many times.”
“What’s it say?” Tyler asked.
Grandma May held it to the light. She read aloud:
Dear friend Mrs. Carr,
Fate and flowers have carried me to California, and I have reveled and luxuriated amid its plants and mountains nearly four months. I am well again, I came to life in the cool winds and crystal waters of the mountains, and, were it not for a thought now and then of loneliness and isolation, the pleasure of my existence would be complete.
Grandma May paused and scanned the creased and fragile paper. She continued reading:
Strange and beautiful mountain ferns, low in the dark cañons and high upon the rocky, sunlit peaks, banks of blooming shrubs, and sprinklings and gatherings of flowers, precious and pure as ever enjoyed the sweets of a mountain home. And oh, what streams are there! Beaming, glancing, each with music of its own, singing as they go in the shadow and light, onward upon their lovely changing pathways to the sea.
Lizzie closed her eyes, listening to the sound of her grandmother’s voice. She pictured the crooked tree house on stilts, the one in the photo, and the roaring waterfall and creek winding beside it. She imagined the fallen-down shack where she and Tyler had spent the night. She glanced over at Tyler and smiled.
“Wow, he has a lot to say,” Tyler commented.
“Yes, it’s very descriptive, isn’t it?” Grandma May held out the letter for them to see. “And this is only a small part of it! You can really picture what it was like for him in the mountains.”
Lizzie thought of the park’s tall redwoods and shining granite bluffs, the cool stillness of the morning air.
“I had an idea,” Grandma May continued. “I’m here for another week. What if we go to Yosemite together?”
Tyler’s face broke into a slow grin. “For real?”
Grandma May laughed. “Yes! We could stay at the Ahwahnee Hotel and go hiking. Maybe we could even look for John Muir’s lost cabin.”
“Sure,” Tyler said, nodding vigorously. “Now that we know our way around the place.” He turned to Lizzie with shining eyes. “I didn’t think I’d ever get to go back,” he said softly.
Lizzie wrapped her arms around her knees and rocked backward, beaming up at her grandmother. “That’s a great idea,” she said. “With my dad, too.”
And in the sunny little apartment, with Tyler and her grandmother sitting next to her, Lizzie imagined returning to Yosemite, to the woods and streams and mountains … and to the wolves, there in the beating heart of the wild.
Chapter 34
TREE HOUSE
LIZZIE LED THE way up the ladder and crawled across the rough plank floor. “See? My dad finished it last night,” she called down to Tyler.
The tree house had been their project for the rest of the summer, and Tyler and Lizzie had spent hours working on it with Mike almost every weekend. Just the day before, Mike had done a final safety check, making sure all the nails, boards, and screws were secure. So here it was, finished, and just in time, too—unbelievably, school was starting next week.
Lizzie scrambled to her feet and peered through the leaves at the quiet yard below. She could see the sloping roof of the garage apartment, and in the distance, the colorful, busy contours of the zoo. There was the lake with the flamingos; near it, the pasture with the gazelles and giraffes. Paths bordered by bright drifts of flowers wound through the network of animal compounds, and throngs of people meandered along, pushing strollers, holding hands, stopping to stare at the animal
s.
Tyler bobbed up beside her, his face glowing with approval. “Sweet!” he said. “You can see everything from here.” He stepped onto the lowest slat of the railing and balanced, pointing. “Look, the elephants!”
Lizzie climbed up next to him. “You can even see the otters.”
For a minute, they hung there, suspended in place and time, hovering in the treetops. Lizzie could see the world spread out below like a colorful patchwork of past and future.
“This tree house,” Tyler said. “It’s like John Muir’s cabin—don’t you think? The house on stilts?”
That old photograph was the very thing that had inspired the plan. She nodded. “It is.”
“Then it would be a good place for this.” Tyler buried his hand in his shorts pocket, then held something out in his palm.
She knew what it was before she even looked. She smiled at him. “Where can we put it to keep it safe?” she asked, taking the coin. She held it up to the light, so she could see again the date 1869 engraved in the silver.
“Let’s figure out a hiding place,” Tyler said, “where nobody else will find it.” He surveyed the board floor of the tree house. “Here!” he cried suddenly. In one corner, there was a complicated knot in the wood, almost a divot. He wedged the coin into it and looked at her triumphantly.
“You sure it won’t fall out?” Lizzie asked.
“Yeah, look. And it’s even covered by the wood, so it won’t get rained on.”
“Then that’s a good place for it.”
“Now this tree house really is like the cabin,” Tyler said. “And you know what? If it falls apart a hundred years from now, and all that’s left is a pile of boards, then maybe somebody will find this old nickel and think our tree house was built in 1869!”
He looked so pleased at this idea that Lizzie laughed.
“I’m going to come up here to write in my journal, the way John Muir did,” she told him, gesturing to her green notebook. She’d tucked it in the opposite corner of the tree house, on top of an old blanket.
Tyler walked over to it. “You still writing in that thing?”
Lizzie nodded shyly. “Yeah.”
“Am I in there?”
She looked at him. “What do you think?”
Now he laughed too. “I bet I’m all over it.”
He bent and picked up the notebook. For a second, Lizzie stiffened, afraid he was going to read it. But Tyler only handed it to her, still grinning.
“Know what? You should hold on to this. Cuz when you grow up, maybe you’ll publish it! You know, turn it into a real book, like John Muir did.”
“Maybe I will,” Lizzie said.
They sat together on the sun-speckled floor of the tree house, staring at ruffled pages of the notebook, which had traveled with them deep into the wilderness, and then out again.
“If you did make it into a book, what would you call it?” Tyler asked.
Lizzie thought for a minute.
“The Wolf Keepers,” she said.
And that is what she did.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Readers who are familiar with my other books, such as Shakespeare’s Secret and the Superstition Mountain trilogy, know that it’s very hard for me to resist a good historical mystery! The one at the heart of this story is the mystery of John Muir’s lost cabin, his home in Yosemite from 1869 to 1871.
While the present-day characters in this book are entirely the products of my imagination (as are the John Muir Wildlife Park and the town of Lodisto, California), the historical characters are all based in fact. John Muir was a quiet, thoughtful, solitary man, more at home in the woods and mountains than in human society. Yet he was in his own way a revolutionary. His vision of nature as something to be cherished and protected—rather than consumed and exploited—was radically new in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. He is America’s best-known naturalist and conservationist. Muir founded the Sierra Club, has been called “the Father of the National Parks,” and was a critical voice in the preservation of the Yosemite Valley, Sequoia National Park, the Grand Canyon, and other wilderness areas. He devoted his life to the protection of wild places.
John Muir at Mirror Lake, c. 1902 [Library of Congress]
The Yosemite Valley has a long history of interesting inhabitants. The Ahwahneechee Indians settled the area several thousand years ago, living in huts known as o-chums at the bottom of the valley, and hunting large and small game. In the mid-1800s, the Ahwahneechee were driven out of the valley by white settlers. The son of Chief Tenaya was killed during this forced relocation, purportedly leading the chief to curse all white people who dared to set foot in Tenaya Canyon. As described in my story, Tenaya Canyon is indeed called the “Bermuda Triangle of Yosemite,” and has been the site of numerous accidents and deaths due to its notoriously dangerous terrain.
John Muir’s “Lost Cabin,” Tenaya Creek, c. 1874 [George Fiske/National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center, Historic Photo Collection]
The Yosemite landmarks mentioned in the book are real, but the trail that Lizzie and Tyler follow into the canyon is fictitious; hiking in Tenaya Canyon is strongly discouraged by the National Park Service.
The early white settlers of Yosemite are as described in this book. Clare Marie Hodges became the first woman park ranger in the nation, due not only to her gumption and skill on horseback but to the foresight and open-mindedness of park superintendent Washington B. Lewis, who did not hesitate to hire her. Kitty Tatch and Katherine Hazelston were waitresses at the Sentinel Hotel and together became the subjects of one of the most famous early photographs of Yosemite: an image of the two women high-kicking at the edge of Glacier Point’s Overhanging Rock. George Fiske, a prominent photographer of Yosemite, purportedly took this photograph as well as a photograph of John Muir’s cabin. A few photographs mentioned in my story are shown here. The photograph placing Clare Hodges with Kitty Tatch in front of John Muir’s cabin is entirely fictitious.
Clare Marie Hodges, first woman park ranger, c. 1918 [National Park Service, Harpers Ferry Center, Historic Photo Collection]
And what of the lost cabin? Muir’s first Yosemite cabin was a small shed built of pine, attached to the sawmill where he lived and worked from 1869 to 1871. Visitors as famous as Ralph Waldo Emerson and the botanist Asa Gray joined him there. No trace of it appears to remain, and there is confusion over its exact location. Two National Park Service plaques place it at different spots near Yosemite Falls; local legend puts it on the banks of Tenaya Creek. The cabin was almost certainly not located where Lizzie and Tyler find it in my story, but William Frederick Bade, a biographer of John Muir, wrote that Muir actually built two cabins in Yosemite, the second one near Tenaya Creek.
Kitty Tatch and Katherine Hazelston dancing at Overhanging Rock, Glacier Point, c.1890s [George Fiske/National Park Service]
One of my discoveries in doing the research for this book was a funny comment by John Muir himself that refers to his “lost cabin.” It appears to be a cabin he built but never lived in, on the banks of Tenaya Creek. In his Unpublished Journals, in a journal entry dated August 31, 1895, he writes, “In the afternoon took a walk in search of my ‘lost cabin,’ as it is now called. Discovered it after a tangly search in the angle formed by Tenaya Creek with the river … completely hidden like a bird’s nest in a charming luxuriant growth.” He describes it as a structure fourteen feet by sixteen feet with a sharply sloped roof and walls that were six feet high. He writes, “Here I longed to live in winter after being driven down from the heights by snow,” but then notes that his plans were dashed: “The fireplace was never built. I intended to sleep upstairs in the garret, cedar-lined and snug, and to write. The roof is mostly gone, someone has been camping in it, a bunk in a corner, a whisky bottle, cans, etc., ferns, and bushes over the floor.”
Tenaya Canyon, as seen from Glacier Point, c. 1900s [William Henry Jackson/Library of Congress]
Even if John Muir never lived in the Tenaya
Creek cabin, if it happened to be the shelter that Lizzie and Tyler discovered during their Yosemite adventure, I think they would have been well satisfied.
John Muir (right) with Teddy Roosevelt on Glacier Point, c.1903 [Library of Congress]
One final note: No animals were harmed in the making of this book! The plot involving the wolves is entirely fictitious. The veterinarians and zookeepers I’ve encountered in my life have all been singularly devoted to the health, safety, and well-being of animals, and would certainly never do anything to deliberately make an animal sick. But for the purposes of my story, there are many substances that can produce symptoms of illness in canines temporarily, with no long-term harm. One of these is macadamia nuts, which are mildly toxic to dogs and presumably wolves, though they do not cause lasting harm or death. The symptoms of macadamia nut ingestion in canines are fever, vomiting, temporary hind limb paralysis, weakness, and muscle tremors; symptoms start within three to twelve hours and resolve without treatment in one or two days.
In my story, the zoo veterinarian uses an analgesic to sedate the wolves before transporting them to Yosemite; a likely candidate would be Domitor, which causes the animal to become unconscious but can be immediately reversed by injecting the drug Antisedan. Many, many thanks to the veterinarian Melissa Shapiro (DVM, Visiting Vet Service, Westport, Connecticut) for her medical advice; to Alex Spitzer of the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York, for his descriptions of wolf behavior; and to Jim Knox, Curator of Education at the Beardsley Zoo in Bridgeport, Connecticut, for sharing his thoughts and expertise on wolf communication and aggression, care in zoo facilities, and rehabilitation in the wild. As mentioned in my story, there are no wolves living in Yosemite currently, only coyotes. Biologists believe wolves roamed the Sierra Nevada Mountains of California several hundred years ago, but were driven to more remote areas by expanding human populations. Wolf rehabilitation efforts in our national parks have focused on Yellowstone.