Everyone woke up. Maris, Henry, and Jessie switched on their flashlights.
The beams poked holes in the darkness. But nobody saw anything. “I heard someone walking!” Violet insisted. “Over there.” She pointed.
Bobcat came around the side of the lean-to from his tent. “What’s going on?” he asked.
“Violet heard someone,” Henry told him. He pointed.
“I’ll check on the food,” Bobcat said. “Maybe that’s what you heard, an animal doing a little grocery shopping.”
They watched Bobcat’s flashlight bob away from the lean-to. A few minutes later, he came back. “Nothing,” he said.
“I know I heard something,” Violet said.
“It must have been the wind,” Maris told her. “Or some small animal.”
Everyone lay back down. One by one, the campers began to fall asleep.
Until Violet sat up once more. “There it is again,” she cried.
This time, Maris walked to the edge of the clearing and shone her flashlight beam into the darkness all around. Everything was still and quiet. Bobcat called from his tent, “Everything okay. Maris?”
“Okay, Bobcat,” she called back. To Violet, she said, “Nothing’s here. Or if it is, it’s run away.”
“I know I heard something,” Violet repeated.
Jessie put her hand on Violet’s arm. “It’s just some animal,” she told her sister. “The animals won’t hurt us.”
“It didn’t sound like an animal,” Violet said. “It sounded big. Like someone walking.”
“A deer, maybe,” said Maris, yawning.
“Or a bear?” Benny asked.
“If it was a bear, it’d make a lot more noise. It’s no bear,” Maris told him. “Let’s get some sleep.”
Everyone lay back down again. This time, it took longer for them to fall asleep. But at last, only Violet was awake. She lay with her eyes wide open, listening hard. She listened and listened.
But the woods were silent except for the creak of branches in the cold wind.
Then she heard a sound. She sat up, but she didn’t say anything. She strained to hear.
The sound stopped. Violet began to relax. She lay back down. Just a raccoon or something, she told herself sleepily.
At last she fell asleep.
“Oh, great! That’s just great!”
Bobcat was shouting. Violet sat up and blinked. A thin frosting of snow decorated everything. Tracks made patterns in the snow.
Maris stood by the warm fire heating a pan of water. “What is it, Bobcat?” Maris called.
A moment later, Bobcat came into sight. His hair was wild and he looked upset and angry.
Benny and Henry were right behind him. “It was a bear!” Benny said gleefully, before Bobcat could answer Maris.
Jessie came trotting around the other corner of the lean-to, holding her toothbrush. “Where’s a bear?” she asked.
But Bobcat was shaking his head. “If it was a bear, I’ll eat my hat,” he said. “No bear is that neat.”
“Did something eat the food?” asked Maris.
“You guessed it,” Bobcat said. “About half of it is gone. Clean gone. No broken-open packets of soup, no dried noodles scattered on the ground. Just gone.”
Maris frowned. “That doesn’t sound like a bear.”
“Did you see any footprints in the snow?” Jessie asked.
“No,” said Henry. “It must have happened early in the night, when the snow had just started to fall.”
“Maybe we should just give up and start over,” Bobcat said.
“We have food left, don’t we?” Maris asked.
“Some—” Bobcat held up a small bag of sugar. “Powdered milk. Sugar. Some dried beans. About half a dozen chocolate bars. The peanut butter sandwiches. Oh, yeah, and some dried oatmeal.”
Maris made a face. “It could be worse,” she said.
Jessie looked at her sister. “You were right, Violet. You did hear something!”
Maris sighed. “Well, whoever did this left us enough food for today. If we can get more supplies, we should be fine.”
Now Bobcat sighed. “I’ll do it,” he volunteered. “I’ll go back to Blizzard Gap and get more food and meet you at the next campsite.”
“Can you make it all the way down and back up to the old cabin by tonight?” Maris asked.
“If I start now,” Bobcat answered.
“I could come with you,” Henry offered. “I can carry some of the supplies.”
Bobcat shook his head. “Stay here and help with the trail,” he told Henry. “I’m used to carrying a heavy backpack. It won’t be a problem.”
A few minutes later, as the Aldens and Maris packed up the camp, Bobcat put on his almost-empty backpack. “When you see me again,” he said, “this pack will be full of groceries.”
With a wave and a smile, Bobcat headed back down the trail. Soon after, the Aldens and Maris had the campsite as clean as if they’d never been there. Then they, too, put on their packs and headed in the opposite direction.
They didn’t walk fast. Maris stopped to make marks on trees with paint and write notes in a small notebook. Sometimes she took photographs or drew diagrams. The snow stayed on the ground in the shade but began to melt along the trail. Their boots made wet, squishing sounds as the Aldens walked.
Maris showed them the neat, even tracks of a fox where it had crossed the trail.
“What’s this?” asked Violet, pointing to another set of tracks.
“Rabbit,” said Maris. “And one with a sore foot, from the looks of it.”
“How can you tell?” asked Jessie.
“Look at this footprint. The other three tracks are deep. But the right front one is blurred and only deep at the toes, as if the rabbit put its foot down quickly, then lifted it up again, dragging it a little.”
“Oh,” said Jessie. “I see.” They hiked on. At last, when the sun was high overhead, Maris said, “It’s lunch-time. Why don’t you rest here? I’m going to look around and see if I can find a way around these rocks that isn’t so steep.”
Benny and Jessie sat on a log. Violet found a spot on a rock in the sun. Henry spread his waterproof jacket out on a patch of leaves and sat on that. They ate peanut butter sandwiches they’d made the day before and drank water that Maris had filtered from a stream that morning. For dessert they each had a chocolate bar.
“If it wasn’t a bear, I wonder who took our food last night,” Henry said.
“Half our food,” said Jessie. “Whoever it was left us some food so we wouldn’t starve.”
“A sort of nice thief,” said Violet.
“Maybe it was the thief who stole all that stuff from the museum,” Benny said.
“I don’t think so,” said Henry. “That thief would be long gone by now. But I do think it was a person, not a bear. If a bear had torn down our food bag, it would have left a big mess. There wasn’t a mess. I mean, the bag had burst open, but only some of the stuff had been taken.”
“The chocolate bars weren’t taken,” said Jessie. “If I was a bear, I’d take all the chocolate bars first,”
Everyone nodded. Then Violet said, thoughtfully, “It’s almost as if someone were trying to scare us off, but they wanted to make sure we didn’t go hungry getting back home.”
“You’re right,” agreed Henry. “I don’t think a bear would be that thoughtful.”
“Then who was it?” Benny asked. He looked around. “Is someone following us?”
Violet looked around, too. She shivered a little. “I hope no one is following us, Benny,” she said.
“Lots of people knew we were coming up this way,” Jessie said. “Carola. Rayanne.”
“Chuck,” said Benny.
“All the people in the coffee shop,” said Violet.
“But who would want to follow us all the way up here and steal our food?” asked Henry. “And why?”
“Not Chuck. He’s got crutches,” Benny said.
“Rayanne?” asked Violet.
Jessie shook her head. “I don’t think so. She was busy at work.”
“That leaves Carola. She doesn’t want us here,” said Henry.
“She could have sneaked into town and let the air out of the tires,” Jessie said. “And she could have fixed Maris’s car so it wouldn’t start yesterday morning.”
“She said she had an appointment in Millpond,” Henry said.
“She could have been making that up,” Jessie said. “Just like she might have been pretending not to remember Maris had told her we were hiking up Blizzard Mountain today.”
“Or if she did have to go to Millpond, maybe someone’s helping her,” said Violet. “She fixed Maris’s battery, but someone else let the air out of the tires and stole the food.”
“Who?” Benny wanted to know.
They were silent for a moment. Then Henry said slowly, “It could be Bobcat.”
“I like Bobcat!” Benny said indignantly.
“We all do. But he might not want people up here, either, Benny. Just like Carola,” Henry said. “They could be working together.”
“He was in his tent last night,” said Jessie. She thought for a moment, then added, “Both times Violet heard the noise, Bobcat didn’t come check on it or say anything until after the noise had stopped. So maybe he wasn’t in the tent at all.”
“Maybe he was being a bear,” said Violet.
“It would have been easy for him to have let the air out of the tires while he was doing his errands,” Henry said.
“That’s right. He did other errands before he came to the diner. He could have done it then,” Violet recalled.
“It wasn’t Bobcat!” Benny said, sounding almost angry.
“Maybe not, Benny. I hope not,” Henry said. “But—”
He didn’t have a chance to say more. Maris came through the woods toward them. “Let’s go,” she said. “I think I’ve found a nice little detour around these rocks.”
The Aldens jumped up and shouldered their packs. Before they left, Maris made a mark on a tree, with an arrow beneath it. “So Bobcat can find us,” she said, “when he comes up the trail this afternoon.”
The Aldens all looked at one another. They didn’t say anything. But they were all wondering the same thing.
What if Bobcat didn’t come back at all? |