38 - The Abominable Snowman of Pasadena (4 page)

“Name-calling is so immature!” she yelled, chasing after me.

Then she stopped and pointed behind me. “Jordan! Look out!”

“Hey—I’m not falling for that old trick,” I called back. I skipped
backwards through the snow. I didn’t want to take my eyes off her, in case she
planned to pelt me with snowballs.

“Jordan, I mean it!” she screamed. “Stop!”

Thud!

I landed hard on my back in a pile of snow. “Unh!” I grunted, stunned.

I struggled to catch my breath. Then I stared around me.

I had fallen down some kind of deep crevasse. I sat shivering in the pile of
snow, surrounded by narrow cliffs of bluish ice and rock.

I stood and looked up. The opening of the crevasse was at least twenty feet
above me. Frantically, I clutched at the icy walls. I grabbed onto a jutting
rock and fumbled for a foothold, hoping to climb out.

I hoisted myself up a couple of feet. Then my hand slipped and I slid back to
the bottom. I tried again. The ice was too slick.

How would I ever get out of here?

Where were Dad and Nicole? I tried to warm my cheeks with my mittens. Why
don’t they come to get me? I’m going to freeze down here!

Nicole’s face appeared at the top of the crevasse. I’d never been so happy to
see her in my life.

“Jordan? Are you all right?”

“Get me out of here!” I shouted.

“Don’t worry,” Nicole assured me. “Dad’s coming.”

I leaned against the pit wall. The sunlight didn’t reach the bottom. My toes
felt ready to break off. They were so cold! I jumped up and down to keep warm.

A few minutes later, I heard Dad’s voice. “Jordan? Are you hurt?”

“No, Dad!” I called up to him. He, Nicole, and Arthur all stared down at me
from above.

“Arthur is going to lower a rope down to you,” Dad instructed. “Hold on to
it, and we’ll hoist you out of there.”

I stepped aside as Arthur tossed one end of a knotted rope into the crevasse.
I clutched the rope with my mittened hands.

Arthur shouted, “Heave!”

Dad and Arthur tugged on the rope. I planted my feet in footholds in the ice,
bracing myself against the side of the crevasse. The rope slipped out of my
hands. I clutched it tighter.

“Hold on, Jordan!” Dad called.

They pulled again. My arms felt as if they were going to be yanked out of
their sockets. “Ow!” I cried. “Careful!”

Slowly they hoisted me to the top of the crevasse. I wasn’t much help—my
feet kept slipping on the icy walls. Dad and Arthur each took one of my hands
and dragged me out of the pit.

I lay on the snow, trying to catch my breath.

Dad tested my arms and legs for sprains and breaks. “You sure you’re all
right?” he asked.

I nodded.

“It was a mistake to haul kids along,” Arthur grumbled. “The snow is not as
solid as it looks, you know. If we hadn’t seen you fall, we never would have
found you.”

“We’ve got to be more careful,” Dad agreed. “I want you both to stick close
to the sled.” He leaned over the side of the crevasse and snapped a picture.

I stood up and brushed the snow from the seat of my pants. “I’ll be careful
from now on,” I promised.

“Good,” Dad said.

“We’d better push on,” Arthur said.

We started walking again across the snow. I gave Nicole a shove once in a
while, and she shoved me back. But we were quieter now. Neither of us wanted to
end up frozen to death at the bottom of a snow hole.

Dad snapped away as we walked. “How much farther to the cabin?” he asked
Arthur.

“Another couple of miles,” Arthur replied. He pointed to a steep mountain of
snow in the distance. “See that snow rise, about ten miles off? That’s where the monster was
last spotted.”

The Abominable Snowman had been seen by that snow rise, I thought. Where was
he now?

Could he see us coming? Was he hiding somewhere, watching us?

I kept my eyes on the snow rise as we walked. It seemed to grow bigger as we
came closer to it. The snow rise was dotted with pine trees and boulders.

After about an hour, a tiny brown speck appeared a mile or so away.

“That’s the abandoned musher’s cabin where we’ll stop for the night,” Dad
explained. He rubbed his gloves together and added, “It sure will be nice to sit
by a roaring fire.”

I clapped my mittens together to keep the blood flowing through my hands. “I
can’t wait,” I agreed. “It must be minus two thousand degrees out here!”

“Actually, it’s about minus ten,” Nicole stated. “At least, that’s the
average temperature for this area at this time of year.”

“Thank you, Weather Girl,” I joked. “And now for sports. Arthur?”

Arthur frowned into his beard. I guess he didn’t get the joke.

He fell behind us a little to check the back of the sled. Dad turned around to snap Arthur’s picture.

“When we get to the musher’s cabin I’ll take a few more scenery photos,” Dad
said, as he changed his film. “Maybe I’ll photograph the cabin, too. Then we’ll
all turn in. We have a big day tomorrow.”

By the time we reached the cabin it was almost eight o’clock at night.

“Took us too long to get here,” Arthur grumbled. “We left town after lunch.
It should’ve taken us about five hours. The kids having
accidents
and all
is slowing us down.”

Dad stood a few feet away from him, shooting a portrait of Arthur while he
talked.

“Mr. Blake, did you hear me?” Arthur growled. “Stop taking my picture!”

“What?” Dad said, letting his camera drop to his chest. “Oh, yeah—the kids.
Bet they’re hungry.”

I explored the musher’s cabin. It didn’t take long. The tiny wooden shack was
empty except for an old wood-burning stove and a couple of broken-down cots.

“Why is the cabin so empty?” Nicole asked.

“Mushers don’t stop here anymore,” Arthur explained. “They’re afraid of the
monster.”

I didn’t like the sound of that. I glanced at Nicole. She rolled her eyes.

Arthur bedded the dogs in a lean-to outside the cabin. The lean-to was a shed
built against the back cabin wall. It was filled with straw for the dogs to
sleep on. I spotted a rusty old dogsled propped in a corner.

Then Arthur lit a fire and began to fix some supper.

“Tomorrow we’ll search for this so-called monster,” Dad announced. “Everybody
get a good night’s sleep.”

After supper we crawled into our sleeping bags. I lay awake for a long time,
listening to the howling wind outside. Listening for the thudding footsteps of
an Abominable Snowman.

“Nicole, get off me!” She rolled over in her sleeping bag and jabbed her
elbow into my ribs. I knocked her arm away and snuggled deeper inside my own
toasty warm sleeping bag.

Nicole opened her eyes. Bright morning sunshine streamed into the cabin.

“I’ll be back in a minute to fix breakfast, kids,” Dad said. He sat in a
chair, lacing up his snow boots. “First I’m going out to check on the dogs.
Arthur went out to feed them a few minutes ago.”

He bundled up and stepped outside. I rubbed my nose—it was cold. The fire
in the stove had gone out during the night. No one had relit it yet.

I forced myself to climb out of my sleeping bag and start pulling on clothes. Nicole began dressing, too.

“Do you think there’s a hot shower in this dump?” I wondered aloud.

Nicole smirked at me. “You know perfectly well there’s no hot shower,
Jordan.”

“Oh, wow! This is incredible!” I heard Dad’s shout from outside.

I jammed my feet into my boots and raced out the door. Nicole pushed right
behind me.

Dad stood at the side of the musher’s cabin, pointing in shock at the ground.

I gazed down—and saw deep footprints in the snow. Huge footprints.
Enormous
footprints.

So big that only a monster could have made them.

“Unbelievable,” Dad murmured, staring at the snow.

Arthur hurried over from the lean-to. He stopped when he saw the prints.

“No!” he cried. “He was here!”

His ruddy face grew pale. His jaw trembled with terror.

“We’ve got to get away from here—now!” he said to Dad in a low, frightened
voice.

Dad tried to calm him down. “Hold on a minute. Let’s not jump to
conclusions.”

“We’re in terrible danger!” Arthur insisted. “The monster is nearby! He’ll
rip us all to shreds!”

Nicole knelt in the snow, studying the footprints. “Do you think they’re
real?” she asked. “Real Abominable Snowman footprints?”

She
thinks they’re real, I thought. She believes.

Dad knelt beside her. “They look pretty real to me.”

Then I saw a light glimmer in his eyes. He lifted his head and squinted at me
suspiciously.

I backed away.

“Jordan!” Nicole cried in an accusing voice.

I couldn’t help it. I started laughing.

Dad shook his head. “Jordan. I should’ve known.”

“What?” Arthur looked confused—and then angry. “You mean the kid made these
prints? It’s a joke?”

“I’m afraid so, Arthur,” Dad sighed.

Arthur scowled at me. Beneath his beard, his face reddened to the color of a
slab of raw steak.

I cowered. I couldn’t help it. Arthur scared me. He sure didn’t like kids—especially not kids who play jokes.

“I’ve got work to do,” Arthur muttered. He turned and stomped away through
the snow.

“Jordan, you crumb,” Nicole said. “When did you do it?”

“I woke up early this morning and sneaked out,” I admitted. “You were all
sleeping. I carved the footprints over my own prints, with my mittens. Then I
stepped in the prints on my way back, to cover my tracks.

“You believed,” I added, jabbing a finger at Nicole. “For a minute there, you
believed in the snow monster.”

“I did not!” Nicole protested.

“Yes, you did. I got you to believe!”

I glanced from Nicole’s peevish face to Dad’s stern one. “Don’t you think
it’s funny?” I asked. “It’s just a joke!”

Usually Dad liked my jokes.

Not this time.

“Jordan, we’re not at home in Pasadena now. We’re out in the middle of
nowhere. The wilds of Alaska. Things could get very dangerous. You saw that
yesterday when you fell down the crevasse.”

I nodded and hung my head.

“I’m serious, Jordan,” Dad warned me. “No more practical jokes. I’m here to
work. And I don’t want anything to happen to you, or Nicole, or any of us.
Understood?”

“Yes, Dad.”

No one said anything for a minute. Then Dad patted me on the back. “Okay,
then. Let’s go inside and get some breakfast.”

Arthur returned to the cabin a few minutes later. He stamped the snow off his
boots, glaring at me.

“You think you’re funny,” he muttered. “But wait till you see the snowman.
Will you be laughing then?”

I swallowed hard.

The answer to his question was no. Definitely no.

After breakfast we hitched the dogs to the sled and set off for the snow
rise. Arthur wouldn’t talk to me and would hardly look at me. I guess he was
angry about my joke.

Everybody else has forgiven me, I thought. Why won’t he?

Nicole and I walked at the front of the sled with the dogs. Behind me I heard
Dad’s camera clicking furiously. I knew that meant he’d found something good to
photograph. I turned around.

A large herd of elk moved toward us, toward the snow rise. We stopped to
watch them.

“Look at them,” Dad whispered. “Amazing.” He quickly loaded new film into
his camera and started snapping away again.

The elk calmly picked their way across the snow, antlers high. They stopped
to eat at a stand of bushes. Arthur pulled back the rein on the lead sled dog to
keep him from barking.

Suddenly, one elk lifted its head. It seemed to sense something.

The other elk tensed up, too. Then they turned and began to gallop away
across the tundra. Their hooves thundered over the snow.

Dad let his camera fall against his chest. “That’s strange,” he said. “I
wonder what happened.”

“Something scared them,” Arthur said grimly. “It wasn’t us. And it wasn’t the
dogs.”

Dad scanned the horizon. “What was it, then?”

We all waited for Arthur’s answer. But he only said, “We ought to turn around
and head back to town right now.”

“We’re not going back,” Dad insisted. “Not after coming all this way.”

Arthur stared at him. “Are you going to take my advice or not?”

“No,” Dad replied. “I’ve got a job to do here. And I’ve hired you to do a
job. We’re not going back without a good reason.”

“We’ve
got
a good reason,” Arthur insisted. “Only you won’t see it
that way.”

“Push ahead,” Dad ordered.

Arthur frowned and shouted “Mush!” to the dogs. The sled began to move. We
followed it, on toward the snow rise.

Nicole walked a few feet ahead of me. I picked up a pile of snow and patted
it into a ball. But then I thought I’d better not throw it. No one seemed to be
in the mood for snowball fights.

We marched through the snow for a couple of hours. I slipped off my mittens
and wiggled my fingers. Frost kept collecting on my upper lip. I wiped it away.

We reached a stand of pine trees at the base of the snow rise. Suddenly the
dogs stopped short. They began to bark.

“Mush!” Arthur shouted.

The dogs refused to go farther.

Nicole ran up to her favorite dog, Lars. “What is it, Lars? What’s the
matter?”

Lars howled.

“What’s wrong with them?” Dad asked Arthur.

Arthur’s face paled again. His hands shook. He stared intently into the
trees, squinting into the brightness.

“Something’s frightened the dogs,” he said. “Look how their fur stands on
end.”

I patted Lars. It was true. His fur stood straight up. The dog growled.