Alexis and the Lake Tahoe Tumult (6 page)

This keeps getting weirder and weirder
, she thought. Someone had wanted to make the coyotes ill but hadn’t gone far enough to kill them. Maybe the person had a soft spot after all. Or maybe he or she was too afraid to poison the coyotes with something more toxic, like antifreeze.

Not only did someone feed the coyotes chocolate, but then they had called Karen in the middle of the night. What was it the caller had said?
You’re lucky they’re only sick this time
.

Does that mean that next time they
will
kill an animal?
Alexis was suddenly afraid for all the animals on the reserve. Why would someone do something like this? What could they have to gain?

God
, Alexis prayed,
please help us get to the bottom of this before one of your creatures gets hurt
.

Her thoughts were interrupted by Lisa, who came into the barn carrying an armload of helmets.

“You three want to take a ride?” she asked. “I thought I could show you the bear caves today!”

Alexis looked at Bailey and smiled. “Awesome!” said Bailey. “Do the bears go away in the winter?”

“Of course not!” said Lisa. “But they do hibernate. They’re all sleeping right now.”

Bailey’s smile wavered, but she was the first one to run outside and climb onto the monstrous snowmobile that Lisa indicated. It was big enough for all four of them. Lisa climbed onto the front, so she could drive, and Bailey held on to her coat. Alexis and Angelo climbed up behind Bailey.

“Hold on tight!” Alexis said to Angelo over her shoulder.

“You, too!” he said. “It won’t do me any good to hold on to you if you fall off!”

The ride up the mountain was fun. Alexis had never ridden on a snowmobile before. Most of the wind was blocked by Bailey’s hat, but her nose was still starting to tingle in the cold. It felt strange—almost like they were sledding uphill.

When Lisa stopped the vehicle, Alexis was confused. She couldn’t see a cave anywhere.

“We have to walk the rest of the way,” Lisa explained. “We can’t take the snowmobile any closer because it’s too loud. The last thing we want to do is wake a hibernating bear!”

Lisa went to the back of the snowmobile and untied a big bundle. She pulled out four pairs of snowshoes. Alexis strapped on the purple ones. She was really excited. She had heard of snowshoes but had never worn them herself. They really did allow her to walk on
top
of the deep snow!

Alexis took the camera out of its bag and began taping. She felt like she was in a scene from
The Call of the Wild
. It was one of her favorite books.

The group hiked for about five minutes before Lisa stopped them.

“There, up ahead,” she said. “Can you see it?”

Alexis had to strain her eyes, but she could just see the cave. It was a small, black opening in the snow beneath a huge pile of granite. The pine trees were heavy with snow. They bent in toward the cave, as if they were protecting it from outsiders.

“We won’t get too much closer,” said Lisa. “Just to be safe. But I thought you might like to get it on tape.”

Alexis moved a few feet to the left to get a better angle. Angelo was still barely holding on to her back.

“Can you smell them?” he asked.

“Who? The bears?” asked Bailey.

“Of course. I wouldn’t want to get too close. Never mind the teeth and claws. They stink!”

Alexis couldn’t smell a thing. She zoomed in with the camera lens, and Bailey said a few words into the camera. Alexis was about to turn around when Angelo’s grip on her coat tightened.

“What is it?” she asked him.

“A sound,” he said. “I heard a strange sound … one that doesn’t belong in this forest.”

“What kind of sound?” asked Alexis, but then she heard it—a small popping noise—right before something hard stung her cheek.

“Ow!”

Alexis stumbled and almost pulled Angelo onto the ground. There were a few more popping noises, and then a completely different sound tore through the forest.

It was the roar of a cranky bear.

“Run!” called Lisa. She grabbed Bailey and took off toward the snowmobile. Alexis and Angelo followed, but the snowshoes were hard to run in. Alexis looked back just in time to see a huge brown bear emerge from the mouth of the cave. It took one sleepy look around and started running right for them!

Fortunately the snowmobile was a bit downhill from the bear cave. That downhill slope helped the young humans run faster, while it slowed down the bear. Alexis briefly remembered a Discovery Channel special on bears, which revealed that bears run uphill much faster than they run downhill.

Of course it’s not good to have bears running after you, fast
or
slow!
she thought.

Lisa and Bailey reached the snowmobile and clambered on. Lisa fired up the engine and turned to pull Alexis and Angelo aboard. Soon they were on their way back down the mountain. Alexis turned to see if the bear was still following them, but she wasn’t holding on to Bailey. She slipped sideways and fell into the snow. She hit hard and rolled down the mountain about ten feet before stopping near a half-buried tree stump.

Lisa circled back around, and Angelo helped pull Alexis back onto the snowmobile.

“Good thing I wasn’t holding on to you!” he laughed.

“Wait!” said Alexis. “My camera! I dropped it when I fell!”

Luckily the bear had taken off in another direction, and the camera was easy to find. It was right where Alexis had fallen, tangled up in a pile of dead branches. The branches kept it from falling into the wet snow, which might have damaged it.

“It’s still on,” said Bailey. “You might not want to waste the battery!”

The group headed back to the office. All of them were quiet. They knew that they had barely escaped being attacked by an angry bear. What were those strange noises? And what could have awakened the bear? Alexis asked Jake her questions back at the office, but he wasn’t worried about answering them at the moment.

“The most important thing, Alexis, is that we find that bear! We need the tranquilizer gun, Karen. Call the ranger, too. Maybe if we put it back in its den, it will sleep out the rest of the winter.”

“What if you can’t find it?” asked Bailey.

“That’s what we’re worried about,” said Karen. “Bears that wake up early run into lots of problems. Right now, most of the smaller animals are hibernating, too, and the rivers are frozen over. There isn’t much food out there for a bear. If he’s awake long, he’ll burn up all of the fat he stored for the winter, and then he’ll have to be put in captivity or …”

“Or what?” asked Alexis.

“Or he’ll die,” said Jake.

Back at the hotel, the girls left Angelo to go meet Alexis’s family for dinner. First they went to the room to change clothes. When Alexis looked in the mirror, she saw a huge red bruise with a purple center on her right cheek.

“Eew!” she said. “That looks awful! Bailey, why didn’t you say anything?”

“Well, we were too worried about the bear, weren’t we?” said Bailey. “Besides, it didn’t look that bad at the reserve. It’s definitely pretty.”

Alexis pressed her fingers gently to her cheek.

“Ouch! What could have done this?” she asked. “I remember getting hit with something before the bear woke up, but I never saw what it was.”

“Could it have been a rock?” asked Bailey.

“Maybe. Oh well. We’d better get down to the restaurant.”

Alexis threw on fresh jeans and a sweater before slipping on her sneakers. They were so much easier to walk in than her heavy snow boots. After tromping in boots all day, she felt as light as a feather. Bailey tied her hair up in a tiny ponytail, and they took the elevator to the second floor to find the steak house.

“There they are!” said Bailey, pointing into the crowded restaurant. Alexis looked up and saw her two brothers waving their arms to get her attention. Her mother was frantically grabbing water glasses to keep them from being knocked over.

Alexis sat down next to her father, and he poked gently at her cheek.

“I thought you two were shooting a documentary out there, not BB guns!” he said.

“BB guns?” said Alexis.

“Yeah,” said Mr. Howell. “I’d recognize a BB bruise anywhere! My brother and I used to play with those things all the time. It’s a miracle we never shot an eye out.”

Alexis’s eyes opened wide, and she kicked Bailey under the table. So she had been shot by a BB gun? That meant someone else had been out at the bear cave at the same time as their group. What if a BB had awakened the bear? What if that’s what the person was trying to do?

It reminded Alexis of Cruella DeVille, the villain in
One Hundred and One Dalmatians
. Her first name started with the word
cruel
, and in the movie she would have done anything to get the puppies for a fur coat. If turning cute puppies into a coat wasn’t cruel, Alexis didn’t know what was.

She thought about how it felt to see the bear charge out of the cave. It had been really scary. One of them could have gotten hurt, or even worse. At that moment, Alexis knew she and Bailey and the Camp Club Girls had to solve this case as soon as possible. The person doing these things was becoming dangerous. Like Cruella’s character, they didn’t care who they hurt. As long as they got what they wanted, they might do anything … but what
did
they want?

After dinner Alexis and Bailey took their camera to their hotel room and borrowed Mrs. Howell’s computer again. Alexis plugged her camera into the USB port on the computer so the girls could look at what they’d filmed near the bear cave. The camera had been rolling the entire time. Maybe it saw something—or
someone
—that they hadn’t.

They started by watching the spot on the sick coyotes.

“You do such a great job in front of the camera, Bailey!” said Alexis.

“Thank you, dah-ling,” said Bailey. She tossed her hair and did her best movie-star impression.

“We have to remember to add the stuff about the chocolate,” said Alexis. “I don’t think we filmed—”

“Shhh!” said Bailey. “Here’s the bear cave!”

They sat and watched as the camera rolled over the snowy landscape. Surrounding pine trees were drooping from the weight of the snow. Shafts of sunlight peeked through the branches and made the white sparkle. Soon the cave came into view—a small opening beneath the rock.

“Is it just me, or does that cave look too small for a bear to get in and out of?” asked Bailey.

“Well, a bear sure did come out of it,” said Alexis. “We’re about to see it happen.”

The camera rocked a little.

“That must have been when you got hit by the BB,” said Bailey.

Alexis nodded. She was watching the screen as closely as possible. Soon the bear came charging out of the cave, throwing snow everywhere. But Alexis wasn’t watching the bear. She was looking everywhere else for any sign of a fifth person in that forest.

Soon the film got hard to watch. The picture jumped all over the place as Alexis tried to run in her snowshoes. Most of the shots showed either her clumsy feet or a piece of the sky.

“Well, that’s it,” said Bailey. “That’s where you dropped the camera when you fell off the snowmobile, right?”

“Yup,” said Alexis. “Now all we can see is snow and a couple trees.” Alexis reached for the E
JECT
button, but Bailey grabbed her hand.

“Wait! I see something,” she said. “Rewind it!”

Alexis skipped back a few frames and leaned in closer. Sure enough, something was moving in the background. Near a group of trees in the distance, a shadowy figure climbed onto something and sped away in the opposite direction.

“Was that another snowmobile?” asked Bailey.

“I believe it was,” said Alexis. “What else could it have been? Bailey! We have this person on tape! Whoever was out there waking up the bears—”

“And
shooting people with BB guns,” said Bailey.

“Right. That, too. They’re on our video, Bailey! This is great! All we have to do is blow up this frame, and we’ll have a picture. What if this solves the case?”

“That would be great,” said Bailey. “Can we blow up the picture on this computer?”

Alexis messed around with the keyboard for a few minutes and then sighed. There were hardly any programs loaded onto it.

“No, we can’t,” said Alexis. “I mean, there might be a way, but I have no clue how to do it without the program I’m used to using at school. I wish Kate were here. She would know how to do it.”

Bailey laughed so loud that someone talking outside their hotel room abruptly stopped.

“Come on, Lexi! Do you or do you not know how to e-mail?”

Alexis couldn’t help it. She began laughing, too. Why had she forgotten all about the Internet? It was her main link to the rest of the Camp Club Girls.

“Right,” Alexis said, going to work at the keyboard again. “All I need to do is cut out this piece of video and send it to Kate. I hope the file won’t be too big.”

After a few minutes of tweaking the video file, Alexis typed an e-mail to send to their friend, the technogeek, and copied in the rest of the Camp Club Girls so they’d know what was going on. If anyone could help them, Kate could.