Nature Girl (16 page)

I feel like I’m looking back at my life. That lake way down there could be the lake where the Lucy girl saved us. Those trees and trees and more trees are where I have been walking forever. Way, way off in the distance I can see a barn. I know it isn’t our barn—still, I imagine Mom painting it, even though it’s almost seven o’clock and
ART
time always ends at noon. If they still have
ART
time. If they haven’t been worrying too much about me to paint anything. But by now they should have gotten the e-mail. I hope they did.

I wave my hand even though I know none of them can see me. Then I wave my whole arm so much, I nearly tip over. But they still can’t see me.

A gray shadow passes over the barn. Then I feel sadder, even though I know it’s just a cloud. From on top of the cliff, I see the different parts of the land change from light into shadow and back into light again. I know, I know, what’s the big deal about clouds moving around? But to see it happen is amazing. If I were down there in that dark patch, I’d be grumping. But from up here I know the sunshine will eventually come back, because I can see it. I can see everything.

Except Mount Greylock.

Still, I feel better. The yucky voice is gone! I can’t believe it. I know my legs are stronger from all this hiking. But maybe the rest of me got stronger too. Soon I’ll apologize to Lucy and everything will be all right again. At least, I hope so.

I take a different way down. Even though I’m proud of my spectacular leap, I don’t want to push my luck. My palms really sting now. I need some water.

By the time I get back to the Trail, I’m about twenty trees further along. Maybe my Loyal Dog will bring my backpack to me so I won’t have to walk all the way back to it and then all the way here again.

But I don’t see Arp. He isn’t where I left him.

I run back. Do I have the wrong place? No, there’s my backpack. I pick it up and put it on.

“Arp!” I hiss.

I’m afraid to call too loud. Even though I haven’t seen anybody in a while, the Woods are so dense you can’t really see who might be lurking around trying to rescue us. And you certainly can’t see where a dirty little dog went.

“Arp, you picked a terrible time to chase a rabbit. We have to keep going. Mount Greylock is further than I thought.”

But I refuse to worry. I just got RID of that yucky voice. No way am I letting it back in my head. After all, Arp is always running after animals and running back when he can’t catch them.

I hold my breath to listen. I hear the wind rustling the leaves, the creak of trees, the twitter of some birds, the buzz of a zillion mosquitoes, and the thumping of my heart. But I don’t hear that cheerful little jingle of dog tags, or that little yip-yip bark I used to find so annoying.

“Oh, Arp.”

I don’t have a clue about which way he went. All I can do is wait for him to come back. But I can’t sit still. I have to do something. I wander around behind the pile of boulders. Some people left some trash there. I crush a soda can with my foot and pick it up. Maybe getting a few Salvation Points will help me find Arp.

You probably don’t know about Salvation Points. I invented them one day last spring after school when Lucy and I were waiting for Mrs. T. Unfortunately we weren’t going to the theater; she was taking Lucy to visit Alison in the hospital. But she was late. After we waited for over half an hour, Lucy got so nervous and anxious she started picking up trash.

“Are you trying to get Salvation Points or something?” I said.

“What are those?” She was really interested.

I didn’t want to tell her that I was making a joke. (What can I say? MOST of my ideas start out as jokes.) So I said, “They’re points you get for doing good deeds.”

“Who gives them to you?” she said.

“Nobody. You just get them. And when you have enough, then …”

I almost said, “Then your mom will get well.” But I was afraid to. What if Alison didn’t? If you want to know the truth, I was afraid to mention her mom at all, because whatever I said would be wrong. If I said that everything would be fine, Lucy would say, how did I know? If I said
how worried I was, that would just make Lucy feel worse.

Lucy didn’t say anything. But she picked up trash faster, like it was a competition. When she had a huge pile of soda cans and ice-cream bar wrappers, Mrs. T. zipped up in a yellow taxi. She was so excited, she was shouting out the window. “Good news, good news. We get to bring your mom home!”

Lucy jumped in the cab with Mrs. T. and they drove off.

I was very glad that Alison was going home. But I have to say, I didn’t like being left behind to put Lucy’s pile in the garbage can.

There are no garbage cans on the Trail. Whatever I pick up, I have to put in my backpack. I hope I get double Salvation Points for that. There isn’t much—just three more soda cans and two Slim Jim wrappers. Unfortunately there’s plenty of room in my pack from where the food used to be. I crush the other cans and cram everything in. Then—you won’t believe this—as soon as I zip it shut, I hear a little yip.

“Arp? Is that you?”

I hold my breath, hoping to hear it again.

There it is—a bigger little yip.

“Where are you?”

I can’t tell. The yip sounds like it’s coming from inside the boulders. But that doesn’t make sense. So I run
down the path. The yip sounds fainter. I run in the other direction. The yip sounds even fainter.

As I run, I can’t help noticing that the shadows are starting to creep out from below the trees. DARK is coming.

I know you’re thinking, Well, duh. DARK comes every night. Who can forget that? But maybe you did forget that when DARK comes to me, I can’t just flip a switch to turn on a light. I can’t carry a fire around like it’s a flashlight. I have to find Arp fast if I’m ever going to find him. Of course, that kind of thinking does NOT help at all. That kind of thinking is practically BEGGING the yucky voice to whine again.

My brain is totally stuck like someone going around and around in a revolving door. That makes me think that Arp must be stuck too. Or else he’d just come running to me. It’s hard to get stuck in the Woods. But it’s easy to get stuck in an enormous pile of boulders. Every boulder has a gap between it and the next one. The taller the boulder, the deeper the gap. Since gaps connect to other gaps, a little dog could fall down and down and down until he’s under the whole huge pile.

“Where are you, Arp?”

He barks. Too bad I can’t tell where the sound is coming from.

Even though my heart’s going a mile a minute, I refuse to panic. I’ll just look in every single gap until I find him.

I try to be organized about looking, but I keep forgetting if I’ve checked a place or not. All the boulders are made of the same yellow-white rock. I can’t tell them apart. I feel like I’m looking in the same gap over and over and never finding him.

“Where are you, Arp?”

He barely answers. His bark sounds kind of raspy and weak.

Then a frightening thing happens. The entire pile of rocks glows RED.

It’s like a horror movie or something. I quickly jump off those evil boulders. Now I don’t even want to look at the rocks. Then I realize the red isn’t the symbolic blood of Arp or anything like that. It’s just the red of the setting sun. That makes me feel a little better, although the sun going down is horrifying enough.

I need to get smarter about this searching. I need to be the girl who leaps across obstacles, not the girl who crashes down in the gap.

Then I think, What if Arp followed me? What if he tried to make that leap and fell? I scramble up the first few boulders and run across the one that’s the size of a truck. I look down into what I boldly jumped across.

And there he is!

I’m so glad to see him, I almost start crying. He’s so glad to see me, his whole body wriggles. He barks and barks. I lie down on the rock and reach toward him. I
stretch my fingers as long as they will go. But it’s no use. My hand is nowhere near him.

“Come on, jump up.” If he jumps really high and I grab on to his collar, maybe I can pull him up to safety really fast before he chokes to death.

But he doesn’t jump.

“Jump, you dumb dog!”

Of course, he doesn’t know what I’m talking about.

“Why did you try to leap over this gap in the first place? You should have known you’d never make it!”

He puts his head down on his paws and whines. I’m so sorry I yelled at him. He only tried to follow me. He can’t help it if his ideas are bigger than his legs. I lie down on the rock so I can reach toward him again.

I still don’t know what to do, but I feel better lying there. The rock is warm. I know that’s just because it sat in the sun all day, but it’s comforting—like when you put your face against a little dog’s furry body.

“Don’t worry, Arp. I’ll get you out of there.”

The only trouble is, I don’t know how.

I lie like that until I can’t feel my arm anymore. It’s a floppy dead fish stitched to my shoulder.

I feel totally terrible. I’ve done plenty of bad things in my life. I put shampoo in the tip of Ginia’s toothpaste tube (but that was on April Fools’ Day). I scribbled “THIS STINKS” in the comment book for Patricia Palombo’s science-fair project (but only after I heard her
say my color wheel was babyish). And I know you remember how I almost killed a Hundred-Year-Old Maple. But getting Arp stuck is the absolute worst thing ever.

Maybe I didn’t MAKE Arp fall down into that gap. But I made him come on this hiking trip. Of course, I wouldn’t be hiking if it weren’t for Ginia. And none of us would be in Vermont if it weren’t for my parents. I try to blame them, only I can’t. I’m the one who ran away and decided to hike all the way to Mount Greylock. I’m the one who refused to get rescued. Because of me, an innocent little dog is dying of thirst in a crack in the Earth.

I pour a little water down the gap to give him a drink, but he won’t tip his head back and open up his mouth to swallow. The water splashes on his head and makes him muddy and the rocks slippery. So I stop.

The shadows keep spreading out from the Woods. There’s no way I can rescue Arp before it gets dark. In fact, I don’t know how I can rescue Arp at all. The sun coming up in the morning won’t change anything—except by then poor Arp will be even weaker and thirstier.

There’s only one thing to do. I have to get help for Arp. And the only person I know in the Woods is Trail Blaze Betty.

Of course, Trail Blaze Betty is the LAST person on Earth I want to find. She’ll be really mad that I didn’t take better care of Arp. She probably likes dogs better than people because dogs never throw trash on the Trail. She might be so furious that she’ll take me straight to the
State Patrol. That would be the worst possible end to my trip.

Actually no. The worst possible end would be if Arp never gets out of the hole.

I slowly walk to the gap and peek over the edge. It’s getting harder to see him in the dark. But I can tell he isn’t so perky anymore. He barely even looks up at me.

“Arp? I have to go get help to get you out of there. I’ll be back really soon.”

Then I have an even worse thought. What if I can’t find Trail Blaze Betty? It’s been five hours since I saw her hat. What if that orange splotch wasn’t her hat? If she stopped following me, then I’ll have to go all the way past the lake, up that path the Lucy girl went on, and onto the road. Then who knows how far I’ll have to go to get help. I mean, this is Vermont. It’s not like there are cops on every corner.

I don’t have time to explain all that to Arp. I just say, “Don’t worry, I’m coming back. I swear.”

He doesn’t look convinced. He looks so sad. His ears sag. Of course, that could be because his fur is still wet from when I poured water on his head. But it looks to me like he’s giving up hope.

Then I have an idea. “I’m going to leave my backpack here with you, so you know I’ll be back.”

I take it off and hold it over the edge, waiting for Arp to move a little so I won’t drop it on his head. Then I
think, Am I an idiot or what? If I drop my pack down there, how will I ever pull it back up?

And then
bam!
A lightning bolt hits my head and a lightbulb flashes on, like you see in cartoons. I jump up and down and dance all around singing, “I’m a genius. I’m a genius.” I’m SO happy!

“Who needs Trail Blaze Betty? Who needs grownups? I can rescue my Loyal Dog ALL BY MYSELF!”

But I better hurry because the second I have my brain flash, the sun drops behind the trees. That means I have about an hour of twilight left.

First I dump everything out of my pack. I’m so excited about being a genius and everything that I’m in too big a hurry to be careful—until the tube of sunblock slides off the rock and down into another gap. Good thing I didn’t really need it because I’m always in the shady Woods. Then I carry the rest of the stuff over to the ground where it’s safe.

Once my backpack is empty, I take the blanket and loop it through the straps. Now the backpack makes a clever little basket and the blanket makes a rope. I scramble back onto the boulder and show it to Arp.

“See what a genius I am? I’ve invented a Dog Rescue Device. I’ll lower it down to you. You get on it, and I’ll pull you up. Got that?”

My plan works perfectly. I lower the Dog Rescue Device into the gap. But the looped blanket is only a few feet long. To get the Dog Rescue Device all the way
down to Arp, I have to kneel on the rock and reach down with my arm.

Plop!
The Dog Rescue Device kind of lands on Arp. But that’s okay because now I have his attention.

“Come on, boy. Get on so I can pull you up.”

He doesn’t get on. He just stands there, with his tongue lolling out.

“Arp! I can’t pull you up if you don’t get on the backpack!”

My arm’s turning into that dead fish again. I’m afraid I’ll lose my grip on the blanket. “Please, Arp, get on. I can’t hold it much longer.”

I’m getting so frustrated. I want to scream, “YOU STUPID DOG!” But I remind myself to stay calm. It isn’t his fault. He’s just a dog. He doesn’t speak English very well. He doesn’t know what I’m trying to do. He doesn’t care about anything except food. Of course! FOOD!