Sammy Keyes and the Wild Things (3 page)

“I even have
stars
in here. Check it out!”

“Stars?” This I had to see. So I crawled in beside her, and after she closed the door, I could see glow-in-the-dark stars and moons shining faintly from the inside of the door.

“Cool, huh?” she said, opening the door again. “So see? You get the bed.” She grinned. “Sorry.”

So I slept in a bed for the first time in ages. It was a
great
bed, too, with soft, fluffy covers and pillows and the faint scent of bleach. And flowers . . .

And I was in the middle of having this great dream about floating through the air on a current of puffy white dandelions . . . just drifting up, down, gliding gently through the air . . . when suddenly
clingidy-cling-cling-clang
Cricket's alarm blew the closet door open and booted Cricket into the room.

“Huh?” I said, totally disoriented.

Cricket flicked on the light. “Let's go camping!”

THREE                                                                                                                                                                                    

Cricket's “troop” turned out to be the most un-Girl-Scoutish group of girls I'd ever seen. Not a patch or merit badge in sight. And their uniform? T-shirts, hiking boots, jeans, ball caps . . . no sashes or vests or, you know,
neckerchiefs
.

Also, when you think of a Girl Scout troop, you think of a big
group
. But this troop consisted of Robin's daughter, Bella—who speaks with very precise diction and has dark curly hair that springs out in all directions—Bella's best friend, Gabby—who has big ears and a little mouth—and Cricket, and me. That was it. I was one-fourth of a “troop,” and I wasn't even officially in the group!

We all piled into a well-worn van and were on the road by six-forty-five, with Robin driving, Cricket and me in the seats behind Robin, and Gabby and Bella in the seats behind us. And by the time we'd been on the road about an hour, I knew exactly why Cricket was so excited to have me come along. In this troop of three, she was odd girl out. See, Bella and Gabby are best-friends-forever kind of friends. Bella leads, and Gabby's the adoring copycatter, agreeing with Bella about everything, sticking up for her about anything.

It got old in a hurry.

And the
trouble
is, Cricket was trying to act like best-friends-forever with
me,
which became really embarrassing. She wasn't being an adoring copycatter, but it was almost worse—she kept telling Gabby and Bella stories about things I'd done to Heather during the year. At first Bella laughed, but then she started getting annoyed, and before long she was rolling her eyes and pulling faces like she flat-out disliked me. Which of course made Gabby do the same.

“Stop it!” I whispered to Cricket for about the fiftieth time. “Don't say another word!”

If I could have turned around and gone back to the boredom of living in an apartment building with a bunch of old people, believe me, I would have. But I was stuck. And by the time we were bumping along the potholes of a narrow mountain road, I was in a serious frump. How had I let myself get suckered into this?

It wasn't just that the people were driving me crazy. It was the scenery. Everything was so brown. So dry. There were no pine trees, no picturesque mountain streams, no twittering wildlife. And the farther up the mountain we climbed, the more it seemed that this “forest” we were in was really just a wasteland of rejects. Like all the plants and animals that hadn't made the cut for
real
forests were collected and put into this place. Crows and flies, scrub oaks and dusty dirt, dried grass and tumbleweeds . . . who wants those in their forest?

Not me.

Robin seemed to pick up on my mood because I caught her watching me in the rearview mirror. “So, Sammy,” she called. “Has Cricket told you about the Vista Ridge Lookout project?”

“A little . . .”

“A
little
? Cricket . . . !” Robin scolded, but she was grinning. “Whatever you've been bending her ear about couldn't have been as important as the Lookout project!”

Cricket blushed.

Robin made a careful turn of the wheel as she negotiated a switchback in the road. “We've been helping with the Lookout project for”—she glanced back at Bella and Gabby in the mirror—“how many years, girls?”

“Since fourth grade!” they answered in harmony.

“Since sixth for me,” Cricket said quietly.

Like I cared? I didn't want to hear about condors or some goody-goody Lookout project. I'd been promised camping, but instead I was trapped with a bunch of condor fanatics who'd probably spend the whole time talking about “environmental issues.”

And any secret hope of running into Casey and Billy was gone. Why would they waste their vacation in this desert of a forest? They were probably someplace with
real
trees, having a great time actually
camping
.

“Are you okay, Sammy?” Robin asked. “You look a little green.”

If I'd have been
thinking,
I'd have said I was sick and had to go home. But I was a
moron
and said, “I just don't really get it, that's all.”

“Get what?”

“Well, how you track condors, for one thing. Is the Lookout like a radio control tower? Like at an airport?”

“Good analogy. Only it's not nearly as sophisticated.”

“Or as tall!” Bella called from the backseat.

“Or as easy to get to!” Gabby groaned as we thumped and bumped over a really bad pothole.

“But
how
do you track them? Do they have a chip implanted in them?”

Robin took another careful turn. “Again, the same idea, but not as sophisticated. The condors have a transmitter and numbered tags attached to their wings; they don't bother them a bit.”

“But
why
do you track them? What good does it do?”

“In the Pleistocene age there were thousands of condors in the wild. By 1890 that number was down to six hundred, and it continued to dwindle until 1983, when the population was a paltry twenty-two.”

“Were people hunting them?”

“People weren't hunting them, but hunting
is
what caused part of the problem. Condors are nature's cleanup crew. They eat animals that have died of natural causes, as well as gut piles left behind by hunters. They
also
eat carcasses of animals that have been poisoned by people who considered them to be pests. And if a condor eats poisonous lead from bullets or poison that was in a dead animal's system, it kills the condor, too.

“There was also a problem with pesticides like DDT, which made condor eggs so thin-shelled that they were easily crushed. And since condors breed slowly—one chick every two years, or thereabouts—and since they don't reproduce until they're about six years old, the population fell dramatically. By the late 1980s there were
no
condors left in the wild. The few birds remaining were in captivity.” She glanced at me in the rearview mirror. “They were really,
really
close to extinction.”

I thought about all of this, then said, “I don't even know what one looks like.”

“You
don't
?” everyone cried. Like
I
was the dumb one.

So I scowled around the van and said, “How am I supposed to know what a condor looks like? There are only twenty-two of them, and we don't exactly have a
zoo
in Santa Martina. . . .”

“There's more than twenty-two now,” Bella said.

“Yeah!” Gabby chimed in. “And there's pictures all over the Web.”

Bella nodded. “And there's one hanging at the Natural History Museum.”

“Yeah! It's been up for a year. Didn't your school go there on a field trip?”

God, they were driving me crazy. And then Robin says, “Here,” and hands me a pamphlet from the front seat. Can you believe that? They're handing out
pamphlets
like they want to convert me to their birdbrain religion.

Join the Condor Cult!

Sacrifice your summer!

Worship the Mighty Feathered Ones!

Man, was I stuck or what?

But really, what could I do?

I took the stupid pamphlet, and when I turned it face-up, what did I see?

The single
ugliest
bird imaginable. Big hunchy black body, bald, bloated red head and face, and what looks like a little black feather boa around its blotchy red neck.

“That's a condor?” I choke out.

“It's got an almost ten-foot wingspan,” Robin says. “An eagle can have up to a seven-foot wingspan, so that gives you some idea of how magnificent the condor is.”

My eyes were bugging out at the brochure. How could she think this bird was
magnificent
? That was like calling a barracuda beautiful. So what if it had big wings? I couldn't believe that
this
was what all the fuss was about. That
this
was worth building tracking stations for.

What was
wrong
with these people?

Then Robin said, “Vista Ridge Lookout was originally a Forest Service watchtower for spotting fires, but they stopped using it years ago, and then vandals wrecked it. But with the hard work of lots of volunteers—”

“Like us!” Bella said.

“Yeah, us!” Gabby chimed.

Robin laughed. “—it's become a useful tracking facility.”

“You wouldn't believe everything we've done,” Bella said.

“Yeah! We painted!”

“And cleared brush!”

“And hung shelves!” Cricket tossed in.

“And helped install windows!”

“And shutters!”

Robin snickered. “You girls make it sound like we did everything!” She glanced at me again. “We're actually just a small part of a large and varied group of people who feel really passionate about saving the condor. The Forest Service, the Audubon Society, Fish and Wildlife, the Wilderness Society, university students—”

“Who only do it for a good grade!” Bella said.

“Yeah!” Gabby added. “Or so they can come up here and drink beer!”

Robin raised an eyebrow. “Hey, now. Those kids would not go into environmental studies if they didn't care about the environment.”

“But
you
said they were snot-nosed partyers who had too much attitude and not enough aptitude!” Bella called from the back.

Robin shot her daughter a dark look via the rearview mirror. “I
muttered
it, Bella. And I only said it about one
particular
student.”

“Oh, right—that Vargus guy.”

“Vargus Mayfield!” Gabby giggled, bouncing in her seat. “He was
cute.
”

Bella gave Gabby a pained look. “Cute?”

“They're all cute at that age, girls,” Robin warned.

“Like Quinn.” Gabby giggled again.

Cricket jolted a little, and Bella backhanded Gabby, saying, “What's up with you? Quinn's twenty-two, he's got a girlfriend, and he's my
cousin
.”

“He's got a girlfriend?” Gabby asked, her voice suddenly small. “Since when?”

“Since a few weeks ago!” Then Bella ran down the stats: “Her name's Janey Griffin, and she's new in town. She's super-pretty and smart and athletic—you should see her ride her mountain bike! She works at the Natural History Museum and is really into the outdoors.” And as if she hadn't already rubbed it in hard enough, she smiled at Gabby and said, “She is
perfect
for Quinn.”

Robin dropped the van into a lower gear. “We are
way
off topic, girls. What I was trying to explain to Sammy is that a lot of people have donated a great deal of time, money, and energy to build a research facility so we can track the flight patterns and roosting habits of condors.”

I still didn't get it. So what if they tracked them? How did
that
help?

Then Bella announced, “I have a really good feeling that this is going to be
the
trip, Mom!”

“Me too,” Gabby said halfheartedly.

“Let's hope so, girls!” Robin said.

“Wait a minute.” I looked back at Bella. “You've been doing this since fourth grade and
none
of you has ever seen a condor?”

Bella shook her head. “Not in the wild.”

For a second it was really quiet in the van. Then Gabby said, “But Quinn has. Lots of times. Right now he's monitoring a juvenile and its mother out at Chumash Caves.” She gave a dreamy sigh. “He's so devoted. He practically
lives
up here.”

So there I am, stuck in a van on a dusty, bumpy mountain road with a bunch of condor
nuts
who obviously have mad crushes on other, older, more
extreme
condor nuts, when all of a sudden, a black jeep comes flying around the corner toward us.

Robin slams on the brakes.

Bella screams.

Gabby screams louder.

Cricket and I hold on tight while our eyes bug out, because the jeep is now totally out of control, sliding and swerving and kicking up clouds of dust as the driver tries frantically to skid to a stop.

But he's
not
stopping, and there's just no place for him to go.

No place but off the cliff.

Or right into us.