Gravediggers (4 page)

Chapter Four
Ian

U
p ahead, I can see his tail bouncing between the trees, doing his best to outrun us, but I'm not letting him get off that easy, 'cause his body may be built for rough ground, but so is mine, and for every split-second turn or dodge he makes, my feet follow, pushing off rocks and clearing fallen trees. There are no big woods or mountains in the distance; there's just the ground at my feet, the tree in my way, and that little bit of buck vanishing in the distance. Branches scratch me, stones tumble out from under me, but I adapt and keep going. The buck's the prey. I'm the hunter.

This is more like it!

The woods open up in front of me and I skid to a halt, and for a split second, the buck's there in all his twelve-point glory, white chest shoved out, spade-shaped head held high, two gray antlers jutting out from behind his ears like bony tree branches. He poses on top of a ridge of rocks that rises out of the brush, a symbol for everything cool about the wild. Behind him, the sun just
explodes
out over the forest, with beams of light caught in the tips of his antlers, the blue-gray mountains coming up around his shoulders like he's one of them. It's beautiful, man,
exactly
the kind of thing you expect to see on a trip like this, no, on a postcard from a trip to the mountains. Pure wilderness. My heart skips a beat. My eyes water. Doesn't get much better than this.

The buck lowers his head, stares me down; and he seems like he's looking directly into my eyes, like he knows that we're both cut from the same cloth, but like he doesn't trust me, not yet. For a second, we just stand there, eyeing each other. When I take a step toward him, he takes a few at me, lowering those antlers like he's not afraid to use them. His eyes are like black stones shining at me.

“Easy,” I whisper to him, crouching low to the ground. “I'm not going to hurt you.”

He lets out a loud snort, turns, and bounds in two great arcs down the ridge. I get that flash of white tail and a couple of crunches in the underbrush, and then nothing, like he never existed.

When I look behind me, Kendra Wright's standing there with her eyes bugging out and a hand clutched to her heart, panting through a smile. Behind her, PJ's taken a knee, staring into the screen of his tiny digital camera, face screwed up in concentration.

“That was
awesome
, right?” I say.

“That was . . .” laughs Kendra. “It certainly was . . . something.”

“Tell me you got that,” I call out to PJ.

“I think so,” he breathes, messing with his tiny camera. “Yeah, definitely. Oh, wow.”

Kendra and I huddle around the miniscreen, and yup, there's the buck, staring down at me, and there I am, crouched near the grass with a single hand reaching out toward it, looking
too cool
, like some kind of deer whisperer. On the video, PJ mumbles, “Look, look at that,” and then coughs, sending the buck off into the wilderness.

“I could only get about nine seconds,” he says. “Sorry.”

“That's okay,” I say, giving him a pat on the shoulder. “Totally excusable. Those nine seconds are worth the whole run.”

I'm not lying, either. For once, PJ's camera addiction has worked out. The look on Coach Leider's face when he sees this video is going to be priceless—at first, he's going to be all shaking his head, folding those big meaty arms,
What'd the counselors say about blahdee blah blah
, and then he'll see the footage of this buck, and he'll to show it to Principal Jones when he asks how the trip went, and the school will use it to get funding for maybe another twenty years of Homeroom Earth, and I'll probably get some kind of Wildlife Tamer award and Coach might even start rethinking this starting point guard situation. And hey,
buck
is even in my name, so maybe the team will call me Ian “Twelve-Point” Buckley, and then we'll see—

“Uh, guys?” says PJ.

“What?” I ask. PJ's staring into the thickness of leaves and branches around us, running his hand through his hair over and over. When he doesn't say anything, I call, “PJ? What's up?”

“I just . . . which way did we come from?” he asks, peering into the woods.

“We came from . . . back there,” I say, pointing behind me. Already, though, the grass we trampled is bending back into place. My ears strain to pick up Ms. Brandt's sharp voice or one of the other kids in our group, but there's just the creak of trees, the call of a bird. Guess we ran farther than I thought.

“Are you sure?” he says. “I thought we came from over there, by that huge rock.”

“Which huge rock?” asks Kendra. “There are a number of huge rocks in this area.”

“That one,” says PJ, gesturing with his hand.

“No way,” I tell him. “That rock? If we came from that direction, we would have had to jump over it, and I don't remember doing that.”

“I sort of do remember that, though. I don't know.” Uh-oh. PJ's chest begins rising and falling quicker and quicker. “We're lost, aren't we?” His big sad eyes turn on me, like he's giving a dirty look and begging for help at the same time. “This is how it always starts! You wander off the path and then you get lost, then you find some maniac living in a trailer in the woods, then he pulls out a hatchet—”

This is what too many late-night horror movies do to a kid. “PJ, calm down. You got the footage, didn't you? Admit it, you had a great time running after that deer!”

“Now we're lost!” he whines. “We have
no idea
how to get back!”

Before I can ask PJ who put a gun to his head and told him to run into the woods after me, Kendra Wright hushes us both and dives into her backpack. She unfolds a big colorful map, then scans it with her index finger. Her other hand fishes around among her stuff and comes back out with . . . a compass?

“This is all you've got?” I ask her. “What is this, the Oregon Trail?”

“I had a GPS in my
phone
,” she growls, giving me the stink-eye.

Given our current situation, I'll let that one slide. Besides, this is Kendra Wright we're talking about, Queen Brain. Her noggin is a mass of numbers, dates, and stupid school trivia. If anyone can triangulate our location and get us home, it's her.

“We headed northeast,” she says. “Those mountains”—she points to the faded peaks way off in the distance—“are part of the Bitterroot Range. There are paths all over them. If we keep walking in . . .
that
direction, we're going to run into Wood Chip Hiking Path, which will lead us back to the parking lot where the buses dropped us off. It shouldn't take more than half an hour.”

“See? We're fine,” I say to PJ.

“Yeah, right,” he says shakily. “I'll believe that when we get back to camp.”

Yeesh. That kid's got to grow a backbone. If it were up to PJ, all we'd ever do is film other people having fun while we sit around talking about cinematographers and monster makeup.

“Come on,” I say, walking in the direction Kendra pointed.

The woods are awesome. The air is totally pure and smells like a million different things at once—fur, leaves, dirt, rocks, water (who knew water had a smell!). Trees drip with sap and rustle with squirrels and birds living it up from branch to branch. Everything's moving, from bugs zipping through the air to plants twitching in the breeze. Even the sunlight on the forest floor looks alive as it quivers and shakes.

Coach Leider was telling us last week that a trip out into nature is what really separates the wolves from the poodles, because a wolf can thrive alone in nature and still find its way back to the pack, and a poodle can't survive without pampering and hand-feeding. Right now, I know exactly what he means. The woods are a big, beautiful playground, and I get a feeling, a wolfish kind of feeling, that we're headed the right way.

Of course, I haven't forgotten about the Pine City Dancers. If Jeremy Morris was telling the truth, they're somewhere out here, even if all that's left of them is bones. Wherever Sean and Mitch are with Coach's group, it's probably nowhere near as deep into the woods as I am. I need to use this as a head start—with PJ and Kendra along for the ride, I'll have witnesses if I do find them. PJ even has a camera, so we can document it. Forget the bet—if I find these missing hikers, Coach will
have
to be impressed enough to make me starting point-guard, maybe even team captain.

Behind me, Kendra waits for PJ to catch up with us. With her hair, she almost
looks
like a poodle, and anyway, there's no fun in her face, no excitement about being out here. I've got two poodles with me now—a brainiac and a scaredy-cat.

But maybe us wolves need to look after poodles. Coach is never down on us when we screw up during practice, he's always pushing us forward, and that's what gets us through. Why blow off PJ, when I can make a wolf of him? It'd be cool if when we got home, he could finally hang with the guys from the team, or at least not make me look like a loser when they're around.

Wow, Wilson, we always thought you were lame, but you really toughened up out in the woods,
and PJ would be all
I had a little help,
and he'd wink at me, and we'd laugh.

A few yards away, I see a chance. There's a big dead cedar tree up ahead, the trunk half cracked and splitting outward like a bunch of sharp snaggleteeth. All the leaves and most of the branches are gone, and the only thing keeping it up is the other tree it's leaning against.

“Let's push it over,” I say, pointing to the dried-up husk.

“I don't know,” says PJ. “Some idiot is always doing something like this in the movies. They hurt someone's sacred tree, and then it releases an evil demon—”

“Dude, this isn't a horror movie. Look at it—it's deader than dirt. And I bet clearing dead trees is really good for the living ones, right?” I ask Kendra.

She stops, her eyes frozen in that creepy nerd stare, then blinks and says, “Yes, actually. Knocking this tree over would also provide extra burrowing space for animals.”

“See? If Kendra Wright says it, it must be true. We're helping the environment.” He still looks worried, so I say, in my most encouraging voice, “It'll be
really cool
.”

The other two slowly follow me to the gray tree. I lean into it with my shoulder, kind of hoping it'll go right down and I'll look like the Hulk, but the trunk just creaks and sways, so I motion the other two to get in on the action. Kendra gets next to me and starts pushing, and soon we're shoulder to shoulder, giving the tree all we've got. It's not like we're friends or anything, okay, my face still aches where that textbook hit me, but we're out here together, so I guess I'll deal with letting her in on the fun.

I hear a beep and look up to see PJ holding his camera, narrating, “Ian and Kendra here, trying to knock over a dead tree—”

“PJ, forget the footage!” I call out to him. “Put down the camera and help us!”

“We can't do this with just the two of us,” says Kendra.

PJ bites his lip, but his eyes finally leave the screen, and he joins us at the tree.

The cedar resists for a second, and then there's a loud crack that echoes through the whole forest, and we leap back as the trunk slowly snaps outward and the tree drops to the earth with a resounding BOOM. Birds fly, chipmunks scatter, the sound echoes for miles. Next to me, PJ dusts off his hands with a proud smile on his pale little face.

“Awesome, right?”

“Yeah, okay,” he admits. “That was really awesome.”

The trunk of the tree is now an open pit swarming with white termites that crawl over one another and burrow deeper into the ground to get away from the light. Of course, rather than leave the disgusting vermin alone, Kendra's all over it, actually picking up a handful of creepy crawlers and putting them in a plastic jar—“for later.”

“What, just in case you need a snack?”

“Don't be
puerile
,” she says. “They're fascinating specimens.”

“Whatever you say, Queen Brain.”

“What?” she says. “What did you call me?”

“What? Nothing. Get back to your bugs.”

The more stuff I do, the more they join in. I jump up and swing from a low-hanging branch and PJ jumps to try and reach it (he doesn't, but at least he tries). We find a couple of downed trees and snap off branches to make ourselves walking sticks. An upturned stone reveals a garter snake, and PJ films it instead of having a heart attack about it—from a safe distance, of course; you can't just make a poodle a wolf in an afternoon.

See? There's no reason we shouldn't be having fun! This is exciting! We're forging a path through the wilderness! We're on our own, living it up in nature!

Except . . .

Except according to my watch, we walk for an hour and twenty minutes and there's no Wood Chip Hiking Path, no walking trails, no hunting blinds, no nothing, just deeper woods, bigger trees. We march past endless rows of tall gray evergreens, miles of fallen red and yellow leaves, the occasional patch of bright green ferns, but nothing else. Even the animal noises fade—soon I only hear birds calling way off in the distance, and the squirrels and chipmunks scurrying around earlier are nowhere to be found. The farther we march, the wider PJ's eyes get, the deeper the corners of Kendra's mouth sink, and the taller our shadows grow against the leaf-covered forest floor.

The sound of rushing water perks up our spirits, and we forge ahead to a small creek running through the woods. We all stop at the bank and take a breather, grateful for something different, some kind of landmark. Kendra fills her canteen and drops a huge pill in it. She tells us it's a water purification tablet, which, of course, she has a bunch of, being a weirdo, but okay, it's been a long thirsty walk, and we all take a much-needed drink. PJ takes off his shoes and dangles his feet in the water. Behind him, I tap Kendra on the shoulder, and the two of us sneak off a few yards into the woods. She looks frustrated and hopeless, and to be honest, I'm feeling less like a wolf every minute.