4B Goes Wild Read online

  “We may be smart,” I said to the Tapes I was walking with, “but there’s something in the boy’s john …” Everybody laughed. “No, really. There’s this sign in there above the mirror.”

  “There’s a sign in the girls’ bathroom, too,” Lisa told me. “ ‘The Most Dangerous Animal in the World’.”

  “What’s so dangerous about me?” I asked, though I was afraid I knew. “I mean, the animals out here are always eating each other up.”

  “Don’t be silly. That’s a joke mirror,” Molly said.

  “No, it’s not,” Eugene told her.

  Miss Ivanovitch told us to hunt animals on the way back and put them in little screened boxes she’d brought along. As we searched Miss I. called, “Don’t hurt them, my dears. When we’re finished, we’ll free them so they can tend to their business.” I thought about my picture in the mirror and didn’t catch anything.

  “It’s like a scavenger hunt, don’t you think, Eugene?” I said.

  His eyes turned suspicious. “Who told you?”

  The two of us shook a bush and woke a bee, which we did not follow.

  “Molly,” I said, smiling brightly. “And I think that was very very very clever. I wouldn’t have thought of it myself.”

  He did not smile back.

  Nobody caught a fox and put it in a box, or an armadillo or a camel, either. We did get a cricket, a centipede, a big black ant, and, even, down by the marsh, a small frog. Aretha soaked her sneaker bagging him.

  We took our animals to an open spot, drew a big circle in the dirt, put them in the middle, and watched to see which would get out of the circle first. I thought it would be the frog easy, because it was the biggest. So did most people. But it wasn’t. The frog just sat there.

  “He’s scared stiff,” Nick said.

  The cricket jumped back and forth, getting nowhere.

  “He’s scared silly,” Eugene laughed, and the three of us from room nine smiled at each other.

  The centipede ambled along. But the big black ant made it out in less than a minute. He didn’t even wait for his trophy.

  8

  DOWN ON THE FARM

  “Come on, it won’t hurt you. Who’ll hold it? How about you, little girl?” Lunch was over. We’d finished planning skits for the night’s fireside program, and we Tapes were back to nature again, learning about bird banding.

  Molly backed off. Either she didn’t want to be called “little girl” or she was afraid to hold a pecky little yellow warbler.

  The Camp Trotter guide man had just taken the warbler out of a metal mesh cage that had seeds in it. Sometime during the morning the dumb bird had just hopped right in and gotten caught. The Camp Trotter man meant to snap a metal band around its leg, giving the bird a number for identification, but the bird already had a band. “This is one of last year’s,” he said, and he handed the bird to me without asking if I wanted it.

  Everybody stared as I took it. There was no way to say no. He started talking about migration and stuff, but I couldn’t follow what he said because I had this wild bird cupped in my hands.

  It pecked at my thumbs like needle pricks when you’re getting a splinter out. Its claws scratched at my little fingers, and its heart beat as fast as a purr against my palms. My heart beat fast, too. He wanted to go home. So did I.

  “Can I let him go?” I asked, interrupting.

  “Anybody else want a turn?” He looked around. Nobody else did.

  “Hold fast,” Miss Ivanovitch called. “I remembered my camera this afternoon.” She took a picture of me and the bird, neither one of us looking happy. And then I let it fly away home.

  After the bird banding place, we hiked to the farm. Miss Ivanovitch lined us up in front of its old white house and took our pictures all together. Then she snapped kids sitting in the old claw-foot bathtub filled with hay in the barnyard. Kids grabbed hay and stuck it in other kids’ shirts and into their hair, great fistfuls of it, wanting pictures of that, too.

  “Don’t play with their food,” she called. And she snapped the lens cap back on the camera. A baby goat wandered up and nuzzled her leg.

  “Oh, look, do,” she said, “it’s the new kid in town.”

  “Miss Ivanovitch, that’s terrible,” Aretha told her, giggling. The little kid sprang forward, ka-pong, ka-pong, and two bigger goats chased after it. So did Vince from 4A.

  Inside the barn, chickens sat on nests. I’d never seen a chicken on a nest before.

  “Are there any eggs?” Miss Ivanovitch asked.

  “I don’t see any,” Marshall told her, holding his hands behind his back as he looked.

  “Reach under the hens and check.”

  “You’re kidding,” Molly said, taking a step away. The hens’ heads shifted toward her. “They’ll attack.”

  Eugene marched right up to the nest, stuck his hand under the hen, and brought out an egg. “Like magic,” he said, holding it up with two fingers.

  “Why is it brown?” Lisa asked. “That’s, like, gross.”

  “Because it’s a brown egg,” he told her.

  “Real eggs are white,” she said. “Like, I never saw a brown egg before, and I’ve been eating eggs all my life. The eggs in the grocery store are white.” She looked at it closely, her nose wrinkled. “Is it safe to eat?” she asked Miss Ivanovitch.

  “Some are just brown and some are white. It depends on the chicken,” Eugene went on. “Chicken eggs are chicken eggs. My grandparents have a farm, and that’s how I know.” He reached under another hen and brought out one more brown egg. If Eugene could do that without flinching, why did he need a baby blanket? It didn’t make sense.

  A black-and-white cat tunneled from under the barn. Vince and I both chased it, but I swooped it up. “I found an owl,” I called to Nick, and everybody else thought I was bonkers. It was the same hard-purring cat I’d carried to the lodge the day before.

  From the farm we could see the cemetery, only a city block or so away. But we didn’t have paper with us. Besides, there was no way to sneak over. Miss Ivanovitch was thinking about the cemetery, too.

  “I wonder if I could break away for a couple of minutes and make a fast rubbing?” she said, almost to herself. She fingered a roll of paper in the big bag she carried over her shoulder, chewed on her lip, and then looked at her watch. She sighed and said, “It’s three o’clock, my dears, and we’re supposed to be in those orange pontoon boats ready to measure the depth of lovely Lake Lindaloma at three-ten.”

  A goat who wanted its picture taken before we left began to nibble on her camera.

  “OK, put the rabbits back in their hutches. We’ve got to leave.”

  “This rabbit is totally like velvet,” Aretha told her. “Pet it.”

  Vince, chasing after a rabbit he’d put down to see if it would hop, slipped in a slick of mud and fell flat.

  “Oh, my dear, you look as though you could grow a crop of corn on those jeans alone,” Miss Ivanovitch said as she scraped him off with a stick and splashed him with water from the pump.

  Molly stuck a brown egg under the flow of water. “Can I take this back with me?” she asked.

  “I hesitate to ask what you’d do with an egg, Molly, but the answer, in any case, is no. It belongs on the farm. It may even have had plans to be a baby chick.”

  Finally she checked to see that everything was in place, locked up, and then announced, “To the boats! We’re going to take the temperature of the lake and test it for bacteria. So, if you fall in, we’ll know how deep you’ll sink, how cold you’ll be, and what’s alive in there with you.”

  We looked like scarecrows, hay sticking out of our pockets and shirts. And as we marched, Miss Ivanovitch told us that we were off to see the Wizard of the Docks, who was going to tell us all about Algae in Wonderland.

  “See,” Aretha whispered to Molly. “She’s even funny like Mr. Star when you give her a chance.”

  Molly rolled her eyes. “A laugh riot,” she said.

 
By suppertime we were tired and hungry. Even kids who didn’t like meatloaf loaded it with catsup and ate. Though they had been quiet most of the day, my woollyworms had an appetite too. Besides, meatloaf is one of my favorites.

  After supper, Nick conned two sheets of drawing paper and a couple of crayons out of Ms. O’Malley, telling her we had this art project we needed to work on. But by the time we’d played another kickball game and seen a film on bats in the recreation room, I was zonked out. I was ready to draw a lake, a couple of trees, and a cat, give that to Miss Ivanovitch, and call it quits.

  “The fire is going strong,” Miss Ivanovitch called when the movie was over, and I looked out the window, half expecting to see Smokey the Bear shaking his finger at her.

  “Oh, my, a campfire, that’s glorious,” Mrs. Bosco announced, pulling herself up from the flowered sofa. “Shall I tell another fireside story? I have a treasury of them.”

  “Not tonight,” Miss Hutter said, a little too fast and a little too loud. “Last night was charming,” she added, “and we thank you very much, of course, but tonight we have Silence, Skits, and Singing.”

  9

  HERE, KITTY, KITTY

  Silence came first. Except for some tripping and burping, we walked in total, mysterious quiet through the woods and up a hill into a clearing. The fire wasn’t there. They had us all lie down in a circle, our feet toward the middle, so we could stare up at the millions of stars. The moon looked like a canoe.

  First we searched for star pictures, but I never do see bears up there or Hercules or the three parts of anybody’s belt. The Big Dipper, that’s easy. But that’s all.

  Then they told us to lie still with our eyes closed and listen to the sounds of the night. It’s true that with your eyes closed you hear better. Somehow, you’d think that so far from the city and shopping centers and cars and all it would be quiet, but it wasn’t. We were quiet for once, but the crickets rubbed their legs nonstop, and the trees made a racket when the wind blew through them. Chains clinked where the boats were tied down at the pier, a plane flew over, and a dog barked far away.

  After we’d listened to night noises for a while, Mr. Star said he was going to call an owl and see if one would answer. Lying on the ground with us, one of the spokes of our wheel, he told us how owls are predators and what they eat. Big owls sometimes catch skunks, he said. Owls don’t even care if they get sprayed with the stink, because they’ve got a lousy sense of smell. Small owls swallow mice and birds and snails whole, he said, and after they eat, they spit out pellets of all the leftover fur and bones and feathers. Everybody went “Yuck.” He waited a little and then went “Woo-woo,” kind of soft like a pigeon.

  Nothing answered, except the leaves and the crickets and the clinking chains.

  “Wooooo,” he went again.

  I shivered. What if this huge owl swooped down, picked up the smallest kid in the ring—Tracey probably—laid her pellet on us and flew away without a noise? Mr. Star had said their wings were soundless.

  “Woooo-oooo,” Mr. Star tried again. He was just two down from me and I knew it was still him calling, but I heard kids say, “I heard one answer, did you?”

  Mr. Star woo-ed once more, and after awhile cleared his throat and said, “Some owls hoot, some laugh, some shriek.” I think he was giving us a lecture to make up for the bird’s not answering him. “Some owls snore,” he went on. That broke everybody up. Owls snoring. The only owl that was going to answer us was a laughing owl.

  “I know how to call birds,” Nick said, turning his head to me.

  “Sure. Sure you do,” I told him.

  “I do. It’s easy.” He raised his voice. “Here, bird! Here, bird!” And from somewhere near in the woods, a bird answered, “Woooooo-wooooooo.”

  We couldn’t stay flat any longer. Everybody was eyes open and whistling like you do for a dog and calling, “Here, birdie! Here, owl!” and the silence was gone for good.

  Next came Singing. We walked to the campfire mumbling this song we’d learned in music class before we left school. It was about “jolly flames a-dancing” and “pale moonlight entrancing.”

  Miss Ivanovitch had been in charge of making the fire and it was a knockout, shaped like a teepee and spitting sparks up like crazy. Sitting-logs were set in a big ring around the fire. Kids kept shifting around on them until they got Mr. S. and Miss I. next to each other, because by then everybody knew for sure they were practically engaged.

  The fire felt warm on our faces, and we were all sitting there smelling the wood burn. When Mr. Plate stood up and raised his hand, we were already almost quiet. Mr. Plate was in charge of the program he called Fireside Fun.

  “First, we’re going to play a warm-up game,” he announced, “called Telephone. What I’ll do is whisper a sentence to the two people on each side of me and we’ll hear how it changes. That way you can see how well you’ve learned to listen.” A few people groaned. Telephone is a second-grade game. But since he was just a student teacher, Mr. Plate might not have known.

  He started out the same thing going opposite directions around the circle and after it had gotten whispered one way through twenty some ears, it came out, “A glove ate more thread than my damp daughter.” Mr. Plate said that wasn’t right. At the other end, Vince said it was “I shove trout ashore dead and they’re hotter.” Mr. Plate hadn’t started with that either, it turned out. He’d said (gag), “I love Outdoor Ed at Camp Trotter.” It was better our way.

  Then it was skit time. Each group had worked one out. The Lindalomas all got up and sang “Great Green Gobs of Greasy Grimy Gopher Guts.” The Bowls did a skit about a barber shop I never did understand, but it had a lot of screaming and catsup in it. The CIA wound kids up in rolls of toilet paper they called Do-It-Yourself-Mummy kits.

  The Scotch Tape did Fortune Teller. It was Molly’s idea, so she got to be Swami. She sat cross-legged, a towel draping her head and a sheet twined around her like a cape. She faced the campfire and swayed back and forth, asking the Spirit of the Great Outdoors to help her read fortunes.

  She read fortunes from shoes. Each of the rest of the Tape brought her a shoe to read. She turned the first one over carefully, stared at its bottom, and said in her high, flutey voice, “You have a beautiful soul.” Kids groaned, but she went on, “And you will go on TV or be in other fancy shoe business.” The groans got louder. The shoe belonged to R.X., who tap dances. Molly flicked it over her shoulder, and R.X. ran to pick it up before somebody else could.

  Over a pair of somebody’s high-toppers she shrieked, “You’re so high-strung!” Then she tossed that shoe behind her, crying, “Let yourself go!”

  I brought her one of Michelle’s Adidas that had tears along both sides where mud had leaked in. She held her nose with one hand and threw the shoe far away with the other, saying, “You don’t give a hoot. You pollute!” Michelle jumped up high to catch the shoe, because Molly had tossed it as far as it was stinky. Somebody else caught it and, while Michelle chased after, the shoe got flung from kid to kid like it was a long-dead toad.

  Then Lisa brought one of Miss Ivanovitch’s heavy, worn hiking boots up. She bowed as she presented it. The corners of Molly’s mouth twitched. She closed her eyes, held the boot up high over her head in both hands, and said, “This belongs to someone who is going on a long, long trip.” She grabbed it by the laces, swung it around in circles, and let it fly. The trip, I guess, was supposed to be to the moon. And, while it didn’t orbit, nobody saw where it fell short.

  “Next,” Molly demanded, holding her hands in front of her like she was in a trance.

  “Molly,” Miss Hutter said, sharply. “You have thrown the shoe into the bushes. It belongs to Miss Ivanovitch. We must find it at once.”

  Molly shook her head like she was trying to wake up. “Oh, my,” she said, “I’m so sorry. I didn’t do it on purpose. Which way did it go?”

  Kids started getting up and moving out in all directions. Nobody was sure which way it had
gone.

  “I’m afraid it’s too dark to look now,” Miss Ivanovitch said. “Tomorrow morning will do. It’s all right, Molly. You were just too involved in the skit. I expect you’d be a terrific actress.”

  Molly smiled. That’s what she thought too.

  Mr. Plate got everybody standing, even though our skit wasn’t really over, and we stood there with a lot more sneakers in our hands. “OK, now, everybody, we’ll sing ‘Day is Done,’” he said, “because it is.” He sounded glad. “Everybody hold hands to sing.” Nobody did. “OK, now, everybody hold hands so we can be one big circle, one group, one family.” We held, but there was a lot of grumbling, oosicking, and cootie-shooting. As we sang, we watched to see if Mr. Star would hold Miss Ivanovitch’s hand, too. He did. It was like happily ever after.

  Miss Ivanovitch was standing on one foot, and, after we finished singing “safely rest” at the end, Mr. Star helped her down the path. Nick winked at me.

  On the way back, Nick and I talked about the night and whether we should go out in it. The moon wasn’t even half there, but our own flashlights were still bright.

  “Listen,” Nick whispered, “we hit the sack right away and pretend to be asleep. Then we sneak out as soon as Mr. Star has made his bed check.”

  I yawned and stretched.

  “You want to chicken out?” he asked.

  I wanted to.

  “Listen, you tore that rubbing as much as I did,” he said. And that was a fact.

  “You guys,” Rolf whispered as we walked in the room, “let’s stay up really late and raid somebody.” He had plans, too. “Maybe we could cruise around and do a little trucking.”

  Eugene was already in bed. “If you truck me tonight,” he told us, “I will let the air out of your tires and make you crash.” He flashed his light in all three of our eyes. It wasn’t fair. Eugene didn’t look homesick any more. But the night still grabbed at my throat, making it hard for me to swallow. I needed at least to call home and check, but I couldn’t let Nick see me doing it.