Chapter 12
The Epic Quest Of Chris And Ben
The sun was high, shortening the shade of the scrubby woods, which finally petered out altogether into fully exposed grassland. Chris began to wish he had dressed in layers less cumbersome than his heavy long-sleeved shirt, which had seemed very cozy this morning. The boys had been following their compass for the better part of an hour as they looked for the first landmark, “An Osage orange tree about 35 feet tall.” Along the way, they had already found one of the required pick-up items, “any edible mushroom.” Ben, who had spent much time studying foraging on the Internet, said it was a Half Free Morel – which made terribly good cooking. Even though the list noted, in all caps, “DON’T TASTE IT, JUST BRING IT,” Chris had secretly filled his pockets in case they decided to bend the rules later.
“There’s the hedgeapple tree.” Ben stopped and pointed to a tree just ahead, standing all by itself like a natural landmark.
Grateful for any reason to rest even for a moment, Chris sank to a nearby stump and surveyed the tree. “I thought we were looking for an Osage orange tree.”
“It’s also called a hedgeapple, or a bodark” said Ben, impressing himself with his knowledge. “You can spot it in any season by the gnarly wood and thorns on the branches. People used to grow them like natural fences.”
“So, where are the oranges?” asked Chris. “Or apples, or whatever.”
“The tree doesn’t produce fruit till later in the summer,” Ben told him. “See the little blossoms, though? About August, each of those will start developing into a wrinkly green orb. By the time fall arrives, the fruit will be anywhere from the size of a golf ball to a tennis ball. You don’t want to be standing under this tree in a strong October wind.”
Chris walked over and examined a blossom. “Can you eat the fruit?”
“It wouldn’t necessarily make you sick to eat one, but you wouldn’t want to. They smell nice, but they taste terrible. Some people actually use hedgeapples for insect repellent.”
Poking himself on a thorny twig, Chris quickly lost interest and turned back to his compass. “Forty degrees is that way,” he pointed. “Let’s go. Maybe we can find some better shade and have lunch.”
They walked along for about fifteen minutes, then suddenly stopped as a young whitetail buck burst noisily from the underbrush and bounded right across their path. Gasping at their good fortune to see such a thing, the two friends congratulated each other with a high-five. Then Chris abruptly paused.
“Ben,” he said urgently, “how tall did that hedgeapple tree look to you?”
“I guess I didn’t notice,” Ben shrugged. “Why are you still thinking about that?”
“It’s been hanging in the back of my mind ever since we left the tree, and I think the shock of seeing that buck knocked it loose. The directions said that the tree was thirty-five feet tall. I didn’t really look that closely, but I wouldn’t have guessed that tree was an inch over twenty feet.”
Looking worried and a bit embarrassed, Ben scratched his head. “Are you sure?”
“No,” Chris admitted. “Anyway, it could be that the Sergeant is just lousy at estimating – or we are. Why would he deliberately lead us across the wrong... oh. He wants us to learn to follow directions, doesn’t he. Oh my.” Chris’s heart was pounding. If they’d turned wrong at the tree, they’d lost fifteen minutes. No, thirty! He suddenly remember one of the Sergeant’s favorite sayings: A mistake costs you three times: First the time you waste making it, then the time you waste fixing it, then finally the time and trouble to do it over again right.
“Don’t panic,” Ben said. “I know how we can figure it out without going back. The directions also say that the tree is just over a mile from camp.”
“How does that help?”
“Because,” Ben told him slyly. “I’ve got a handy-dandy pedometer strapped to my leg. We can know exactly how far we’ve gone.”
“And we didn’t check that earlier because...?”
“Because I stupidly presumed we had the right tree,” Ben admitted.
Chris had to agree that he presumed it too. “Well, check it already and let’s find out.”
“Chris, I don’t know to tell you this... it’s not working.” As Chris stood in open-mouthed horror, Ben slipped the pedometer from his ankle and opened the back. “I thought it felt lighter this morning!” he exclaimed as he stuck a finger into the empty battery compartment. “Why that sly Army Ranger... Look, he left a note: ‘Ben – Equipment failures are part of every mission. Improvise. – The Sergeant.’ Oh man, we can’t improvise! We can’t even find the right hedgeapple tree!”
“Well, we’re not going to find it standing here,” Chris observed doggedly. “Let’s get back there as fast as we can and then continue along the same bearing. From the length of time it took us to get there, I’d say we probably stopped just short of the real thing. I just hope the Sergeant put some flat-tire time into this mission.”
“I’m sure he did,” Ben said, “since he kinda put the nails in the road, if you know what I mean. I guess the pedometer wasn’t exactly fair, anyway.”
Feeling like Christian scouring the Hill Difficulty for his salvation scroll (the abridged Pilgrim’s Progress was free as an e-book too) Chris followed Ben as they loped and jogged back up the way they’d just come. It seemed to take a frightfully long time, but they finally found the Osage orange tree again. It certainly didn’t look thirty-five feet tall, but having just learned a lesson about assuming things, they decided to avoid repeating their mistake. Ben stood next to the tree, and Chris backed off from him about fifty feet. Then Chris opened his fingers at arm’s length to encompass Ben’s apparent height – which they knew to be a bit under six feet – and used the opening between his fingers as a sort of distance ruler to approximate the height of the tree, step by step. The Sergeant had shown them this technique, he remembered now, with a utility pole (which was probably paying more attention than they were, Chris reproached himself).
The fingers told the story. The tree was twenty-five feet tall at the most, and so couldn’t possibly be the right one. They set off fifteen degrees north at a near run, and did indeed find the correct tree just a short distance beyond, another lone Osage orange measuring exactly thirty-five feet to its top. By this time Chris was completely winded, so they stopped for lunch under its shade.
The next landmark, a mile further on, was more of a “mudmark.” It was a dry – or rather very wet – creek bed. All its water seemed to have been absorbed into goopy muck, which was now deep enough to lose the six-inch stick Chris tentatively inserted. The mud they might have braved, but the directions forbade even that: “Find a way to cross,” the Sergeant had written, “without getting muddy. There will be an inspection at the objective.”
“We’ve gone from the Hill Difficulty to the Swamp Of Despond,” Chris wailed. “Does he want us to cut down trees and build a bridge? I knew I should have brought my hatchet.”
“I did bring mine,” Ben said, “but we can’t possibly cut down a tree big enough to bridge this moat. It’s twenty feet across. Even if we found one already down, we’d never be able to move it. And this mess extends who-knows-how-far in each direction.”
“Maybe he just wants us to take off our shoes and socks and roll up our pants, walk through, then put them back on on the other side.”
“I don’t think so – and I’m definitely not putting my socks back on over a layer of naturally-occurring rubber cement. Wait. I’ve got it!” Ben suddenly snapped his fingers. “Snowshoes!”
“In June? Are you crazy?”
“No, it makes perfect sense. We just need to find a few flat surfaces, and we’ll lay them across like stepping stones.” He quickly glanced around. “Look – there’s a dead log with the bark flaking off in sheets. We can separate enough to use with my hatchet. Come on!”
Chris wasn’t sure about the idea, but allowed Ben to lead the way as they formed five “snowshoes
” from the decaying bark sheets. To test the principle, Ben set one carefully on the muck nearest their shore, and tentatively placed a foot on it. It held for a moment, then began to sink – but slowly. He quickly withdrew his foot. “It’s going to work,” he predicted excitedly, “but we have to go across really quickly on each step. Just bounce like a tennis ball.”
“More like a medicine ball, in my case,” Chris observed glumly. “Do I look like a ballerina to you?” He weighed the risks mentally. Chris had never been athletic, and he could just see himself fumbling a step as he tried to cross. Ben, standing dry on the other side, would politely suppress a chuckle as his pudgy friend landed face-down in the muck with a giant SPLAT, then thoroughly coated himself with mud as he tried to scramble up. At the “inspection,” Ben would get a medal and Chris would get put on K.P. Yet what was the alternative? Stand here looking dumb? Go back to camp? He made up his mind.
“I’ll do it, but only if you’ll cross first and carry the heavier pack.”
Ben agreed, even though he knew that the point man would carry a double risk: he would have to pause to place each new step. “Might as well get on with it.” Grinning gamely, Ben hoisted the pack and plopped the first step into the creek bed. Not daring to look down, he jumped lightly on it, tossed the next stepping board out, and hopped to that one. Chris couldn’t believe it, but the plan was working perfectly. In twenty heart-pounding seconds, Ben was across.
“If I get through this with my natural skin color,” Chris told himself, “I promise to lose fifty pounds.” Out on the first rapidly-sinking step, Chris remembered that Ben was only two-thirds his own weight, and that these flimsy bark fragments might already have been weakened from being walked over once. He couldn’t turn back. It was one heroic leap to the third step, then the fourth, then the fifth, and into the cheering arms of Ben, who suddenly found himself elevated to hero and genius. They’d made it, and made it dry.
The Sparrow Found A House (Sparrow Stories #1) Page 12