When we got back to the campground from the Mammoth Hot Springs, Harry and I were sent up to the store at the front of the campground to get a gallon of milk. I lost Harry when we went past the rig where Peggy was staying. I decided she must have several pairs of red shorts because we’d never seen her wear anything else.
Well, I could carry a gallon of milk by myself, I thought, and kept going. As the girl behind the counter gave me the change, she said, “Aren’t you with the Rupe party, in the big motor home?”
“Yeah,” I admitted, hoping Mr. Rupe hadn’t backed over somebody’s kid or their dog.
“Did your friends find you okay?”
“Friends?” I echoed stupidly.
“The fellow who was asking about you this morning said he was supposed to meet you here. Your rig was gone so he was afraid you’d left, but I checked the reservations and told him you were booked for three more days, so you must have gone on into the park and you’d be back this evening.”
“Uh . . . okay, thanks,” I said, but the alarm bells were going off in my head.
As far as I knew, we weren’t expecting any friends. And nobody had showed up since we returned to the campground. I mentioned it to Harry when I pried him away from Peggy.
“So what?” Harry asked.
“So who are the friends?”
“What difference does it make?”
“What if,” I said patiently, “they’re not friends?”
He frowned. “Meaning what? They’re enemies? More than the ones we’ve already got, the ones who are chasing us all over Yellowstone?”
“Didn’t you notice they weren’t chasing us today? There wasn’t a sign of them anywhere.”
The wheels in his head were grinding slowly. “I didn’t pay any attention. You think it was somebody trying to find out how long we’d be here?”
“Well, if they knew we weren’t leaving for a while, there might not be so much reason to watch us every minute. Though I don’t know how they think they’re going to get at the motor home, since we’re either in it or it’s locked in a parking area with so many people around they won’t dare try to break in.”
“Maybe they sent for another set of keys, and they’re waiting for them to get here,” Harry said. It was the smartest thing he’d come up with so far. “Let’s walk past their rig again,” he suggested, “and see what they’re up to.”
“Okay. You carry the milk the rest of the way,” I told him, and swung the gallon jug at him.
The trailer and the car were where we had left them. The only thing that was different was that there was a flat tire on the Crown Victoria.
“That might explain why they didn’t follow us today,” I observed, and Harry nodded. “Nobody around now unless they’re inside the trailer. Shall we look?”
“And have one of them looking back at us? I’ll pass,” I told him.
He called me a chicken, but he didn’t go over by himself and look.
The next day we didn’t see anything suspicious, nor any sign of the guys with the blue car. Nobody had fixed the tire—in the morning we checked before we left—and we couldn’t tell if Syd and Ernie were in the trailer or not.
That morning we stopped at the museum in West Yellowstone, the Montana town just outside the park. Harry had gotten more and more impatient because we hadn’t seen any bears, and Ariadne kept saying the bears would bite.
“Hey, look!” I said when we entered the museum. “There’s a bear, Ariadne! And he can’t bite, because he’s stuffed!”
The sign said his name was Old Snaggletooth. Ariadne had to be coaxed up close to him, but she finally got brave enough to reach out a finger and touch one of his great claws. Even I didn’t feel like getting too close to his yellowed fangs.
We saw a video on the fire that swept through the park in 1988. It was pretty scary, but exciting. We had already seen a lot of the burned trees. My mom had been afraid it had ruined the park, but there had been regrowth since then, and they said that most of the animals had been able to outrun the flames.
None of the Rupes seemed interested in why the mud and the steam came rising out of the ground, but I thought it was fascinating. I couldn’t help telling them some of what I’d read, whether they seemed interested or not.
That day we also spent a couple of hours at the Mud Volcano Trail. The trails were steep and it was hard work to climb them. Mrs. Rupe never did get all the way up to Sour Lake, and she hated the smells.
Nobody liked them, actually. They stunk of sulfur and other gases that came up through the water or the mud from the volcanic heat far down inside the earth.
But it was worth the stink to see the Churning Caldron and the Dragon’s Mouth that seethed and rumbled so that Harry grinned as he looked into it. “Boy, if anybody fell into that thing, they’d never come up, would they? What a place to murder somebody, huh?”
I didn’t think anybody with any brains would get close enough to get pushed in. Even if the mud or water wasn’t boiling hot, it was likely to swallow anything up like quicksand.
Even Harry stopped to hear the information about Sulfur Caldron once I started reading it. “It’s got the same sourness as battery acid or stomach fluids, it says.”
“Yuk,” Harry muttered as he peered into the slobbering mess.
Alison was holding the little kids’ hands so hard that Ariadne complained. “Maybe,” my sister suggested, “you could sit here on the bench with your mom while I go to the top.” I knew she was really scared one of them would fall into one of these death traps, yet just as intrigued by them as I was.
“I’ll stay with Mama, too. I’m tired,” Billy said, and to our astonishment Mrs. Rupe didn’t object, but let Alison leave them behind and go on up the climb with Harry and me. Mr. Rupe went off the main loop, I think, so he didn’t have to listen to Harry and me talking.
I wondered why he’d brought his family on this trip, since he didn’t actually seem to enjoy his kids very much.
We didn’t miss him, though. The gang at home wouldn’t believe all this stuff, I thought. Outsiders in the old days had ridiculed the men who discovered Yellowstone. Their tales of steaming springs and geysers and smelly pots of roiling mud in all kinds of different colors had sounded like hallucinations to those on the outside. It was kind of hard to believe even when you were actually looking at them.
When we went back to camp that afternoon and took a walk past Ernie and Syd’s rig, the car and trailer were still there. So was a white paneled van that said LOCKSMITH on its side.
Several other kids were standing there watching, so Harry and I joined them. The locksmith was just finishing up.
“There you go,” he said to Syd. “The new keys work just fine. You shouldn’t have any more trouble.”
They had new keys? Because their old ones were missing? I looked at Harry and he looked at me and licked his lips. I cleared my throat, keeping my voice low. “Weren’t there keys in the car the first time we came over to check things out? It seems like I remember a key ring—that one with the Seahawks medallion on it.”
Harry nodded. “Yeah. I saw it before Billy got in their car. I didn’t notice when I dragged Billy out of the front seat.”
“Did you see it after you pulled him out?”
Neither of us said any more, but we didn’t need to. When we got back to the coach we cornered Billy in the bathroom where he was making pictures on the full-length mirror with a can of aerosol spray cleaner he’d found under the sink.
“What’d you do with the keys you stole out of that blue car?” Harry demanded.
We’d startled him, and Billy swung around with his thumb still on the spray device. White foam went all over both of us at thigh level, and Harry whacked the can out of his hand.
“Cripes! Pay attention to what you’re doing,” he said crossly, and grabbed a towel to wipe it of
f. “You aren’t supposed to be playing with that.”
“Nobody told me not to,” Billy defended himself, which was probably true. Who could think of all the things to tell this kid not to do?
I didn’t want the subject to be changed. “Where are the keys to that blue car?”
Billy stared at me, saying nothing.
Harry bent over and grabbed the front of his little brother’s shirt. “We know you took the keys out of that car. So where did you put them? Get them for us.”
“I can’t,” Billy said.
“Why not?”
And right that second I knew. “You threw them away, didn’t you? Into one of those hot pools.”
Harry straightened up, reading the same thing on Billy’s face that I did. “Did you really? Holy cow!”
“Why?” I asked.
He hesitated, then said reasonably, “I wanted to see them disappear, the way the ice cubes did.”
I exhaled. “So now we know why Ernie and Syd didn’t keep following us. They must not have put the trailer keys on the ring with the car keys. They apparently have been staying in the trailer.” I paused, then asked, “You didn’t monkey with their tire, did you?”
He moistened his lips, and shook his head. “No. Charlie did that.”
“Who’s Charlie?” Harry and I asked together.
“The boy who has the little puffy white dog.”
I knew the one he meant. Everybody in the campground who had dogs walked them every evening. I remembered Charlie, too. He was about ten and on the chubby side.
“How come Charlie gave them a flat tire?” I asked.
“That man kicked his dog. It made Charlie mad, so when he came back he took that thing off his tire and it went Sssss and then it was flat.”
Harry was staring at him. “How do you manage to learn all this stuff? We keep an eye on you all the time. You don’t get to wander around loose.”
A little smile curled Billy’s lips. “Sometimes nobody watches for a few minutes.”
“We were with him when he snitched the keys,” I reminded Harry.
“Well, they’ll fix their tire, and they’ve got new keys, so tomorrow they’ll probably follow us again,” Harry said.
They didn’t, though. Maybe now that they knew we had reservations for a few more days, they didn’t feel they had to, though what they were waiting for we didn’t know. Maybe they really were waiting for another set of keys for our coach to arrive so they could use them anytime we were out looking at something in the park.
That morning we finally saw a bear.
It looked every bit as big as Old Snaggletooth at the museum. Harry howled and dived for his camera as the bear ambled out of the woods and began to cross the road ahead of us.
Mr. Rupe put on the brakes and pulled over to the side. Alison scooped up Ariadne and held her to the window, and I reached for Billy.
“Look! Look, it’s a real bear!” I said.
Billy was on his knees on the couch, but the expression on his face didn’t change. Ariadne’s did; she was torn between being thrilled and being terrified, and Alison talked to her reassuringly.
Billy’s eyes didn’t even track as the bear padded across the road and paused to paw at something on the ground.
And finally it hit me.
I jerked off my glasses and held them over his eyes. “Can you see the bear now, Billy?”
Suddenly his face lit up in a big grin. “Wow!” he said.
Now I could barely make out the shape of the animal right ahead of us, and I realized why Billy was always swiping glasses, why he couldn’t be bothered to look when we pointed out sights, why he preferred to do things right close up, like coloring or wrapping Scotch tape around the cat.
“He’s so nearsighted he’s practically blind to anything more than a few feet away,” I said.
Nobody but Alison paid any attention. I’d tell them again, later, and I hoped they’d listen. Billy needed glasses with a prescription for nearsightedness. His father’s were for the opposite, for seeing what was near, and that’s why Billy hadn’t been able to see with those.
From that time on, whenever we got where there was anything really worth seeing from Billy’s viewpoint, I shared my glasses with him.
When we came upon a herd of buffalo, I held them on his nose so he could look too. When the elk were grazing below us in a small meadow, he examined them through my lenses. When we came upon a small group of people watching a lone moose feeding along a small stream, and we were afraid he’d spook when Mr. Rupe got out and tried to get up close for a picture, I made sure Billy got to look for a few seconds before I did.
Mr. Rupe did get too close, and the moose decided to retreat. He was a very large animal, and I imagined what he could have done to the man if he hadn’t chosen instead to trot off across the open area and into the woods.
One of the other tourists, a tall fleshy man with a camera around his neck too, scowled when Mr. Rupe came back to the road. “You chased him off while the rest of us were still taking pictures,” he complained, loud enough for us to hear him from inside the coach.
“Don’t blame it on me,” Mr. Rupe said, “if you’re too chicken to get close enough to get a good picture.”
The man was red-faced and angry as we drove away. I looked at Harry, but I guess he was used to his dad being obnoxious. Mr. Rupe must have been considerate when he was working at the bank, but away from home he didn’t seem to bother. I’d have been embarrassed to death if my dad had behaved that way.
Ten minutes later, when we stopped again because the road was full of buffalo and tourists with cameras or just gawking, Mr. Rupe went back to the bathroom. He came out looking furious.
“There’s no water to flush the toilet! Who’s been wasting water? We had half a tank when we left camp this morning, and now I can’t even wash my hands, let alone flush!”
We all looked at Billy. He’d been intrigued by the pedal that flushed the toilet ever since the first time he got in the motor home.
Harry reached over and pushed the button over the refrigerator that made the panel light up to monitor all the different systems. Instead of a green light indicating a safe level in our fresh water tank, there was a red one showing that the waste-water tank was full enough that it needed to be dumped.
Mr. Rupe growled something, stalked past us and got back into the driver’s seat. The culprit, Billy, sat on the floor petting William, ignoring the fuss.
When Mr. Rupe started up the coach, we lurched forward just as an impatient driver, annoyed that we had blocked the road for so long, tried to pass.
There was a grinding sound of metal on metal, and we were all thrown forward.
“Oh, Milton,” Mrs. Rupe said, “you made Ariadne bump her head!”
Ariadne was crying. Alison tried to soothe her. Mrs. Rupe patted her knee.
Harry and I got out of the way when Mr. Rupe swore and turned off the engine, then headed for the door to talk to the irate driver who was getting out of his car.
We sat in silence while they exchanged insurance information. Whatever Mr. Rupe said to him, the other driver didn’t seem to be pacified. Both of them were clearly angry.
Nobody said anything all the way back to the campground. Mr. and Mrs. Rupe announced that they were going with the Nabs, in their car, into West Yellowstone for the evening.
“You’ll be perfectly all right by yourselves with all these people here,” Mrs. Rupe said, as if all five of us kids were the responsibility of the strangers camped around us.
They had been gone about half an hour when we heard the crackling sound of the PA system from the main office.
Harry looked up from the card game he and I were playing at the table. “What did they say?”
I leaned over and slid a window open so we could hear when it was repeated.
“Lone John is nearby. He is a buffalo bull who sometimes wanders away from the park to mingle with domesticated cattle on the nearby farms. He is wild, however, and can be dangerous if he’s confronted. Stay in your rigs and don’t approach him. Anyone in the pool house, laundry, or store, please stay there until we announce the all clear. Rangers are coming from Yellowstone to herd John back where he belongs.”
It was almost dusk. We pressed our faces against various windows, trying to catch a glimpse of the runaway buffalo.
“There he is!” Harry said, and we all shifted to his window. I got a good look at him, coming along our road as if he belonged there, then handed my glasses to Billy. After all, I’d seen a lot of buffalo before he’d had any glasses to look through.
The voices from outside were perfectly clear because we still had a window open, and I recognized the speakers.
“It’s a good thing that key was delivered today,” Ernie said. “We’re running out of time. If it hadn’t come, I was going to bust out a window or something before they check out and go home.”
“Well, this turned out great,” Syd said. “They finally all left at the same time. Come on.” And we heard the click of the key in the lock of the motor home.
Where we were, behind the tinted windows, it was practically dark. When the door swung open, I was scrabbling to get my glasses back from Billy.
“Uh-oh,” I said, but there wasn’t anything I could do to stop them from coming in. I was pretty sure none of the neighbors was paying any attention to us at all. They were still engrossed in Lone John.
Beside me, Harry faced the doorway, and his comment wasn’t much more helpful than mine.
“Oh, crum,” Harry said.
Chapter 11
Though it wasn’t fully dark outside, it was dim inside the motor home. We’d all been watching Lone John the buffalo wandering through camp and had seen a van with the park rangers pull in. They were out of our sight now, but nobody had turned the interior lights on yet when our door opened.
Surviving Summer Vacation Page 9