And just at that moment, the rope that was holding Jo, April, Ripley, Mal, and Molly received what could be described as a tremendous tug.
“AAAAHHHHHHH!!” the Lumberjanes hollered in unison, because what else could be done at a moment like that?
Mal wondered if this was what it was like to be a yo-yo, and she decided never to yo-yo again.
Whatever was tugging on the rope switched from tugging to swinging. Yes, something, or someone, very big seemed to be swinging the rope.
Now, instead of plunging through a mysterious white fog, the members of Roanoke cabin were swinging back and forth through it.
Like a pendulum, Jo thought.
And then, suddenly, they were swinging up into the air, higher, higher . . .
“AAAHHHHHHHHH!!!!” everyone screamed, because circumstances seemed to still indicate the necessity of hollering.
It was not unlike being on a swing set and swinging as high as a person can swing. Except the Lumberjanes were on a rope full of Lumberjanes, and they had no idea why they were swinging or why they were suddenly . . . hanging . . . in midair.
“WHAT IS HAPPENING?!” Mal, who now had her hand firmly gripped around Molly’s, howled.
“HANG ON!” April screamed.
Gravity says you can only hang in midair for so long.
Sometimes, in some magical situations, gravity can be a little bit wrong.
But in this case, gravity seemed to be on point, and after a moment the Lumberjanes were falling.
Fast.
Of course, the good thing about falling is you can’t do it forever.
I SAW THE SIGNS BADGE
“A sign of the times”
The world is a complicated place. Knowing where to go and where you are going is key to the success of any adventure. A Lumberjane knows that natural and human-made signs are there to help us get where we are going in one piece, and to ensure the safety of those around us. To achieve their I Saw the Signs badge, Lumberjanes must master crypto-signology, semiotics, symbolism, and signifiers. They must also know the basics of road signs, forest signs, lake signs, desert signs, and mountain signs, as well as hand signals and light signals. Do you know the signs? Do you know, for example, the first sign of . . .
CHAPTER 28
The Lumberjane scouts of Roanoke cabin fell from the sky and landed on whatever it was they were landing on in the following order: April hit the ground, bounced up into Jo, who was holding Ripley, all three of them hit the ground, bounced up again, and landed. Then Mal and Molly arrived in a twisted ball of vine and rope and landed on top of Ripley, Jo, and April.
“OOF!”
“OOOF!”
“OOOFF!”
“OOOOFFF!”
“OW!”
The heap of pink, plaid, green, khaki, and orange groaned collectively.
“Alive?” Molly called out from the tangled mass of Lumberjanes.
Mal took a deep breath. “Alive,” she sighed.
“Yup,” Jo said, stretching her legs out of the pile. “Definitely alive.”
“ALIVE!” Ripley, who was tangled in a mass of rope, waved.
Bubbles jumped onto Molly’s neck and wrapped his furry little arms around her. “Squeak!”
April’s head popped up out of the pile of Lumberjanes. She threw her hands up in the air and yelped, with the relief of a thousand Aprils, “LUMBERJANE POWER!”
“Thank Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner,” Jo said, shaking her head as she cautiously untangled herself from her friends’ limbs.
“That was CRAZY,” Ripley gasped, still squiggling in a mass of rope.
“That was definitely in the nut family,” Mal groaned, standing.
Molly looked around at her fellow Lumberjanes, relieved. “It’s a good thing to remember just how awesome it is not to be squished like a bug.”
April spun around, taking it all in. “You guys! This is the top, right? WE MADE IT TO THE TOP!”
“We really need to work on our crash landing formation,” Jo said, cracking her back. “Or not.”
“Add it to the list,” Mal grunted, testing out her feet to see if they still worked.
April grabbed Jo by the collar and shook her happily. “WE MADE IT TO THE TOP OF THIS MOUNTAIN!”
Not exactly as planned. But still!
“Ah yes,” Jo chuckled under the wave of April’s unbridled enthusiasm. “WOOO!”
“Yes, we did.” Molly pulled herself up off the ground. “So where are we?”
“The top of the world. Holy Amelia Earhart!” April struck a victorious pose. “WE DID IT!”
It is a rare thing to feel like you’re in the sky instead of having the sky above you. To literally be on top of the world, your nose pressed against the ceiling. April breathed in. Was this the highest mountain she had ever climbed? Yes! The air was sharp. A gentle mist, much thinner than what they’d climbed through, clung to the air, leaving a haze of sparkly, twinkly stuff in the atmosphere.
The rest of the Lumberjanes took a moment to look around.
Curiously, it didn’t look like most mountaintops.
First of all, instead of the pink stone, now the ground under their feet was slightly spongy, and bumpy, like a carpet made out of a thousand snowballs, or like those art projects where you make snow by gluing a bunch of cotton balls together on a piece of paper.
Stretched out in front of them were little puffy hills and cotton candy wispy spires.
“Little help?” Ripley reached a free hand out from a giant hair ball of rope.
While April untangled Ripley for what was probably the two millionth time (because Ripley had this thing for getting tangled in string-like materials), Mal and Molly contemplated their own recent discovery.
“That was really scary,” Mal breathed. “That was like some weird scene in some action-adventure movie or something.”
“Totally,” Molly whispered back. “I might not want to be an action-adventure star.”
“No kidding.”
“What happened?”
Molly held up her hand. Thin strands of green hairs still clung to her fingers. “Look.” Molly twisted around, pulling her shirt out. They were all over her shorts, her shirt: little threads of green silk. “They’re everywhere.”
Mal turned her hand over, and the threads caught the wind and floated off her fingers like dandelion fluff. “Holy Beatrix Potter. What is it? Is this . . . a plant?”
Molly held a thread between her thumb and forefinger; the thread looped around and stuck back to the underside of her thumb. “Clingy Vine, maybe.”
Most of the vine had snapped in the fall, or was floating away, but one or two fragile green threads were still holding Mal and Molly together.
“It must have grabbed me when you were falling,” Mal breathed.
Molly’s eyes went wide. “Yeah. Wow.”
Mal grabbed Molly in a bear hug. “I’m never going to be weirded out by a plant again,” she said. “Thank you, vine.”
“Me neither, not that I was,” Molly added with a smile, grabbing Mal’s hands.
Mal winced.
“Wait. What’s wrong?” Molly looked at Mal’s wrists. The wrist with the Clingy Vine was fine, but the wrist that had the rope wrapped around it was turning a light shade of purple. “Oh no! Mal!”
CHAPTER 29
Mal bent her wrist and grimaced. “Maybe it’s sprained?”
Molly called out, “Mal’s hurt! CALL AN AMBULANCE! WE NEED BAND-AIDS STAT!”
All the Lumberjanes stopped and looked at Mal.
“WHAT?”
“OH NO!”
“MAL!”
“FULL MOON FORMATION!” April cried.
The Lumberjanes circled Mal in a cluster of concerned Lumberjanes.
“What happened?” April asked, kneeling in front of Mal, her eyes full of worry.
“I think it’s from me wrapping the rope around my wrist when we were falling through midair and trying not to die,” Mal offered. “Just a guess.�
�
“Good guess,” Jo said, her voice soft, bending over to look at Mal’s wrist. “Who has their First Things First Aid badge?”
“Barney,” April said. Really really wishing she had hers too.
Ripley raised a finger up in the air. TING! “I know how to treat chicken pox, because my whole family had it once, even my cat.”
Mal frowned at her throbbing wrist. “Thanks, Rip.”
“Like all my sisters and my brothers. Like all at once!”
Mal smiled a small smile.
“Do you want a hug?” Ripley offered. “That’s actually the one thing you’re not supposed to do when you have chicken pox, but I don’t think that’s what you have.”
Mal smiled and nodded, and Ripley wrapped her arms around Mal in a gentle hug. Bubbles curled up in Mal’s lap and raised his paws for a raccoon-style hug.
“Thanks, Bubbles.”
“Well, I don’t know first aid but I have sprained my wrist before. We definitely need to get you to a nurse or something,” Jo said.
Molly put her hand on Mal’s back. “We need to get back down to camp, pronto.”
“Yes.” April stood up. “Yes. Yes.” She clapped her hands together. “Okay. Yes. Let’s totally get down right away. Right! So!”
April put her hands on her hips, which is often the stance a scout will take when she is about to fix everything. Actually, standing with your hands on your hips is a very effective way to look and feel authoritative and proficient. April’s face fixed into an expression of determination.
The plan was still in effect. Maybe not perfectly, she figured, but they got up this weirdo mountain. Now they just had to get down. Everything was going to be okay. All April had to do was figure out how . . . to get down. Right. Didn’t plan that out exactly. Still. Totally fine.
Somewhere in this white fluffy place was a way down . . . Right.
April turned. The fluffy place was on top of a mountain, right? So . . .
April walked a few dozen steps away from the huddle of Lumberjanes, expecting to find . . . what? An edge? A sign of where the path was to get back down the mountain? A jagged edge of pink rocks peeking through the clouds? One of those things had to be around here somewhere, she thought.
But the puffy whiteness just unfurled. And unfurled and unfurled. It was like the first minute of non-snow right after a big blizzard, when you go out in your backyard and everything is just white. The slide, the swing, whatever it was you forgot to put in the garage, all blanketed in white.
Infinite, which is to say, endless.
Jo watched April turn to the left. Walk a few dozen steps. Turn to the right. Walk a few dozen more. Then she stopped.
“Uh,” April said.
Jo walked over. “Uh?”
“Okay . . .” April paused and walked a few more dozen steps. “We’re going to be fine and this is fine, I just . . . can’t . . . find the path down.”
“Oh, uh, hey, guys,” a voice behind them said. “Welcome to Cumulous!”
CHAPTER 30
The voice belonged to a long-legged, long-armed, willowy creature with gray skin, long white wavy hair, and a long, flowing white beard framing a chubby, smiling, pearly face, round like a pug face if it were made out of full moon.
Next to the tall creature was another, slightly shorter creature with the same hair and face and a small gray knitted cap on top of its head. Both creatures wore long robes cinched at the waist in a style not unlike a bathrobe you might find in a fancy hotel or in the bathroom of someone who likes a nice bathrobe.
Actually, it was exactly like that.
The creatures smiled at the scouts with big pearly smiles.
“Hey, dudes,” the first creature said, in a kind of gravelly, sleepy voice, giving a long, slow wave. “I’m Swish, uh, and this is totally Flap.”
Flap peeked its hand out from under its robes and did a floppy wave at the scouts. Flap’s voice was even more gravelly. And slower. “Yo. Cloudy, you guys!”
“Sup?” Swish grinned. “We’re Cloudies and, uh, like I said, this is totally Cumulous so, you know. Cloudy!”
Swish and Flap glided forward through the swirl of whiteness, little white boots with puffy toes peeking out from under their robes.
“Hey, uh, Cloudy to you too,” April waved, stepping up sharply. “My name is April and this is Jo, Mal, Molly, and the person hugging you right now is Ripley. We’re Lumberjane scouts.”
“Hey,” Ripley said, her arms already wrapped tightly around Flap’s fluffy robe. “Your coat is really fuzzy.”
“Yaaa, thaaaanks,” Flap nodded, patting Ripley on the head. “Your hair is totally sunny clear skies. I like the blue.”
“April did it!” Ripley pointed proudly at April.
“So this mountain is called Cumulous,” Jo looked around. “We thought it was called This Mountain.”
“Oh uh, mountain? Uh no,” Flap reached out its other hand and began combing its long gray fingers through the curls of its beard. “This whole place is called Cumulous. It’s, like, a land above the earth, you know? It’s really big, actually, we should probably give it more than one name, but . . . you know, we haven’t gotten around to it.”
“Yaaa. Dude,” Swish chuckled. “we’re totally raining off on that.”
Jo looked around, the gears in her brain turning.
“Yeah so.” Swish looked around. “That was pretty crazy back there with you falling. We were up here, like, you know, hanging out, having a super sunny tea party. And we heard you guys yelling, like, thunder boom crash, and we were like, ‘WHOA. What the rain?’ You know?”
“Yeah,” Flap nodded. “So we, like, stopped and we were like, ‘Dudes. That does not sound sunny!’”
“Then this rope, like, zoomed in like lightning.” Swish said, its voice full of awe.
“And then Flap was like, ‘Dude, we should pull on this rope, because, like, maybe it’s attached to all the thundering boom crash,’ right? So we did. We just pulled on the rope and then, WHOA, you guys flashed all way up there, and then you came back down. Now here you are! Rainy day about the rope.”
Flap pointed to the frayed bits of rope next to their feet.
“Yeah,” Jo said, looking down, “too bad, er, rainy.”
“Did we rainy day your tea party?” Ripley asked, concerned, because that’s a pretty bad first impression.
Flap waved it off. “Nah, dudes. We have so much tea. It’s sunny.”
“Okay,” April nodded. “So we’re super . . . sunny to be here but our friend is hurt. And we need to get back down right away. So can you let us know the best way to get back down the mountain?”
Swish and Flap put their hands up on top of their heads. Then they turned and pressed their foreheads together, which made a tiny clinking sound, and then they looked back at the scouts.
“Uh, rainy day. Like, not really,” Flap said.
As they spoke, the mist around the Cloudies settled to reveal even more bright blue sky stretched in a dome shape around them.
Jo looked around. “Cumulous,” she repeated to herself. “We’re in the clouds. We’re standing on clouds?”
Flap nodded, digging its hands into its bathrobe.
“Wait. And we can’t get down?!” April yelped.
Flap shook its head. “Yah, dudes, I mean, if you wanted to go down . . . Wow, it’s so rainy to say this but . . . you shouldn’t have come up, right?”
“What does that mean?” Molly tightened her grip on Mal’s shoulder.
“Well,” Swish offered, “there were signs, right? On the ground?”
“This Mountain,” April said.
“Foggy,” Flap said.
CHAPTER 31
It didn’t take Jen long to find the sign the girls had read earlier, perched in its pile of pink and purple soda-colored rocks.
Rosie was off circling the fields on Jeremy, looking for the girls, and Jen was investigating on foot. No sign of the girls. Then. The sign.
�
�This Mountain,” Jen read aloud, her brow furrowed. “This Mountain what?”
There was very little Jen disliked more than a fragmented sentence.
A fragmented sentence isn’t a sentence. At best, it tells you something a sentence could be about, if it had some verbs.
Jen looked around. Sometimes a verb was just something you had to look for. Spotting the other bits of wood scattered among the rocks, she stepped forward and started turning the pieces over. Some of the pieces were blank, some were so old they were almost not even wood anymore and crumbled in her hands like an old cookie. But many of them had more words inscribed into them: please, because, not, climb.
“Finally,” Jen muttered. A verb!
After picking up as many words as she could find, Jen kneeled in the grass with an armful of bits of wood, verbs, nouns, and conjunctions, which she laid out in front of her in a wide arc.
“Okay, Jen,” she muttered, twisting her long black hair into a knot, “somewhere in here is an actual sentence. All you need to do is find it.” She began rearranging the sign pieces.
Word puzzles weren’t really Jen’s thing. Word puzzles were Jo and April’s thing. Unfortunately, Jo and April were wherever it was they decided to go off to instead of doing what they were ASKED to do, which was a list of stuff that needed to get done around the cabin and the camp but . . .
Jen bit her lip. Her stomach churned. She KNEW something was wrong, she knew it. Her camp counselor instinct, well honed, was rarely wrong. Maybe never wrong. Or maybe it was just that Roanoke cabin was always doing something, and so her camp counselor alarm was always going off.
Which was very stressful.
Rosie galloped up on Jeremy. “They’re not here,” she said.
Jen looked at the sentence she had managed to puzzle out.
A sign.
A warning.
Rosie jumped down from Jeremy’s back. “Just smelly unicorns as far as the eye can see.” Rosie adjusted her glasses. “But I did find this.”
Unicorn Power! Page 8