“Thanks, Jamie!” the guys hollered as she drove off in the clanky old truck.
The rest of the boys shouldered their gear and headed back to Birch Cabin. But even though Zee was dirty, soggy, sweaty, smelly, sunburned, and had a big bump on his head from where the paddle bonked him, he raced to the wood shop. That’s where he figured he’d find Will. Sure enough, Will was there, quietly sanding the edges off a piece of wood.
“Yo,” said Zee.
Will looked up from his sanding and raised his eyebrows. “Jeez,” he said. “What happened to you? You look like you lost a fight with a crazed mud shark.”
Zee grinned. If Will was ragging on him, it was a good sign. It meant Will was back to normal. “Yeah, that’s pretty much what happened,” he said. “I’ll tell you about it later. But listen, I think I might have found a clue to finding Hidden Falls.”
“Let’s go,” said Will, instantly dropping the wood and the sand paper.
Zee hesitated for a nanosecond, and Will said quickly, “Let’s go get Kareem and anybody else from Birch or Pawpaw who wants to come along, too. We’d better ask Simon, or some other counselor, to come, too.”
“Right,” said Zee, relieved that Will had changed his mind about including other guys in the search. Most likely Will had changed his mind about including other guys in all of Will-n-Zee’s ideas, opening a whole new universe of possibilities for pranks and mayhem, just as Zee had hoped. Oh man, it’s going to be great! thought Zee as he and Will raced down the trail that led to the cabins.
***
“Watch out below!” hollered Zee at the top of his lungs. He held onto a vine with two hands, ran, and pushed off the bank so that he swung wide out over the water, then let go. Splash! He landed in the deep, cool pool at the bottom of Hidden Falls.
The hike to Hidden Falls had not taken long. Zee led the guys from Pawpaw and Birch in the right direction, and they had soon found the spot where the stream gushed into Lake Evergreen. From there, they’d followed the stream uphill. The trail was almost nonexistent, but Kareem and Zack were both really good at detecting trail marks, and Nate helped out with clues he knew from his bird-watching hikes. They heard the Falls, but even after they’d hiked up a hill and climbed on to a rock, they saw only the pool down in the ravine. They hiked on, and all of a sudden, around a bend, there it was. Hidden Falls.
“You found it, guys,” said Simon. “Well done.”
The water crashed down through a series of boulders, pouring over the rocks into a deep pool. Leafy green trees and bushes crowded the Falls from every angle. The dank woods this far back had a jungle-feel, with birds calling, water gushing, and only a few patches of sunlight getting through the dense canopy.
Simon gave them the go-ahead to swim, and it didn’t take long before the boys were all splashing in the water. Later, they sat in the shallows enjoying the spray from the waterfall on their faces or lounged on the warm boulders around the pool, turning over rocks, looking for shiny green and blue salamanders. They talked and laughed, forgetting about time. No one thought about leaving. The peaceful current of the soothing, fresh water seemed to hold them in place.
“I could stay here forever,” Zee said, leaning his head back against a mossy rock and closing his eyes.
Then Will let loose a bellow that shook the trees. “AAAAAACCCCKKK!”
Zee opened his eyes, bolting upright, but all he could see was a blur of green.
“AAAAAACK!” Will yelled again. “Snakes! In the trees! SNAKES!”
Everyone looked up where Will was pointing. Horrified, they saw that the tree canopy was full of gleaming, lazy, big black snakes looped and stretched out along the branches just above them. Just then, one of the snakes from high up in a tree startled. It twisted and fell, splashing into the water.
“Run for it!” shouted someone and, in a mess of scrambling, splashing, slipping, and crashing, that’s exactly what they did. The boys flew all the way back to camp, screaming and shouting every step of the way.
They never stopped until, breathing heavily, they collapsed in a heap on the grass outside of Birch Cabin.
Sean was the first to catch his breath enough to laugh. “Did you …” he gasped. “Did you see when Vik flew straight up into the air?”
“Did you see yourself go from zero to sixty in a split second?”
“Did you see Jim’s hair stand on end?”
“Did you see the size of those snakes? They must have been ten feet long!”
“Okay, Hidden Falls,” said Zee. “We found you. It was fun, but we’re not coming back.”
“Right!” said Jim. “Hidden Falls, you can stay hidden.”
“Yeah,” agreed all the boys.
“No question,” said Will.
***
After dinner, a bunch of the boys wandered down to the lake and sat on the edge of the dock. They rinsed their hands and dipped their toes into the clear, green water. Shimmery fish darted around just below the surface. Bugs skittered across the surface of the water making tiny ripples. Max, on waterfront duty, was sitting at the edge of the water, digging his fingers in the sand.
“I’ve got one word for you people,” said Zee.
“Oh no,” said Nate. “Here we go.”
“Kayak!” shouted Zee. “It’s my new word of the day, boys. You know the word kayak is a palindrome. It’s so cool. It’s spelled the same back and forth. It’s like infinity.”
“Infinity,” repeated Will, “endless, like I wish summer could be. Then we could stay at camp forever, you know?”
Zee nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “I know.”
A group of birds deserted a branch overhead, chattering cheerfully as they took off across the lake.
Max splashed his face with water and stood up. He grabbed the foam rescue tube lying on the ground next to him. The boys watched him, expecting him to raise his whistle to his lips and blow, signaling that they were free to jump in the water. But Max took a deep breath, sprinted past them with a ridiculous smile on his face, grabbed his knees, and launched—foam rescue tube and all—into the water in a massive cannonball that soaked them all.
He quickly came back to the surface, shook out his short hair, and yelled, “Gotcha!”
Wet, laughing, and sliding, the boys raced over to the pegboard with their swimming buddy tags. “Flip your tags!” Vik bellowed.
“Flip your tags, you tag-flipping flag tippers!” Zee yelled. Max climbed out of the water and blew his whistle.
The boys ran to the end of the dock where the water was deep and the lake stretched out, looking endless. One after another, with howls of joy, they plunged in.
REAL BOYS CAMP STORIES
Doug Smith
Doug Smith is working hard “to make the world just a little bit more wild by bringing wolves back to Yellowstone National Park.” In this essay, he explains why.
I was raised on a camp in northern Ohio. My father bought an old farm in the 1930s. When he went to the bank for a loan, they told him the farm had failed. Why would he want to buy such a place? My father said he was not buying the land to farm it. He wanted to start a camp, which had been his dream for most of his life.
The people at the bank thought he was crazy.
But my dad loved nature, and he loved children. He thought, Why not put the two things together? He also loved horses and had to get them involved somehow, too. So our camp, Red Raider, had a lot of horses. Three barns full of them; nearly one hundred! The rest of the camp was wild, or I thought it was, and because that is where I grew up, I have carried that camp and that wildness in me every day of my life.
When I was a kid, I had plenty of time for exploring. Usually I had a dog with me, and we’d go off to a stream in the woods to look for salamanders and crayfish, and occasionally snakes, frogs, or toads. I wasn’t hunting or trying to catch anything; I just liked standing in streams, turning over rocks, watching the creatures, and then putting the rocks back so they could go on with their lives.
On those horse rides, we could feel the pulse of nature if we were lucky and patient. If I tried to grab the feeling of being at one with the woods and the animals, it wouldn’t come. But if I went into the forest not expecting anything, and just quietly observed, the most beautiful things imaginable would happen. For brief, golden moments I would be one with the natural world.
Today, I study wolves in Yellowstone National Park. Wolves were killed off by people even after Yellowstone became a park because people thought they were bad; wolves were not part of a “civilized” world, so they had to go. But I remember our camp—the salamanders, the crayfish, the trees, the birds, and how I loved it all. To me, camp was wild, not at all civilized, and I thought that to be very good. So I have been part of bringing wolves back to Yellowstone after they were killed off, to make the world just a little more wild, like it was when I was a small boy at my dad’s camp.
Growing up at my dad’s camp started me on my path toward what I do now, but getting here had many steps along the way. One step was a job studying wolves on a remote island in Lake Superior called Isle Royale.
Wolves intrigued me. When I was a kid, I read as much about them as I could. When I was fifteen, I wrote wolf biologists handwritten letters asking to work with them. No one would hire me because I was too young. But at eighteen, I wrote to all the biologists again, and finally I got lucky and got the job on Isle Royale.
Isle Royale is stunningly beautiful—and stunningly remote. It may be more remote than the far reaches of Alaska, because it sits out in the middle of the largest freshwater lake in the world.
One time, I was sent out alone to track a pack of wolves and find where they were raising their pups. I hiked all day and camped on a dry upland in the forest surrounded by swamp, near where I thought I would find the wolves. Wolves are active at night, so at about 11:00 p.m., after resting some and listening to the night sounds, I unzipped my sleeping bag and the bug net on the tent and stood outside in the dark forest and howled. I often tracked wolves by howling for them. If they were around, they’d howl back, and that helped me locate them.
I howled some more, and then some more.
Nothing.
Maybe I wasn’t as close to the wolves as I thought I was. Disappointed, I crawled back into the tent and shined the flashlight around so that I could find and swat the mosquitos that had got in.
And then it started.
West of me, several adult wolves wailed a deep, throaty howl. Then, to the east, the pups began to howl.
Uh oh. The adults and the pups were separated and I was camped between them. There weren’t many ways to get around me; I was on the route to the pups. Had I cut them off—divided the adults from the pups—without meaning to?
Then in the forest I heard something. At first it sounded like the other night sounds, but then I heard sticks cracking and I knew something was coming my way. It was big, and it was more than one animal. I knew it was wolves.
What should I do? Should I crawl out and try to get a look at them? But there was no moon. It was too dark, and also, I didn’t want to scare the wolves away. They were coming toward me. They had to have known they were coming toward a person—they can smell their way around in the dark—yet they still kept coming. Normally, wolves are afraid of people, but this pack kept coming closer and closer to me. What were they going to do?
I got out of my sleeping bag and sat as still as I could. Now the wolves were so near that I could hear them sniffing, investigating my camp. They were right there, only a few feet in front of my tent! They had come in unafraid. I pressed my face up against the bug net to try and get a look, but it was too dark. I couldn’t see them, but I could smell them and hear them and feel them near me.
And then—they left. They slipped away, farther and farther, until I didn’t hear them moving through the dark forest anymore.
Then, minutes later, I heard howling. The adult wolves and the pups were howling at the same time, like a chorus. They had reunited, and they were howling together.
I was overwhelmed. The wolves had come so close to me. They had visited me in my camp and had done nothing more than check me out. I think they had probably heard me howl, and it had made them worried about their pups, so they’d come back from their night hunt early to investigate me and return to their pups. Their visit was as close as I had ever been to a wolf—and in the dead of night! Such an encounter with wolves had never happened to me before—nor has it happened since.
From that time on, I knew I wanted to study wolves. I wanted to find out more about them in order to help them, because so many people hated them. And the feeling that I had when I was alone in the dark with those wolves in the forest? It was the feeling that I had at Camp Red Raider—exploring alone or with my dad—of being connected to nature. I am old now, and I still crave that feeling I got when I was young. It fuels me. For more than twenty years now, I’ve been bringing gray wolves back into Yellowstone National Park. And it all really started as a young boy in the woods on a camp in Ohio with my dad.
ALSO AVAILABLE
Boys Camp
Zack’s Story
Written by Cameron Dokey and illustrated by Craig Orback
Being at Camp Wolf Trail is a dream come true for city boy Zack. Finally, he’ll have the summer full of challenge, friendship, and fun of which he’s always dreamed. But nature has surprises in store for Zack: animals, weather, and even the earth itself don’t behave the way he expects them to. After Zack makes a mistake that nearly costs him the friendship and trust of his cabinmates, he loses confidence in himself. When a scary catastrophe happens, and Zack is faced with life-threatening danger, will he have the courage and problem-solving smarts to lead his friends to safety?
$9.95 Paperback • ISBN: 978-1-62914-805-2 • ebook ISBN: 978-1-62636-321-2
Boys Camp
Nate’s Story
Written by Kitson Jazynka and illustrated by Craig Orback
Nate has returned to Camp Wolf Trail with a secret: he doesn’t want his cabinmates to tease him about his newly found interest in birds. Nate confides in Vik, but can he trust his friend, the cabin jokester? Tension grows when before an overnight horse-riding trip Nate discovers that he has another secret. He is terrified of horses, even Herschel, the boney old horse assigned to Nate from the group of rescue horses that the campers ride. Nate shows honesty and bravery when he faces his fears—both of being laughed at for his hobby and of riding horses. But what will Nate do when a wildfire threatens the safety of his friends, the rescue horses, and himself while on a horseback trek deep in the forest? What will be the fate of homely Herschel, the horse no one wants to adopt? And will Nate ever find that owl in the forest?
$9.95 Paperback • ISBN: 978-1-62914-806-9 • ebook ISBN: 978-1-62873-349-5
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