Hes smiled. “Need a ride?”
CHAPTER 18
It was late morning when Rosie passed under the sign outside Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady-Types, uniquely frustrated. Which is to say, frustrated was not a Rosie thing to be. Generally, Rosie was unruffled. Cool, like a cucumber that’s just come out of the crisper.
But a night of wandering through the trees following a trail that went cold will ruffle the best of us.
Rosie needed to nettle up and regroup.
“You should get some shut-eye,” Rosie called back, “if that’s something you still do. I’m going out again in an hour.”
Bearwoman, who never really slept aside from a scheduled three months of hibernation, was downright cranky.
“We’re stopping?” she grumped. “Just because a trail goes cold, you give up?”
“What can I say? I’m only human. I need supplies. Food. Water,” Rosie said, not looking back. “And then I’ll go back out.”
“Harrumph,” Bearwoman said. Shifting shape, she disappeared back into the woods. “Only human. Very funny.”
Jen, meanwhile, was making her way back to her cabin after her morning counselors meeting. She was not expecting a visit from Annabella Panache, who today had opted for a more casual black leotard and silver sweatshirt and was stretching on the steps of Roanoke.
Spotting Annabella, Jen’s stomach flipped in that not-fun EEK kind of way.
Annabella beamed warmly, holding up her arms and then bowing down to touch her toes.
“GREETINGS,” Annabella boomed, her face by her knees. “Is it Jennifer? Yes? I’m never sure.”
Jen froze, her face plastered in a terrifying grimace as she gave Annabella a stiff, nervous wave. It looked like she was trying to very quickly wash a very small window with her left hand while smiling.
“Yes.” Panache smiled, standing upright, her face flushed. “I was hoping you could assist me in locating a few of your scouts. Some rogue thespians, if you will.”
Jen blinked, now sweating profusely. “Oh,” she said, because it was the smallest thing she could think of to say, the thing that meant opening her mouth for the shortest period of time.
A thing, like a bubble, was jumping around inside of her, struggling to get out.
Indeed, Jen’s face was turning purple. Miss Panache stared, fascinated.
“The workshop of course is going fabulously,” Panache said. “Yes. Your scouts, all of them, have been incredibly spirited if sometimes hesitant, yes? To . . . EMBRACE? Still, they were doing very well and then some of them just . . . POOF!”
Panache threw her hands up as though releasing a cloud of glitter. POOF!
“Specifically,” she added, “this afternoon, several scouts, it appears, have exited stage left. Including April, Jo, and Ripley.”
Now Jen was trying to talk without actually breathing. “Really?” she squeaked.
“Yes. If you could assist in locating them, it would be most appreciated,” Annabella said, curtsying. Then she snapped her fingers. “OH YES. I meant to add, I’m sorry we couldn’t convince you to join us in our THE-AH-TRICAL pursuit. Maybe get up onstage?”
“SNRK!” Jen’s face spasm-ed. “ST-ST-STAGE?” she gulped. “ME ONSTAGE?”
“My dear,” Annabella tut-tutted, “you look unwell. Yes? Whatever is the matter?”
Jen couldn’t hold it in any longer. A laugh the size of a freight train stormed out of her, “HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHHAHAAAAAA!”
“Miss Jennifer,” Miss Panache gasped. “A most fabulous explosion of emotion? Yes! We can work with this!”
“HAHAHAH!” Jen fell backward, her back twisting and her arms rigid. “STAGE FRIGHT! TERRI-HAHAHAHA-BLE STAGE FRIGHT! MAKES ME LAAHAHAHAAUGH!”
“Hmmmm.” Annabella tipped her head. “I don’t believe in Stage Fright. I believe in Stage POSSIBILITY! You need to channel this, Miss Jennifer. I sense great potential. Yes!”
Jen fell back in another spasm, her body shaking with earthquakes of hysterical laughter. “HAHAHAHA! NO! HAHAHA. Sorry. HAHAHA. Nope. Excuse me. HAHAHAHAAA. CAAAHAHAHN’T BREHEEHEETH!”
And with that, Jen twisted in the opposite direction and bolted away from the cabin, both to escape the idea of ever going onstage and to find her scouts.
Meanwhile, Rosie swung by the stables, where she found a note from Hes letting her know that Jeremy had been “borrowed.”
“Interesting,” Rosie said, thinking maybe now she wouldn’t have time to get her nettle tea.
She was right.
CHAPTER 19
Let us take a moment, since we have one, to revel in the joy that is traveling by moose, a very close second to traveling on magically massive kittens named Marigold.
Moose riding has been an honored tradition at Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady-Types since Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet acquired, and trained, her first moose, Roger Masterhead Morningside Marbel Meedoo.
Moo, for short.
Scouts with a passion for moose riding have two badge options, the Get a Moose On badge, for general moose riding, and the Bust a Moose badge, for Moose dressage, which is where moose and rider perform a choreographed routine to a popular song. Only three scouts have ever received the latter of these badges, including Hes and Rosie, mostly because a great number of moose really don’t like to dance.
Jeremy was an exceptionally strong, patient, and very large moose who loved to dance and, fortunately, could fit six scouts on his back and still travel at a fairly fast clip.
As Jeremy galloped, Ripley stared at the horizon.
We’re coming, Eggie, she thought. We’re coming.
The trail of crossed ferns wound through the woods into a field of lavender, where the ferns faded and laid bare the trail Ripley had uncovered earlier that day.
“They stopped covering their tracks,” April noted, looking down.
“Maybe they didn’t think we would follow this far,” Hes offered.
“EGG THIEVES!” April growled. “Think they can just come into our camp and take eggs?! What the Dee Rees is going on here?”
Barney looked at Ripley.
Ripley kept looking ahead. Searching the view for a sign of Eggie. Searching with what felt like her new superpowered observing eyes.
“Hey!” Ripley shouted, pointing at a bunch of trees up ahead.
Jo, leaning over the side of Jeremy with a pair of binoculars, nodded. “I see it! Hold up!”
Hes tugged the reins gently and Jeremy ground to a halt.
Everyone squinted into the distance and strained to listen.
“What is it?” April asked, looking at Rip. “What did you see?”
“Gold,” Ripley said. “A little sparkle. In the trees there.”
Ripley knew sparkle when she saw it.
“I hear voices,” Wren whispered. “About twenty feet away.”
Wren, like Mal, had what’s called “an ear,” which means having an ear that’s very sensitive. Or two ears.
“Dismount,” Hes whispered, and all six scouts slid off the moose and onto the ground.
“All right, scouts,” April and Hes said in unison.
“Ahem,” Hes said, taking a small step back. “I’ll let you do the ‘being the one who says the thing’ thing.”
“If we’re going to Lumber-rescue this properly, and I think we are, we’re going to need to take the Maya Lin approach,” April said, holding her arms out with the tips of her fingers touching. “Spread out and stay low to the ground ’til we get to the trees and the egg poachers.”
“Does everyone have their Mixed Signals badge?” Wren asked. “Because if so, we could stick to hand signals.”
Ripley nodded.
Jo gave a thumbs-up.
Hes put her hands on her waist and then nodded three times, which means, in Lumberjane signal speak, “Yes, of course.”
Barney knew several
different versions of hand signaling, including ASL (which is American Sign Language), but knew this was not the time to go into those details and so just nodded.
April held up her arms. Then dropped them, pointing forward. And then pointed to the ground. Which are the Lumberjane signals for “OKAY, SCOUTS,” and “MOVE FORWARD,” and “STAY LOW.”
By the time they got close to the tree line, faint strains of disco music could be heard wafting through the breeze.
Also, a sort of cement mixer–like shriek. “EU-GENE!”
“EUGENE!”
“EUGENE!”
All six of the Lumberjane rescue party stopped in mid-crawl, hands hovering, muscles frozen. Jo held her breath.
Hes, next to April at the front of the crawling party, tapped her head and pointed.
April nodded and turned behind her.
Egg-nappers in sight! she signaled. Move with caution.
Everyone else nodded. Moving slowly and silently to where the shadow of the trees overlapped the grass, they crouched behind a bank of blackberry bushes.
The little green leaves tickled Ripley’s chin, but she kept her lips pressed shut.
The Lumberjanes leaned forward and peeped through the branches.
And there they were, the source of all this noise: human creatures dressed entirely in gold.
“EUGENE! I ASKED YOU IF THE GOOSE DOWN WA-TER IS REA-DY?!”
Human creatures in the process, Jo thought, from the smell, of making very bad coffee.
Ripley looked closely, taking in every detail. There were two in the camp. One was tall and curvy and wore a gold hat, a gold jumpsuit, and gold high-top running shoes with big floppy gold laces. This was the one screeching “EUGENE!” like an owl. A really big owl.
The other one, who Ripley figured was EUGENE, was short and skinny, roughly the weight of a Yorkshire terrier, Ripley guessed, or eight chubby hamsters. This one was dressed in a similar gold jumpsuit with a gold safari hat perched on his head, in tall, lace-up gold boots.
Jo flashed to the picture in The Very Big Book of Curious People.
Bad food, Jo thought. Tacky outfits. Must be the Order of the Golden Egg!
How curious!
“Golden Goose, Egberta,” the man who was most probably Eugene griped. “Get a hold of yourself. I heard you. Stop it with the goose down yelling!”
“If YA HEARD me, YA SHOULD HAVE SAID SO!”
“You are gonna get us caught! What if those crazy army ladies are still following us?”
Army ladies, Ripley thought, meant Rosie and Bearwoman.
The gold woman waved her arms as though batting away a herd of butterflies. “AH, WE LOST THEM MILES AGO. They don’t call me Egberta, master tracker repeller, for nothing, ya know! I even tossed out a few gum wrappers to throw them off our scent! Those STUPID army ladies! Trying to steal our EGG!”
You, Ripley thought, don’t even know what we can do. We are LUMBERJANES, and just because we don’t have gold pajamas doesn’t mean we can’t kick—
April touched Ripley’s shoulder softly. Where is Eggie? she signaled.
Ripley, wide-eyed, signaled back, Up there!
Up in the trees, Eggie dangled in a hammock of golden ropes.
“What YOU need to be worried about is my goose down COFFEE!”
“Feathers, Egberta, I said stop with your GOOSE DOWN yelling!”
Eugene stamped the ground in his high heel boots. He started pacing in an angry circle, growing increasingly closer to where the scouts were hiding.
Back up, Hes signaled. Before they see us!
Slowly but surely, without even a squeak of noise, the Lumberjanes back-crawled away from the tree line.
Ripley, all the while, looked up at Eggie, sending a psychic message.
I am here, I am Ripley, and I am going to get you out of there.
Okay, April signaled, once they were back at Jeremy, who was contentedly munching on lavender.
“Right,” Hes said, quietly. “I don’t think they can hear us now. So, I think we can actually talk.”
“So that,” Jo said, “is the Order of the Golden Egg.”
“What’s the Order of the Golden Egg?” Ripley asked.
“Them,” Jo said, gesturing in the direction of Eugene and Egberta. “They’re part of an Order that’s obsessed with eggs, and this book I read said they were tacky and had bad taste in food.”
“I did sense some beef gum on the breeze,” Barney noted.
“Right,” Ripley said. “We need a plan.”
April looked at Ripley. “Yes! Yes, we do.”
“Does anyone HAVE a plan?” Hes wondered.
“They were really loud,” Ripley said. “We need something to distract really loud people in tacky clothes.”
April snapped her fingers. “Plan!”
“Okay, spill it,” Hes said.
April smiled the smile of someone who has a very good plan. “How do we all feel about doing a little ACTING?”
CHAPTER 20
By the time Rosie left the stables, a great wind was gusting through the camp.
Somewhere inside that wind were the beginnings of a sound.
Rosie looked up at the dark shadows in the sky that looked very much like clouds. And frowned.
“ROSIE!” Vanessa bounded around the stables, her hair spikes tossing in the wind. “WHAT IS—”
“GET EVERYONE IN THEIR CABINS!” Rosie shouted. “NOW!”
Quickly and efficiently, counselors gathered their scouts and headed to their cabins.
Rosie started running toward the center of camp, stopping to herd wayward scouts to their cabins.
“Let’s go! Let’s go! Into your cabins! This is not a drill!”
Mal and Molly were heading back from the music cabin. They were halfway to Roanoke when the wind started stirring and swirling like a cauldron.
“YIKES!” Molly cried, putting her hand on top of Bubbles so he didn’t fly off her head and into the woods.
“TWEEEP!” Bubbles chirped, clinging to Molly.
“Is it a hurricane?” Mal wondered.
“Grab my hand!” Molly reached back with her free hand.
At the center of camp, the Lumberjane flag flapped wildly, like it was trying to break free and go somewhere less windy. Bearwoman, sitting next to the flag, swayed slightly in the current.
“Bearwoman!” Molly cried.
“B-DUBS!” Mal added, because Mal enjoyed calling Bearwoman “B-dubs” whenever possible. Because it’s a cool name, even if it wasn’t Bearwoman’s actual name, which wasn’t even Bearwoman.
“Humph,” Bearwoman said, most of her voice caught up in the wind. Bearwoman wondered how long she would let these scrappy scouts call her by something other than her name.
“What’s happening?” Molly called into the wind.
“Once again this is none of your business,” Bearwoman shouted, adjusting her coat, which was also thrashing in the gale like someone was trying to pull it off her back.
“UH, well, we’re kind of standing in it,” Mal said. “SO maybe it kind of IS our business this time.”
“SCOUTS!” Rosie called as she pushed through the gusts to the flagpole. “You need to go to your cabins!”
“We’re going,” Molly said. “We just—”
“What’s happening?” Mal asked.
“They’re coming,” Bearwoman growled, adjusting her coke-bottle glasses. “Humph. Just as I predicted.”
Mal looked up. “What is that sound?”
“They’re here,” Rosie said, looking up.
The sound. It hit the camp like a hammer. It was a sound of FLIGHT, but thick and heavy like metal, like the kind of metal that holds up buildings or cuts other heavy things in two.
It is curious how the sound of something flying can reflect the nature of the thing that is flying.
Like how mosquitoes, flying in their weaving way, make a sound like a mosquito bite feels.
Or how almost everything humans have crea
ted to fly, including Jo’s father’s many rockets, sounds, accurately, like metal and fuel.
And yet, a flute, the most frustrating instrument of all time, tossed off a cliff, makes almost no noise.
This sound was the sound of wings the size of baseball diamonds, wings as broad as ships, cracking against the air like angry whips. Pierced through with the sound of a blistering shriek:
CERRRRAAAAAARP! CEEEEERRRAAAAAARP!
And there it was, a crest of wings, a sharp beak, eyes as blue as an ocean.
A thick lion’s paw touched the earth first, and the ground shook.
“WHAT THE OPRAH WINFREY?” Molly gasped. “What is it—”
Molly’s eyes were like saucers. “HOLY G. WILLOW WILSON, it’s a GRIFFIN!”
Mal looked at Molly. “A what now?”
CHAPTER 21
A griffin.
A griffin is a massive, very impressive, very dangerous creature that stands, if you can get it to stand still to measure, between fifteen and twenty feet tall. Unlike dragons, which are traditionally reptilian in nature, griffins have the body of a lion, the head of an eagle, a set of thick furry hind paws in the back, and a set of sharp eagle claws in the front.
It would probably be one of the coolest and scariest things you have ever seen, if you had.
But the possibility that you HAVE seen a griffin is so small, even Jo would have trouble calculating it.
It is not even a curious thing to see a griffin. It is an incredibly strange, rare, almost unheard of thing.
It is so unheard of that even Rosie had never stood this close to a griffin before. And Rosie, in all her years as a Lumberjane, had seen a great many things.
So many things it would be impossible and not completely time efficient to list them here.
Of course, as a seasoned and experienced Lumberjane, Rosie knew what to do when encountering something so very unheard of. The thing to do, which relates to the ODD approach actually, is to be very still and very attentive and to try not to do anything upsetting or disturbing.
And so, after watching the front claws of the Griffin hook and rip into the ground, clawing a deep gash as it skidded to a halt only a foot away from where she was standing, Rosie did her best to be very still and very calm.
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