The Case of the Dirty Bird

by Gary Paulsen

  “All right, all right. Let’s go—there’s that color television set to pick up yet.”

  “You think it’s safe to go back to the same house?”

  “Oh, sure. They’re on vacation. We can clean the whole place out. Then we load the truck and take it downstate and sell it at flea markets, just like last time.”

  “Last time you traded the whole load for old telephone line insulators.”

  “An investment, my friend. You’ll see. Now come on—wait a minute, what’s that?”

  “What’s what?”

  “There. Those are tracks heading off down the tunnel. See them in that soft dirt and dust?”

  “Tracks?”

  “I told you I left the peg in the hasp. Somebody took it out, and they’re still in here.”

  Dunc poked Amos, leaned close to his ear. “Get ready. We have to go through this door. It’s our only chance.” He pulled Amos up.

  The voices came down the tunnel again.

  “How do you know they’re still here?”

  “There’s two sets of tracks and they only go one way—they don’t come back. And there’s no way out of the tunnel. Come on, we’ve got to find them.”

  “Oh, come on—they’re probably gone. You don’t know that there’s no other way out. You just walked back a little ways.”

  “That doesn’t matter. I’m not letting anybody steal my stolen appliances.”

  Dunc leaned close to Amos again and whispered barely loud enough to make a whushing sound. “Ready?”

  Amos hesitated. “Well, as a matter of fact—”

  “Now!”

  Dunc pulled at the door. This time the hinges had not been oiled. The door opened, but with a sound like fingers being dragged down a blackboard. It made a slot wide enough for the two boys, and they wiggled through just as they heard from the tunnel:

  “There they are! Come on—let’s get ’em!”

  Dunc stopped just past the door, and Amos ran into him.

  “What the—”

  “It’s a storage room.” Dunc flashed the light around. There were barrels and boxes stacked up both sides of the tunnel.

  “Let’s go!” Amos shouted. “They’re coming.”

  “It’s powder,” Dunc said. “Gunpowder from years ago.”

  “We have to get going!” Amos dragged him and headed on through the tunnel. “There has to be another way out of here.”

  “All that powder, all these years.” Dunc followed, and inside forty feet they came to another wooden wall with a narrow door. This door was closed, but Amos got his fingers into the edge and jerked it open, and Dunc and he piled through. Amos closed the door and looked to see Dunc flashing the light.

  “It’s no good,” Dunc said. “It’s a dead end.”

  “No—it can’t be.”

  “It is.” Dunc lifted the light. “See? It goes back a little and stops dead.”

  “What about there—on the side? See it? That low hole?”

  Dunc moved the light down and to the right.

  There was a small hole—not over three feet in diameter—going off to the side.

  They heard a screech as the two men opened the first door on the powder storage room.

  “Go for it,” Amos said. “We’re out of time.”

  Dunc dived into the small hole, and Amos followed.

  Only to be stopped dead in ten feet.

  “That’s it,” Dunc said, squirming around. “It ends here—they must have done it to explore a new tunnel and then dropped it.”

  “We’re dead.” Amos turned and crouched on all fours. “They’ve got us.”

  Dunc said nothing. They held their breath, waiting.

  There was a long pause, then they heard:

  “My flashlight bulb blew—coming through the door.”

  “Where are we?”

  “I don’t know, some sort of room. I’ve never been in here before, and I didn’t see anything before the bulb went.”

  “Well, keep going—they can’t be that far ahead of us.”

  “I can’t. It’s pitch dark in here.”

  “Wait—I’ll light a match, and then you go ahead.”

  “Oh, oh,” Amos whispered. “This isn’t good, is it?”

  The boys heard the scratch of a match, once, twice, then a small whuffing sound as it lit.

  “Blow it out!” the other man yelled. “Blow it out! It’s pow—”

  Which was as far as he got before the powder, stored for 130 years, decided to take over.

  There was a huge, deafening barfing sound, a light like fifteen or twenty thousand flashbulbs going off, and Amos and Dunc were driven to the end of the small side tunnel like two corks in a bottle.

  “Cover—” Dunc started to yell, was going to yell, cover your ears when the shock wave hit them, pounded them, and then there was nothing.

  Dunc stopped, leaned the shovel against the side of the tunnel, and rubbed his eyes. They were still swollen and a little puffy, and he blinked them a few times to clear them.

  Amos also stopped. He’d been digging with a square-shaped garden spade, and now he used it for a prop and took a rest. His eyebrows were starting to grow back, and his hair as well, but it was still short and fuzzy and made him look like a monkey about to ask a question.

  The building was gone—blown away from the tunnel mouth by the explosion, and what hadn’t been blown away was burned.

  “Freak explosions are funny things,” Dunc said.

  “Oh, yeah,” Amos said. “I laughed until I thought I would die.”

  “No, really. Those two guys hardly got hurt at all because they were right in the center of it.”

  “They lost all their hair,” Amos said. “And all their clothing was blown off, even their shoes and socks. You call that nothing?”

  “Well—it could have been worse. The cops told the newspapers that they’re starting to hear again, and they can both remember their names now and it’s only been two weeks.”

  The two weeks had been busy. After the fire department had come and the police had found Amos and Dunc out in the street, accompanied by two completely naked men who did not know their names, the newspapers and television had gone crazy.

  Dunc’s parents had grounded him until he was a grandparent, roughly, and Amos’s mother and father had talked about shipping him to the Arctic for a few months, but things had settled.

  They had kept the parrot and the story of treasure a secret by saying they had just been exploring the old buildings and had run into the tunnel to hide from the crooks.

  And now they had come back.

  “They say the washing machine went all the way across the river,” Dunc said, picking up his shovel. “It must have come out of that tunnel like a cannonball.”

  It was the middle of the day, and they had come in on a back street so as to not be noticed.

  Amos had wanted to drop it.

  “If you think that I’m going to go through all that and not get the treasure, you’re nuts,” Dunc had told Amos. “Whether you come or not, I’m going.”

  So they were there, and they were digging where the parrot’s clues had told them to dig. But it wasn’t going well.

  “We’re down three feet, and there’s nothing,” Amos said. “I say let’s drop it and go play some video games.”

  Thunk.

  Dunc’s shovel hit something solid. Dunc looked up, smiling. “See? You were giving up too fast.”

  Amos grabbed his shovel. “So dig.”

  The two of them tore into the hole and in a few minutes had uncovered a wooden box. The sides and top were dirty and the outside edges were rotten, but the box was made of oak and seemed sound. It was held closed by a large hasp, but it wasn’t locked.

  They dragged the box from the hole, set it off to the side. The hasp was rusted in place and Dunc used his shovel to pry it up. Then he used the edge again to pry at the lid, wedged it up, and looked inside.

  “What is it?” Amos had been at a wron
g angle and came around to see.

  “I don’t know.” Dunc poked in the box with his finger. “It looks like an old rotten sack.”

  “That’s it,” Amos said. “Pirates always put their gold in sacks before they buried it. You read about that all over the place.”

  “Not this time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “There’s nothing in the sack. Well, sort of nothing. There’s a rotten gunk, but it’s mostly gone. I don’t know what—wait, there’s something written on the sack.”

  “What?”

  “It’s all fuzzy—I can just make it out. It says ‘wheat.’ Yeah. Wheat.”

  “The bag had wheat in it?” Amos leaned over, read it. “Wheat—they buried wheat?”

  Dunc shook his head. “Crazy, isn’t it? Wait—I remember something. During the Civil War this whole area was wiped out. They couldn’t get food, and the armies were taking things from the people. I’ll bet that was it—the people who were here buried the wheat to keep it safe from the soldiers.”

  “Wheat?” Amos seemed about to go into shock. “They buried wheat?”

  “I guess so.”

  “So there wasn’t a pirate?”

  “I guess not.”

  “And there wasn’t a buried treasure?”

  “I guess not.”

  “All of this,” Amos said, “all of this with the tunnel and the rats like rhinos and the two crooks and blowing us back into a gopher hole and my eyebrows and hair being gone so I’ll never be able to talk to Melissa—all of this is for a bag of rotten wheat?”

  Dunc nodded. “You know, I just thought of something.”

  “What?”

  “Well—wheat wouldn’t be buried treasure to a person. We would think of gold or coins or jewelry—something valuable to us.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “Well—to us it’s just wheat. But to somebody else it could be something else. Wheat could be like, well, birdseed. A sack of wheat would be valuable, would be buried treasure—”

  “To a parrot,” Amos finished. “The parrot was using us. All this time the parrot was just using us to get his birdseed.”

  Dunc nodded. “It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

  But he was talking to himself. Amos had dropped his shovel and was walking to his bike.

  “Where are you going?”

  “To the pet store.”

  “Amos—wait a minute. Amos, what are you going to do?”

  Amos turned and stood, his hands on his handlebars. “I’ll give you a hint—it involves a scuzzy parrot and about six pounds of gunpowder.” He climbed on his bike and started pedaling.

  “Amos, you’re kidding, right?” Dunc said. “Now, Amos—don’t kill the parrot. Amos. Amos! Amos!”

  Be sure to join Dunc and Amos in these other Culpepper Adventure/Mystery books:

  Dunc’s Doll

  (Culpepper Adventure/Mystery #2)

  Dunc Culpepper and his accident-prone friend Amos are up to their old sleuthing habits once again. This time they’re after a band of doll thieves! When a doll that once belonged to Charles Dickens’s daughter is stolen from an exhibition at the local mall, the two boys put on their detective gear and do some serious snooping. Will a vicious watch dog keep them from retrieving the valuable missing doll?

  Culpepper’s Cannon

  (Culpepper Adventure/Mystery #3)

  Dunc and Amos are researching the Civil War cannon that stands in the town square when they find a note inside telling them about a time portal. Entering it through the dressing room of La Petite, a women’s clothing store, the boys find themselves in downtown Chatham on March 8, 1862—the day before the historic clash between the Monitor and the Merrimack. But the Confederate soldiers they meet mistake them for Yankee spies. Will they make it back to the future in one piece?

  (August 1992)

  Dunc Gets Tweaked

  (Culpepper Adventure/Mystery #4)

  Best friends Dunc and Amos meet up with a new buddy named Lash when they enter the radical world of skateboard competition. When somebody “cops”—steals—Lash’s prototype skateboard, the boys are determined to get it back. After all, Lash is about to shoot for a totally rad world’s record! Along the way they learn a major lesson: never kiss a monkey!

  (September 1992)