Puddlejumpers (9 page)
As snow began to flurry, the Jumpers bundled themselves in wool against the freezing cold, then packed the supplies. Buck lashed a hornet's nest to Root's sled, wrapping it in wheat straw while giving him urgent instructions to use it only as a last resort. Chop gave last sips of water to the raccoons and Cully bundled Shawn into the big sled, pretending it was all just another adventure. “Pay attention and remember everything you see,” he advised, then reached behind Shawn's ear and produced a roasted chestnut, ready for eating. He tucked it into Shawn's eager hands. “We'll be home soon, and I'm expecting you to tell us a great story in the Well.”
“Kayko,”
responded Shawn, munching the nut.
When the loads were secured, Pav stood quietly beside Shawn's sled. He seemed to know it was time to say good-bye. In the Puddlejumper way, Shawn touched his heart, then hers. Overcome by a feeling that she would never see him again, Pav pulled a sharp stone from her belt and cut off her beautiful white hair. The others watched stunned as she wove it into a bracelet around Shawn's wrist.
Her voice quavered as she said, “This will protect you on your journey.”
Everyone pressed gently around her, touching her frayed hair, but Pav urged them on,
“Tookla, tookla!”
Runnel squeezed her hand and settled behind Shawn. Root, Buck, and Cully jumped on their sleds, snapped the reins and were off. Riding at the back of the last sled, Chop feathered the snow with a pine bough to cover their trail.
Waving farewell, Pav watched them disappear into the snow as the sky threatened and the wind began to howl.
T
HE SCOUTS TRAVERSED
the crest of the plateau, a difficult windblown route that avoided the farms in the valley below. When the snow began to drift over their heads, Buck stopped the caravan to rest the raccoons in a grove of pines. While Shawn hungrily ate a wheat cake and sipped Pav's tea, Cully climbed to the top of a towering pine to scan the horizon. He squinted into the snow as the treetop swayed in the icy wind. A shrill caw startled him. In the next tree, there was a big black crow staring right at him. He shivered. Crows were never a good omen. Scavengers, they often fed off the carnage left behind by Troggs. The bird dismissively flapped its wings and took to the air. Cully watched its flight into the valley with a feeling of dread. That's when he saw them: four hulking brutes were slogging through the snow, with tails arched rigidly over their heads like riflescopes, scanning, searching for a scent. He could hear the muffled cries of three Puddlejumpers that a Trogg had stuffed into its fleshy stomach pouch. Like a Venus flytrap, once a Jumper was captive inside the pouch, with its spiky bristles, there was no way out.
Cully tumbled out of the tree, snapping branches and jabbering all the way down,
“Jo waba konibi wa!”
The Jumpers scrambled aboard their sleds and frantically drove the raccoons hard along the ridge. Runnel bundled Shawn in flight and the look on his face frightened her. Chirping fiercely to one another, the scouts veered off through the trees in separate directions, hoping to draw the Troggs away from the Rainmaker.
Root and Runnel escaped along a deer trail while the Troggs charged after Cully and Chop. Glancing back in the blinding snow, Cully could see the monstrous shapes ripping through the brush and hear their awful grunts. Chop heaved supplies overboard as Cully threaded between the trees, driving the coons at breakneck speed. Suddenly their sled launched off a snowbank and crashed in a frozen marsh. The raccoons scurried away as the Jumpers slipped under the broken ice into the frigid water. They swam underneath as the Troggs stomped across the marsh in a furious attempt to crush them.
At the far shore, Cully and Chop tunneled into an otter den, seeking refuge, but a Trogg tail snaked in right behind, its hairy nostril sniffing noisily. The otters circled around the terrorized Jumpers, protecting them with their scent. The confused tail grabbed the smallest otter, shook it, then tossed it aside in frustration. As the tail slithered out, a grateful Cully and Chop curled up with the animals and listened to the departing howls of the Troggs.
On the next ridge, Buck shuddered at the spine-chilling sound. Trusting that Cully and Chop could take care of themselves, he returned to the grove of pines, where he picked up the imprint of Root's sled in the freshly fallen snow. He tracked their route until it was obliterated by a tail print that cut a huge swath in the snow. One of the Troggs had caught the scent of the Rainmaker.
As the forest darkened, the only sounds Root could hear were the panting of his raccoons and the wind in his ears. His face was crusted with snow and his whole body ached. He'd been standing for hours reining the coons, struggling to stay ahead of the Troggs. Shivering in back, Runnel tucked a woolen fleece around Shawn. He was pale and his teeth were chattering. Suddenly the sled swerved and side-swiped a tree.
“Root,” she called. He turned around and their eyes met. “We have to stop. He's hungry and cold and you're falling asleep at the reins.”
“Mataki, mataki-lo.”
“Pleaseâwe need rest, too, and so do the raccoons.”
Root knew she was right. In the last mile, the coons had begun to falter. Though reluctant to stop, he found a ravine where he hoped it would be safe to rest for a few hours.
Halfway down the slope, Root and Runnel dug a cave in the snow big enough to enclose the sled and raccoons, then dusted it with fox dander to cover their scent. They made a nest amid the animals' warm fur and snuggled there with Shawn, who quickly fell asleep. After the tumult of the day, the quiet of the woods wrapped them in a kind embrace. The storm had subsided, and through a small opening at the front of their shelter, they could see the Big Dipper. They shared a smile, each knowing the other was thinking about the night of Shawn's birth.
But their remembrance was broken by the telltale crush of snow.
Crunch. Crunch. Crunch.
Footsteps. Big foot-steps. Silently they began to gather their belongings and harness the coons. With hearts pounding, they nudged Shawn, still half asleep, onto the sled. Now they could smell the Trogg's stench and hear the muffled whimpering of other Jumpers, captive in its pouch.
When Root peeked through the opening, the Trogg came into view, thrashing wildly and yanking young birches from their roots, its tail sniffing. The noises scared Shawn, and he called out for Runnel. Shrieking, the Trogg spun around and raged toward their shelter. Root ripped open the hornets' nest and launched a colony of angry hornets out the opening. They swarmed into the face of the charging giant, stinging it again and again and again. The Trogg swatted the air, yowling in angry confusion.
Bursting out of their snowy shelter, Root steered the sled right between the Trogg's legs and sped down the slope. The hornets' fury couldn't last in the bitter cold. One by one, they fell out of the air and perished in the snow. The Trogg, its face swollen with red welts, charged after the sled. With pounding strides, the behemoth caught them from behind and yanked the sled into the air, tumbling Root and Runnel into the snow and dangling the helpless raccoons from their harness. The Trogg plucked Shawn out and prodded him with a scaly finger and sniffed him with its disgusting tail, mucus dripping from the nostril. The tiny human wailed.
Root and Runnel jumped onto the behemoth's hairy leg, but the Trogg shook them off like bugs. Desperate, Root sped up a birch tree to a branch eye level with the beast. The Trogg dangled Shawn over its mouth, ready to eat him in one gruesome bite, when Root drew a nugget of sparkling quartz from a pouch and showed it to the beast, then made the stone disappear. The Trogg hesitated, distracted by the Jumper's sleight of hand. Out of the corner of his eye, Root spotted a ten-pronged deer charging down through the woods behind the Trogg. Buying time, he revealed the quartz again, then made it vanish as the brave animal lowered his head and drove his antlers into the behemoth's leg. Howling in pain, the Trogg dropped the boy into the snow and lunged at the deer. The animal stamped backward, snorting, readying another charge, with Buck riding high on his neck. Buck drew the cattail plunger from its quiver and fired a torrent of cold water. The geyser struck the Trogg in the neck, momentarily stunning it.
While Buck sparred with the Trogg, Runnel and Root dug Shawn out of the snow and escaped on their sled toward a frozen lake at the bottom of the ravine. Once they were away, Buck began his retreat, but the vengeful Trogg sent him catapulting through the trees with a vicious swat of its tail. The deer bounded away as the screeching Trogg careened after the sled, ripping trees and bushes out of the ground as it went.
Root forced the coons onto the icy lake, where they slipped and slid, their paws barely catching hold. Knowing that Troggs couldn't swim, Runnel scattered a pouch of rock salt and sulfur dust off the back of the sled. As soon as the beast stepped onto the patch of softened ice, it crashed into the water. The Trogg bellowed in panic, flailing and kicking and furiously breaking ice all the way back to shore. Grunting and heaving, it crawled onto the snow. Two Puddlejumpers wriggled out of its pouch, the bristles softened by water, and fled into the woods. The prehensile tail snatched the third Jumper just before he reached the trees.
On the other side of the lake, Root followed a deer trail up a steep gorge into the woods. When the sled reached the plateau, gathering clouds obscured the stars and snow began to fall. Root and Runnel could hear Buck's mournful cry in the distance. He was hurt, but they couldn't go back to help him.
In a hollow, two ridges away, Runnel stripped off Shawn's wet clothes, then bundled the shivering boy in the warm fleece. The storm showed no sign of letting up. Shawn drank the last of Pav's tea while Root fed the coons some honeycomb. Before departing, the Puddlejumpers brushed the snow to make it appear that no one had ever been there. They wondered what had happened to Cully and Chop. They hoped they could make it on their own.
Root and Runnel were farther from their den than they'd ever been, and the journey had barely begun.
Root and Runnel sledded through the night in a terrible blizzard. When the raccoons could no longer bear the weight of their prized load, Root was forced to abandon most of their supplies. Even with the Jumpers trudging alongside, the coons still struggled. They were beyond exhaustion.
On a treeless plain, icy and bare, the raccoons finally collapsed. Refusing to quit, Root and Runnel grabbed the coons by their halters and pulled with all their might. Step by step, they inched the sled through the drifting snow until the runners got caught in an icy trough. Root yanked on their harness and Runnel pushed from behind, but the valiant coons couldn't budge the sled.
Out of the dark, a rising stench and a coarse breathing gripped Root's spine. Runnel put her arms protectively around Shawn. They squinted into the raging snow and what they saw ended their last hope of escape. Four monstrous silhouettes, their tails arched overhead like scorpions ready to strike, emerged from the trees onto the frozen plain.
Suddenly a mechanical drone and an eerie light penetrated the storm. Root, Runnel, and the Troggs all turned to look into the glare of an enormous eighteen-wheeler as it blasted out of the darkness like a ghostly phantom, its air horn blaring. With snow flying off its locked wheels, the truck skidded along the icy surface until it stopped just inches from the sled.
The cab door, sporting the moniker
Bleacher Bum,
creaked open. A black man in his early fifties, wearing a Chicago Cubs baseball jacket and cap, descended from the cab. Joe Beason was a bear of a man with a day's worth of stubble on a round face. He waded through the snow to the front of his rig. When he crossed through the headlight beams, he thought maybe his mind was playing tricks. There in front of him were four raccoons harnessed to a small sled buried in a snowdrift in the middle of the Interstate. No matter how hard he tried to explain it to himself, it just didn't make any sense. And as much as he wanted to ignore the muffled cries coming from the bundle on the sled, he knew that he couldn't. He reached down and tentatively opened the wool covering. It was a boyâwide-eyed, trembling, and completely naked but for something draped around his neck that looked like a crystal in the shape of an acorn. “Hell's bells,” he mumbled, crossing himself. “Now I've seen everything.”