Once Upon a Camel

by Kathi Appelt

And Beulah, bless her, said in her bravest voice, “I think I always wanted to be a caravanner.”

  “Me too,” said Wims. “I want to be a caravanner too.”

  And with that, the threesome leaned into the wind. “To the escarpment,” said Zada. Tallyho!

  6 Mountain Lion Territory

  1910

  The escarpment would give them a respite on their journey, for sure. But what Zada did not tell the babies was that there might be one slightly huge problem: Pecos de Leon, the resident mountain lion.

  Zada had first met Pecos de Leon when he was just a cub. He had been adorable then, but that was years ago, and now, Zada thought, adorable would not accurately capture his personality.

  Like the wind, he was elusive, slinking between the arches and arroyos, his tawny coat a perfect disguise against the sandstone walls. Unless you knew that you were looking at a mountain lion, you could mistake him for one of the many rocks or boulders that littered the landscape.

  Nevertheless, in their few encounters, Zada and Pecos had maintained a certain amount of respect for each other, thanks to their shared history. They had both traveled a lot of miles and traversed a lot of country. That was worth something.

  More than once, Zada had spotted Pecos lounging in front of the escarpment. But a mountain lion’s territory is wide. Today, if she was lucky, he’d be on the far side of his range. If she wasn’t lucky, maybe, hopefully, he wouldn’t be hungry. Mountain lion or not, the escarpment was their best chance, at least as a temporary measure.

  “Hang on, bird scouts,” she told the babies.

  Stretching her long neck—her racing stance—she set out, taking each step with caution, careful not to stumble. She couldn’t risk Wims and Beulah tumbling out.

  As if they were waiting to grab one of the chicks, the willy-willies and the dust devils, the samiels and simoons, danced all around Zada. They swiped at her ankles, raced ahead of her, rose and fell, then rose and fell again, reminding her of the ocean’s waves.

  Zada. Ship of the desert, as a camel is known, picked her way past them, while the sun and the very last of the morning stars blinked out one at a time in the disappearing sky.

  7 Mountain Lion Territory

  1910

  American kestrels are custom-built for aerodynamics. They’re among the bird kingdom’s most agile raptors. They can ride comfortably on the upper wind currents for hours at a time, and upon spotting a grasshopper or a mouse from a thousand feet up, they can dive at speeds that astonish, over two hundred miles per hour.

  Despite it all, Zada couldn’t help but worry about Perlita and Pard. No matter their agility, they would be no match for the haboob. Blasting sand can strip paint from buildings. It can scrape the rust off metal. What could it do to a pair of birds?

  As if to make the point, from behind her came a horrifying CRRRRAAAAAACCCKKKK! The cottonwood tree! Quickly, she glanced over her shoulder. The wind had yanked it up by its roots. A hundred years, that old tree had stood there, watching over the creek, keeping generations of bird families safe. Now it lay in a heap on its side.

  Hurry, Zada, hurry! She picked up her pace, all the while keeping her ears tuned for the sounds of Perlita’s voice. But no matter how shrill the kestrels’ klees and killys were, everything was drowned out in the increasing ferocity of the haboob. The wind dazzled, threw fistfuls of stinging dust at her hindquarters. She hurried.

  The chicks gripped hard at her fur. Not only had they just witnessed the disappearance of their parents, but this was their very first time out of the nest.

  Ever.

  Zada pushed forward, the wind shoving her from behind. She held her head as steady as she could to keep the chicks from sliding.

  Step, step, step, step. She didn’t have time to turn around, to take stock of the haboob, no time for pausing. She didn’t have to see it to know that the moving mountain was catching up to her. She could hear its roar.

  Alas, Pecos de Leon had quite a roar as well. Whenever the night was quiet, Zada could hear his yowls and growls, even from miles away. Pecos was a loner. He would not appreciate her presence in his territory. He’d appreciate even less her presence in his lair. She sent thought beams out into the air. Please don’t be home. Please don’t be home. If he was, she’d just keep walking. There was another canyon that could provide shelter, but it was at least another mile away, over an ancient bed of lava rocks that were unnervingly wobbly, even without a pair of kestrel chicks aboard.

  She thought it again: Please don’t be home. And she hoped like crazy that somehow the big cat would get her message.

  8 Somewhere, Texas

  1910

  Someone else was sending a message. In fact, two someone elses were sending a message. Even as they were being tossed and spun and pummeled by the storm, Perlita and Pard called out, “Keep them safe!”

  It’s the universal prayer of every mother and father in every land, no matter how strong the wind, no matter how far it carried them away. No matter.

  And Zada, old camel, she didn’t need to hear their message to receive it.

  Wasn’t she the fledglings’ Honorary Auntie? Had she not waited and waited and waited for them to hatch from their pebble-sized shells? And once they did, had she not watched over them every waking moment? Had she not counted each of their toes about a million times, just because it seemed like babies should have their toes counted?

  Why, yes, yes, and yes to all of the above.

  In fact, Zada would do anything for her bird herd. They were, after all, the only herd she now had. But knowing that didn’t make the missing she felt deep inside—the missing she’d felt for at least a decade?—any less real.

  And with that, the memory of her old friend Asiye flashed through her mind. Asiye. Stablemate. Fellow caravanner. Friend.

  9 Mountain Lion Territory

  1910

  As Zada pushed on, all around her the denizens of the desert continued to rush past. A dozen white-tailed deer. A squadron of peccaries, their squeals making Zada want to close up her ears. Others ran by in pairs: bobcats, a gray fox and her kit, armadillos. Above her head, flocks of birds—blue grosbeaks, doves, yellow-breasted chats, painted buntings—flew as fast as they could, their desperate cries punching through the roar of the wind.

  Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  Zada’s sides heaved. Her chest burned. The sand bit into the backs of her legs, harder and harder.

  Step, step, step… hurry, hurry, hurry. Step, step, step.

  At last! Just when she thought the haboob would overtake them… there it was. The escarpment. The lion’s lair looked to Zada like a giant mouth, carved into the rock. The scent of lion was unmistakable; every strand of fur on her large body stood up. It was such a huge risk.… It didn’t go unnoticed to Zada that all the other animals were hurrying by, not daring to invoke the wrath—or the teeth and claws—of Pecos de Leon.

  Nevertheless, it was a chance she had to take. She ducked her head to keep the chicks from being scraped by the upper edge of the rock and stepped just inside the opening. The whiskers on her lips quivered.

  Another few feet, another couple of inches…

  She waited for her eyes to adjust to the darkness, squinted. All the corners were shadow-filled. She could only barely make out the nooks and crannies that lined the inner wall.

  Empty. They were all empty. No sign of Pecos. Whew!

  Her pounding heart began to slow down. Well, as slow as it could get when the wind sounded as if a thousand longhorn cattle were stampeding all around them. Zada’s ears ached with the noise of it.

  But they also ached from this: Peeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeepp!

  “Caravanners,” said Zada to Beulah and Wims. “We made it.” She tried to sound reassuring, which was hard over the hubbub of the haboob. “We are good here,” she shouted. And that was mostly true. They were out of the wind, the lion was nowhere to be seen.

  Nevertheless… Peeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeep!
>
  “Excuse me,” she said, as loudly as she could without setting off even more peep alarms. She stepped a bit farther toward the back of the cave. Ahh, thankfully, the sound of the wind was muffled there.

  The chicks relaxed their grip on her tuft. Oof, that felt better. A tiny thread of peace nestled in, but not before another worry popped up. Surely the chicks must be hungry, yes? Camels can go a long time without food or water. Not so growing birdlets. From watching Perlita and Pard take turns feeding them, it seemed to Zada that baby kestrels pretty much ate all the time.

  Fortunately, she had a whole cache of sand fleas in her coat, not to mention a tick or two. The supply wasn’t necessarily infinite, but for now, the fleas would be enough to avert the hunger pangs. Water would be a different matter, but she couldn’t worry about that until the time came. One problem at a time, she decided. “Fleas, anyone?” Zada asked, which was answered by some serious peck-peck-pecking combined with “That flea was so yummy.” “My flea was yummier.” “Fleas are my favorite.”

  Zada deliberately didn’t mention the bigger problem, which had little to do with the wind or the big cat or the fleas or even water. It had everything to do with not knowing where the moving mountain had carried Perlita and Pard, and if they could find their way to their babies.

  Blowing dust can change the appearance of the landscape in disorienting ways. Even the Mission, a place both the camel and the kestrals knew well, could become hard to find. The desert was so immense, so expansive, so enormously huge, they could search and search and search and still miss each other.

  Alas. Zada had to stop thinking about it. She and the chicks were safe. At least there was that. All they could do was wait. Wait for the dust to dissipate. Wait for the light to reappear. Wait. It. Out.

  From their spot on the top of her head, Beulah and Wims peered through Zada’s thick fur. They stretched out their necks, but in the dimness all they could see was the big absence left by their mother and father. Wims leaned sadly against his sister. “I miss Mommy and Daddy,” he whimpered.

  A tiny sniffle trickled from Beulah’s beak. “Me t-t-t-too,” she said.

  Then, because when one baby cries, the other one can’t help but join in, Wims burst into a mini rainstorm, so many tears they flooded Zada’s furry tuft. The two peeped and hiccupped and sobbed until the whole patch was in danger of turning into a swamp. Zada had to swallow hard to keep from unleashing her own tears.

  Missing. It’s such a hard thing, isn’t it? Zada wished she could say something that would make it all right, or just a little bit better.

  It must have been a good wish because right then, in the darkness of the escarpment, dust all around, Zada could swear that she heard the faint ringing again. Kllloookkll. Which made her think of… Asiye.

  Ahh, the stories we could tell, thought Zada. If only…

  But wait. Stories?

  Of course!

  There were so many things Zada couldn’t do. She couldn’t make the wind stop blowing. She couldn’t keep the air from filling up with dust. She couldn’t make the light return just by asking. Worst of all, she couldn’t make Perlita and Pard reappear, no matter how much she wished.

  But stories. That she could do.

  “Pip-pip, peepsters,” Zada said, as cheerily as possible, under the circumstances. “How can I tell you about two baby camels named Zada and Asiye, with so much wailing and gnashing of beaks going on?”

  There was a long moment of joint hiccupping, but at last, to Zada’s relief, Beulah sucked in a big breath and wiped her face on her wing. Wims did the same, followed by a final hiccup, followed by another sniffle, followed by both of them fluffing up their new feathers and scrunching down into tiny gray-blue puff balls.

  “I want to hear a st-st-story,” said Beulah, in her softest voice. And in a voice even softer than that: “Me too.” To which Wims added, “But make sure it’s not sc-sc-scary.”

  “Do we have an O.O.D. (Official Okie Dokie) then?” There was no answer, but Zada was fairly certain she could detect the baby caravanners’ heads nodding up and down. “Let the saga begin,” she said. And with that, she used the most time-honored beginning of all great beginnings… and while maybe not the most original, when you are sheltering from a massive haboob, with hopes that the local mountain lion was not in the near vicinity, who cared?

  “Once upon a time…,” Zada began, “in a land far away…”

  10 Smyrna, Turkey

  1850

  If you could fly due north from a rocky cavern in West Texas, cross the very top of the world, soar above the Arctic ice sheets and tundra, you might catch a meltemi wind, one that rose up on a clear bright day and blasted across the frigid waters of the Black Sea. From there, you could ride on the wind’s back, high above the Aegean, where you’d finally find a pier, or a dock where you could land in Smyrna, an ancient city snugged along the coast of Turkey.

  Smyrna. That was where Zada’s story began. There the Pasha, the man in charge of things—decreed by the sultan himself—lived in a stupendously large mansion. Legend has it that Alexander the Great once fell asleep on the mountain that overlooked the city and the bay. In his dream, an angel told him to build a palace in that very spot. Which is exactly what occurred, because when you are great, stuff happens.

  We’re sure that any angel flying over would be impressed. First, they’d see the imposing red dome of the mosque, which sat right in the middle of a huge walled complex. Four minarets that reached into the sky, graced the compass points—north, south, east, west. Surrounding the whole affair was a tall stone wall with round watchtowers on the corners.

  Walk through the arched gate, and into the main building. Step into the large reception hall, festooned with golden candelabras and fine wood carvings, carvings of gazelle and bears and wild dogs. On one wall was a brilliant tile mosaic, featuring a forest of plane trees, their knotted trunks twisting and twining. In front of them a green-blue stream flowed by, filled with golden-scaled barbels.

  Dozens of arched doorways opened into dozens of rooms, each one carpeted with finely woven rugs made from the wool of the Pasha’s own flocks of white fat-tailed karaman sheep.

  There was a bakery, a madrasa, an entire wing of rooms for the various members of the Pasha’s family, all ringing a courtyard filled with rows of tomato plants and coriander and rich, pink Damascene roses.

  Remember that mosque? First, remove shoes. Next, walk inside. Last—deep breath—look down. The blue-and-white-tiled floor gleamed in the light of a thousand candles. Look up, and there was the round ceiling of the dome, adorned with perfectly geometrical rings of floral designs and shapes. It soared into the blue ceiling of the sky.

  Finally, last stop on the guided tour: at the very end of the long hallway was a large ballroom where the Pasha entertained guests from near and far, all of them bedecked in fancy outfits, rich velvet capes, billowing robes that swirled when they walked. The men wore felted fezzes and the women covered their faces with silk masks that hid their smiles, and at the same time, lit up their eyes. So much bedecking. Even the servants were bedecked.

  You could say it was the posh Pasha palace.

  Outside the mansion’s walls, the Pasha’s orchards were filled with apricots and figs and sumac. Their sweet and spicy aromas intertwined with the salty fragrance of the sea, and altogether—sweetsy, spicy, salty—those luscious smells wafted up and down the streets. They permeated all the buildings, including—ta-da!—the camel nursery, which sat behind the mansion and opened onto a large field. The camel nursery housed all the new mother camels and their baby calves, separate from the rest of the Pasha’s larger herd.

  As it turns out, the Pasha raised the finest camels in all of Anatolia (which is the old name for Turkey, but is still used even today). At any rate, we can faithfully report that between raising the figs and apricots and the elite camels, the Pasha was a highly successful governor. He was practically perfect as far as Pashas go.

  Even so, more
important to Zada, was Teodor, the stable master and cameleer. After her mother’s, Teodor’s was the first voice she ever heard. “Güzel kiz. Beautiful girl,” he called her. His were the first hands to ever rub her beneath her chin, and behind her ears. He was the first to offer her a handful of juicy figs, which to this day are her favorite food ever. Just thinking about them made her mouth water.

  Teodor. He was soft-spoken and generous and had a large mustache. When he kissed Zada on her cheek, his mustache tickled, which made her burst into her own unique camel chuckle, a combination of long, rumbly fur-covered notes, with an added puff-puff-puff that capped it all off.

  Camel voices. Each one is different. Each one is mellifluous… at least to camels.

  Speaking of voices… In those early days in the nursery barn, Zada’s mama sang her baby Zada awake in the morning, and sang her to sleep at night. Such honey to Zada’s baby camel ears.

  There was also, in the camel nursery, a resident jerboa. He entered and exited Zada’s stall through an exceptionally small hole in the corner, which was fine since he was exceptionally small, mouse-sized. He had ears that were almost as tall as his body was high, and he jumped from one side to another in zigzags that were impossible to follow, which was the point, as it kept the resident cats confused enough to throw them off his trail.

  The jerboa wasn’t exactly friendly, and he loved to sneak up on Zada while she was snoozing and swat at her tail. He might have had a name, but if he did, Zada couldn’t tell you. All she knew was that he did a great job of snapping up the seeds scattered on the floor from her mother’s dinner, a trough full of wheat and bulgur.

  Zada had never seen anyone eat as fast as that jerboa. It was a wonder to behold.

  But the biggest wonder of all? Zada’s next stall neighbor: Asiye! She was born only a few days after Zada. She was the same coppery color, had the same rounded ears and whiskery chin. Same dark black eyes and fat toes. They were like mirror images, those two. Zada thought Asiye was the best-in-the-west. And the north, south, east, too.