Once Upon a Camel

by Kathi Appelt

  If he could have bought them, he would have, but he had not the funds to purchase nine camels. He couldn’t even purchase two of them. Not even one.

  So he concocted a plan. Maybe if he released them into the desert, two or three at a time, the army would not notice their dwindling numbers before they were all safely gone. It wasn’t a perfect plan, by any stretch of the imagination, but it was all he had.

  With each release, he told his officers a different tale: they had been kidnapped along the way, they had fallen off the side of a cliff, they had gotten caught in a current while crossing the river. Slowly, he set the Pasha’s camels free, and he hoped like crazy that they would keep each other safe. Zada and Asiye never knew the truth of the matter, never heard his tearful güle güle, never knew his heart was broken, again and again and again.

  They didn’t realize that he had taken off their halters with the chiming bells in order to keep them from getting caught on a branch, or captured by someone who might not be kind to them. He removed the bells and tied them to a cord, which he wore around his neck for the rest of his life.

  No. All Zada and Asiye knew was that they had lost him, and no matter how hard they looked, they never found Teodor again.

  But that didn’t keep them from looking. It didn’t keep them from hoping for a miracle.

  39 Anywhere

  Some think of a miracle as simply coincidence. Others put it in the good old-fashioned luck category.

  But at its most basic, what it boils down to is something along the lines of “a good thing happens at the exact moment it is needed.”

  40 The Escarpment

  1910

  The dark began to lift, and with the light came the smallest flicker of happiness at the prospect of leaving the den. But first, Zada had to get back on her feet. They’d been too lucky—Zada couldn’t press that luck any further. Pecos de Leon was likely just as eager for the dust to lift as they were, eager to come back to his den just like they were eager to leave for the Mission! Why, he could be on his way right now.

  Zada wasn’t so worried about herself. At least, not too worried. (Well, maybe a little worried.) Years ago, she had made a bargain of sorts with Pecos de Leon, but it wasn’t necessarily a bargain that could be relied upon.

  She had to get up.

  “Hold on tight, peepers,” she told Wims and Beulah. “We are rising to the occasion.” And slowly, oh so slowly, Zada raised her back legs. Then she pushed up with her front legs, all the while trying to keep her head and neck steady.

  Up… up… up…

  “Oof,” said Zada. Every square inch of her was shaky. And achy. And sore. Nevertheless… victory!

  But it was short-lived, because all at once, there was a flurry of flapping. First the chicks switched places. Then they switched again. And once more.

  Then Beulah announced, in a surprisingly authoritative voice, “Do not cross this line.” Which led Wims to ask, “What line?”

  “The invisible line,” warned Beulah. “The one I drew with my toe.” She added, “You keep your toes on that side, and I’ll keep my toes on this side.”

  “I don’t see a line,” said Wims.

  “It’s right here,” replied Beulah.

  Zada could feel a talon being dragged down the center of her forehead. It might be invisible, but she could certainly tell it was there.

  “I see it!” said Wims. He did a little hoppity-hop-hop and then Peck!

  “Ouch!” said Beulah. “You crossed the line.”

  “You said no toes, not no beaks,” said Wims.

  Zada could feel the steam coming off Beulah. Sure enough, peck peck peck. And just like that, the chicks launched into a furious round of Peeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeeppeep!

  Zada took a deep breath, but just as she was about to say, Please don’t make me count to ten, Beulah said, “Look! I can see shadows.”

  “Me too!” said Wims.

  Zada peered toward the opening. Despite the thick air, for the first time in hours, she could actually detect some boulders and some lumps that she was fairly sure had been shrubs, but were now mounds of dirt with a few leaves poking through.

  But then Wims said, “Um… Auntie? I think that shadow is moving.” That was followed by Beulah, “It’s coming our way.”

  Zada’s blood started pumping. She’d know that shadow anywhere. After all, she’d known him since he had barely outgrown his cubbish spots. Pecos de Leon.

  All the whiskers on her chin twitched. Her stomachs roiled. She slowly backed away from the cave’s opening, while sending thought beams to the chicks: Please don’t make a peep. That was mixed in with, No chirps, no chirps. And added to, Must be quiet. So quiet.

  A low-pitched growl, barely discernible, reached her ears, and this time it wasn’t the wind. Zada took another step back.

  Then another.

  The shadow stopped.

  If only Zada could draw an invisible line with her toe, one that would keep the mountain lion at bay. Alas!

  Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr…

  Zada froze. The dust-filled air felt supercharged. One false step and it might ignite.

  Over and over, she sent thought beams to the babies: No peeps, no chirps, no klees or killys.

  The big cat took another step closer. Its elongated shadow stretched all the way into the cave, bumped against Zada’s foot. Even though it was only a shadow, Zada could feel the menace of it.

  The cat spoke up. “Why, Zada,” he said, his voice raspy. “It seems you’re in my cave.”

  Zada started to reply, but before she could even utter a syllable, Pecos de Leon started coughing and hacking and coughing and hacking some more.

  Zada whispered frantically to her charges, “Please, please, a thousand pleases, do not let out a single peep.”

  As it turned out, she didn’t really have to, because birds tend to hatch from their shells knowing that cats of any type—domestic, Himalayan, saber-toothed, Scottish fold—are their mortal enemies. Even tiny kestrels know the consequences of making their appearances known to a cat, especially if they are within the cat’s swatting range, which our kestrels most decidedly were.

  Still, they had a hard time holding in the klees and killys when Pecos de Leon, after a furious storm of continuous hacking and coughing, finally hocked up the world’s biggest hairball.

  Don’t laugh, kestrelets. DO NOT LAUGH. Zada hoped the babies would pick up on her message. Because let’s face it, the worst thing you can do to a cat is embarrass it.

  41 The Escarpment

  1910

  And how, birderoos, how would Zada know that? It does seem odd that a camel and a mountain lion would have what we would call a “reckoning.” Zada was much older than the lion, even though at ten revolutions around the sun, the years were beginning to show on the big cat, too. His teeth certainly weren’t what they once had been, and he was actually missing a few, having bitten down on an extremely tough bone from an elk he had once dined upon.

  He hardly ever ate elk anymore, subsisting instead on chuckwallas and the occasional jackrabbit. Only once in a while did he manage to sneak up on an unsuspecting bird, maybe a quail or a dove, one of those ground-nesting types. He preferred lizards and rabbits to the feathered foods.

  Still, none of this meant that he wasn’t dangerous.

  And besides, Pecos de Leon had not always been so demure when it came to his prey. In his prime, he had taken trophies for his crafty stealth maneuvers; he was known far and wide for his pouncing skills, when he would spot an unsuspecting pack rat from ten feet away, then boom! Four paws off the ground and no more pack rat.

  Even snakes weren’t safe from his stalking prowess. He liked their spicy flavor.

  Nevertheless, what could explain the lion’s restraint when it came to not chowing down on a camel? It seems like catching an old dromedary with creaky knees would be a nothing burger, especially for a master predator like himself. The answer, my birdlings, had everyt
hing to do with horses. You heard me.

  The horses of west Texas weren’t always a thing. In fact, for many thousands of years, there were no horses at all in the western hemisphere. Back in the Eocene, also known as “the Dawn of Time,” there was a tiny predecessor known as Eohippus, which was about the size of a large Chihuahua—same skinny legs, same skinny nose—which evolved over millennia to eventually become Parahippus, then Merychippus (which sounds like a holiday greeting), followed by Pliohippus, and finally to equus. For centuries they cavorted all across the western lands, manes billowing.

  However, all the models that were originally extant in North America slowly went missing. What caused that is up to conjecture. Like the early camelids, the mammoths, and the cave lions, it seems that the equine sort headed north and kept going until they ended up in Europe and Asia. And there they stayed until the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when some Spanish and Portuguese explorers, known as the Conquistadors, loaded a few dozen or more onto their ships and hauled them across the Atlantic.

  As soon as the Conquistadors landed on the eastern shores of the South American continent, they unloaded their caballos from their barcos, reintroducing them to their ancient homelands.

  Over time, some of those horses escaped. And so, for a couple of hundred years, these heretofore domestic animals became wild animals. And—wild or not—horses need a lot of water, so they tended to congregate along the banks of rivers, including the Rio Grande and the Pecos. They liked it there, and their herds grew and grew. The offspring of the Spanish horses became known as mustangs.

  One day a young Pecos de Leon, not even fully grown, decided that a mustang would be perfect for dinner. But as nervous as horses are, they are also pretty smart. It seems that they have a scout system, and as fate would have it, the scout horse, upon spying the young Pecos, alerted the herd that danger was creeping up on them. So, what did they decide to do?

  CHHAAARRRGGGE!

  Those wild ponies put their heads down and started running straight at the cat. An older, more experienced feline might have taken off on all fours and headed directly back to his cave, but we are talking about a young lion, only recently on his own. And fright tends to do one of two things—it either gets you going or it freezes you up. The latter is what happened here. Pecos de Leon did not have anyone to whisper, “En parlak yildiz ol” into his ear. So, our kitty boy was trapped by Fear in all its paralyzing wonder. Every muscle, from jaw to tail, was clenched.

  What no one saw—not the cat, not the horses—was the camel. Zada was just a ways upriver, when she felt the ground begin to shake. She lifted her head and sniffed the air.

  Maybe…

  She cocked her ears. Nothing. She waited.

  Soon enough, she heard the hoofbeats. She broke into a run toward the noise, arriving just in time to see that a young mountain lion was about to become roadkill. It wasn’t that she had any great affection for mountain lions. After all, a fully grown one could be menacing. But she absolutely could not stand the horses. And she knew that the cat would never survive the pummeling of several hundred hooves racing over him. Nobody deserved that, certainly not this cat who was just starting out in the world, who still had the last small tufts of his baby fur.

  Nope. Not going to happen. Not on Zada’s watch. She raced at the young cat, stood directly in front of him, raised herself up to her full seven feet, threw her head back, and hollered in her loudest, most death-defying voice, “Baaawwwwllll!!!!!”

  A veritable fear of camel surged into those mustang hearts. It set them into a frenzy of bucking and kicking and whinnying and all sorts of mane tossing, after which they made a herd-sized U-turn and never looked back. They might still be running for all we know.

  Lion—One.

  Horses—None.

  Zada—Victory!

  And since that day, the lion, who became known far and wide as Pecos de Leon, had respectfully honored his side of the bargain to Zada by not eating her. And Zada, while only a wee bit worried about becoming the lion’s dinner, appreciated him for his restraint.

  You couldn’t really say they were friends. But it seemed that they had each other’s backs.

  Mostly.

  42 Somewhere

  1910

  Speaking of restraint, Perlita was still trapped all by herself in her tumbleweed cage. The wind had come from everywhere. It had pushed her forward. Backward. Upward. Downward. Round and round and back again. Seriously? she thought. One minute she was facing the sky, the next she was facedown.

  Stupid wind! Stupid tumbleweed! Stupid dust!

  “Enough!” she tried to say, but it just came out as, “Thhuuphhh.” Which just made it more stupid.

  Bounce bounce bounce. Each time she landed, every bone, every muscle, every feather noticed. The branches held her tight, like a spiderweb holds a fly.

  She was beginning to believe that she was going to spend the rest of eternity trapped in its sticky arms, trapped forever, trapped until the end of time.…

  Pity. That’s what she needed. A big, fat helping of it. A whole mountain of pity. And where was Pard in this, her hour of need? Wasn’t he her primary purveyor of pity? What was he waiting for? For chirping out loud, was he taking a vacation?

  The worst question, though she tried not to keep asking it… and asking and asking and asking: What about Wims and Beulah?

  Perlita sent a million wishes out into the desert, wishes for their safety, wishes for Zada to be okay. She even sent wishes to see her darling Pard suddenly drop out of the sky in front of her.

  Of course, at the moment, Perlita couldn’t see anything. The entire universe was clouded with dust, dust that rose to the very top of the sky, blocking even the sun. Stupid sun!

  All Perlita could do was tumble along, and hope like mad that this whole stupid day would somehow right itself. That the wind would stop blowing, that she’d remember what she needed to tell Zada—the best news—and that somehow, some way, they’d all find each other.

  Find. That was the crucial verb. Find Zada, because if she found Zada, then she’d find Wims and Beulah. Of course, that wasn’t happening until someone—or better yet, some bird—found her.

  Pard! She huffed. Get those tail feathers going!

  43 The Escarpment

  1910

  As Pecos de Leon took another stealthy step toward them, Zada could feel the kestrels hunkering down, shimmying deeper into her tuft, following their bird instincts.

  Even so, they were babies, after all. And following directions was hard. Zada had to get out of that cave before all baby restraint was tossed. The thick dust still floating around them was the only thing that kept Pecos from smelling the tufted twosome.

  But then, to Zada’s dismay, Pecos plopped down across the entrance to the cave, entirely blocking their exit. To Zada, his lack of motion was even more unsettling than his actual motion. She had to get past him because, oh yeah, there were chicks on her head, chicks that would soon become tapas if she couldn’t get them out the door.

  “Well,” said Zada, as casually as she could muster. “If you’d just scooch over a bit, I’ll be on my way.”

  Pecos didn’t even flick an ear. Instead, he commenced to licking his front left paw, making sure to extend his talons so that she could get a good look at them.

  Yep, the look was good.

  She tried again. “This is a mighty fine cave you’ve got here,” she said. “But time to take my leave.”

  Not one inch did that cat budge.

  “Seems like a good time for me to be on my way,” said Zada.

  Pecos stayed put.

  She could feel the chicks fidgeting. Horrible thought number 292 popped into her head: What if they were so scared, they decided to try to fly away? All the chambers in her stomachs clenched. The chicks would just end up on the ground, appetizers.

  If she weren’t so tall, she’d consider jumping over Pecos. But the entrance was barely high enough for her to get her hump through as it was
. If she jumped, she’d whack her head on the ceiling. She might crush the babies.

  Nope. Couldn’t do that.

  Thinkthinkthink.

  She took a hard look at the entrance. If she sidled close to the left, there might just be enough room between the mountain lion’s back and the edge of the opening for her to slip past.

  What other choice did she have? So long as the lion kept concentrating on his paw-cleaning regimen, and the babies kept their beaks shut, she had a chance… a slim chance. She sent another wave of thought beams to the chicks. Quietquietquietquietpleasebequiet.

  Softly, one old camel slipped one large foot in front of the other. Hadn’t she been on mountainside trails that weren’t any wider than this passage? She could do this. Step. Step. Step.

  Quietquietquietquiet…

  Only a few steps more, and she’d be out. She could smell the good news, that’s how close she was, and she might have been doing a victory dance in, oh, three more seconds, but just then, like a meteor zooming from the deepest reaches of space, the unmistakable sight of an American kestrel rocketed through the dust, directly toward them.

  Pard! Despite his grit-covered body, there was no doubt who it was. Zada wanted to spit for joy, but the timing Could. Not. Be. Worse. In a rush of sandy feathers, he nearly dive-bombed the cat, swerved at the last moment, and landed on Zada’s nose.

  “It’s me!!!!” Which set off a whole lollapalooza of happy. Klee, klee, klee, killy, killy, killy.

  Which was followed by, “Do I smell birds?”

  And not for the first time, Zada really, really wished that she could fly. More specifically, she wished that Beulah and Wims could fly. That would solve so many problems, the primary one being Pecos de Leon, who was, at that very moment, sitting on his haunches, stretching his long front paws, and putting all his claws on display.