The Eagle's Quill

by Sarah L. Thomson

  They slowed down, letting raft after raft pass them until they were the last except for one person—the guide in the kayak.

  And no matter how much they slowed down, she stayed behind them. It was clearly her job to stay in the back, making sure nobody ran aground or went astray. How could they get away without her seeing them?

  “There’s the fork, coming up,” Abby called back softly. Sam leaned around Marty again and saw the river split around a rocky outcrop with a few scrubby, gnarled pine trees clinging to shallow drifts of soil.

  “I dropped my paddle! I’m wet! I don’t like this vacation!” came a wailing voice from up ahead. It was the boy who’d splashed Marty. The guide in the kayak sprinted ahead to pick up the paddle again. Sam distinctly heard her sigh as she went past their raft.

  “This is our chance—let’s go!” Abby called in a low voice.

  Behind the guide, out of her sight, they leaned into their paddles and drove the raft toward the right side of the river. The current picked up speed beneath them, and in a few minutes the rocky point of land cut them off from the rest of the rafters. They were out of sight and once again on their own.

  “Smooth move!” Sam rested his paddle on his knees. No point in working hard now. The current was carrying them along nicely.

  In fact, the current was speeding up. The river was narrowing, the sides becoming rockier and steeper, sloping down to the swiftly moving water.

  “Maybe we should try to slow down.” Marty’s voice sounded anxious. “I can’t see what’s ahead.”

  Sam peered around her shoulder once more, only to see the river disappear around the bend. “It’s not like we can hit the brakes, Marty. Don’t sweat it. Didn’t we handle those rapids all right?”

  “No, she’s right.” Abby’s voice was sharp. “Back paddle! Everybody!”

  “Do what now?” Sam shouted. It was getting harder to hear what anybody was saying.

  “Paddle backward!” Abby shouted. “Hard! Now!” And then she added something that Sam couldn’t catch, something that started with “Can’t you hear—”

  But all that Sam could hear was the river getting louder and louder. He dug in with his paddle, trying to slow the raft, as Theo and Marty and Abby did the same. The muscles in his arms and shoulders strained, but it was like digging into frozen ground. No matter how hard he tried, it did no good at all.

  The current swept them around a bend, and then another. The raft plowed through a cloud of white spray, bounced off a boulder, and spun madly as it sprang back into the current. Riverbank, bright sky, and rushing water flashed past as they turned. Then Sam caught a glimpse of what lay downstream, and his heart leaped into his throat. Just ahead, the entire river poured right over a cliff.

  “Paddle!” Abby shrieked. “As hard as you can!”

  But it was no use. The relentless current had them. For a moment, the raft seemed to hang at the edge of the waterfall, as if gravity had somehow been canceled just for them. Sam’s entire body turned icy with terror.

  Then they fell.

  Chapter Six

  The raft plunged downward, in free fall along with the water around it. Sam could hear somebody screaming.

  Maybe he was the one screaming.

  Even worse than the sickening fall was the endless second he had to anticipate hitting the pool at the bottom of the waterfall.

  Then they hit, slamming into water that felt as hard as concrete. Sam, along with his friends, was bounced out of the raft like popcorn bouncing off a hot skillet. He snatched in a breath before freezing, angry water yanked him under.

  Swimming wasn’t even a possibility. He thrashed and kicked, but it made no difference to the current, which swirled him in a circle, let him up briefly to breathe, pulled him under again, and then spit him out so he drifted helplessly into the calmer shallows.

  His rib cage thumped into something solid and smooth—a rock! He seized hold, crawled up onto the solid surface, and lay flat, dripping water and heaving in gulps of air.

  Marty had her own rock. Abby had crawled out onto a little stony beach, littered with driftwood and clumps of dead leaves. Theo was standing near her, knee-deep in the swirling water, watching their raft disappear far downstream.

  “I am never,” Sam said shakily, and coughed, and sat up shivering, “going on a log flume ride ever again.”

  Abby giggled very faintly. Marty gave Sam an impatient look, climbed off her rock, and sloshed over to join Abby and Theo on the beach. Sam followed.

  “Sam! Get that!” Abby called out.

  “Get what?” Sam asked.

  “That pack!”

  Sam looked around. His pack, which had been tossed out of the raft, had washed up in the water near his feet. He snagged it, and then saw Marty’s as well—it was bigger and heavier than anybody else’s. He got that too, dragging both to the shore. There was no sign of Abby’s pack, though, or Theo’s. They must have been washed downstream or sunk into the churning pool beneath the waterfall.

  “Well,” Abby said. She propped herself against a dead tree, pulled off her helmet, and started wringing water out of her hair. “I guess we know why the guides didn’t want us to take this fork of the river.”

  “No kidding.” Sam took off his helmet too, then pulled off his boots and dumped water out of them. The sun was beginning to warm him up a little. “So what now?”

  “Is the compass okay, Sam?” Marty asked.

  The compass! Sam hadn’t even thought about it. But surely the antique mechanism wasn’t made to be thrown over a waterfall and dunked in freezing water. He scrabbled at his pocket to get it out and sighed with relief to see that it hadn’t gotten smashed.

  “It’s okay.” He shook the compass a little to make sure no water was sloshing around inside. “Or—uh. Maybe not.”

  “What’s wrong with it?” In a moment, Marty was on her knees at his side. Theo looked over their shoulders, and Abby also came to see.

  “The needle,” Sam said, staring in confusion. Every other time he’d looked at the compass, the needle had quivered for a moment and then pointed firmly northeast. But it wasn’t doing that anymore. It wobbled a little and then it pointed firmly south, across the river.

  “It’s changed,” he said, baffled.

  “It can’t have.” Marty was frowning down at the compass. “A compass doesn’t change, not like that. It can only point in one direction.”

  “Well, this one did.” Sam handed her the compass—maybe staring at the quivering needle would make her feel better, but all it was doing to Sam was making him nauseated. Or maybe it was their situation that was creating that queasy churning inside him.

  They were in the middle of a wilderness with no horses, no raft, only two packs, and no easy way out. And Thomas Jefferson’s compass wanted them to trek off to the south now? How were they supposed to do that? When he looked to the other side of the river, he saw nothing but endless rows of dense trees, a solid wall of green. Could the four of them really bushwhack their way through that?

  And what would happen if Gideon Arnold got tired of waiting?

  Sam didn’t want to think about that.

  He looked around. They’d followed the compass this far, trusting that it was a clue from Thomas Jefferson. They’d done just what the thing said—literally, in fact. They had swum with the current.

  “In matters of style, swim with the current,” Sam muttered to himself, trying to see if saying the words out loud would turn up any new ideas. “In matters of principle, stand like a rock.”

  Like a rock . . .

  Or on a rock?

  Sam stood up, grabbed the compass from Marty, and plunged right back into the water. “I was sitting on it!” Sam yelled, and suddenly he felt like laughing. “The whole time! I guess I should have stood on it instead! Maybe then I would have seen it!”

  “He gets like this sometimes.” Marty sighed as she got to her feet. “What are you talking about, Sam? Please remember that the rest of us can’
t join you in the strange and frightening place that is the inside of your head.”

  “Come and look at this!” Standing knee deep in swirling water, Sam slapped the rock that he’d been washed up on. He’d been so grateful to breathe at last that he hadn’t even looked at it.

  Or at what was carved on its surface.

  Theo, Marty, and Abby all waded out into the pool. Water swirled around their knees as they studied what Sam had found—a pyramid with a quill in its center, cut into the rock. Water and wind had rubbed away at the lines, but they were still there.

  Jefferson’s pyramid. It was a clue, the next clue! Falling over that waterfall had not been a disaster after all. It had brought them right where they’d needed to be!

  “Look at the compass,” Marty said, grabbing Sam’s wrist. She pulled his hand with the compass in it closer to her eyes. “If we stand on this rock and look at the compass, maybe that’ll be our next clue—oh. No.”

  Sam looked down at the compass as well, and saw what Marty was seeing. The needle now swung in wide, wobbling circles, as if it had no idea anymore which way they should go.

  “I guess the compass was just supposed to get us here,” Sam said. “To this rock. Now it’s not going to help us anymore.”

  “So what are we supposed to do next?” Abby asked, looking around as if the trees or the clouds would toss down an idea.

  “Figure out our next clue,” Sam said. “This rock. What’s it telling us?”

  “Look at the pyramid,” Marty said. “It’s not like the other Founders’ pyramids I’ve seen.”

  “You’re right.” Theo rolled up his sleeve to compare the pyramid on the rock to the one tattooed on his forearm.

  The pyramid on the rock was much narrower than the one on Theo’s skin. It was almost as if somebody had grabbed the tip and pulled, making it longer and skinnier.

  “That’s strange,” Theo said. “The Founders’ symbol is always the same. I’ve never seen it look like that.”

  “It doesn’t look so much like a pyramid at all, really,” Sam said, feeling a thought take shape inside his head. The apex of the pyramid, the part with the eye, was pointing upstream.

  “Does it look anything like an arrow to you guys?” Sam turned to look. “An arrow pointing . . .” He let his voice trail off.

  “At the waterfall?” Abby’s voice rose with disbelief. “The waterfall is our next clue?”

  “Maybe not the waterfall itself,” Marty said. “Maybe something . . . behind it?”

  “A cave,” Sam said, nodding. “Something underground. Like that old mine in Death Valley. Those Founders really loved deep, dark, scary places.”

  Theo was already sloshing back toward the beach. The little curving shelf of gravel and driftwood extended all the way around the pool beneath the waterfall. The others followed Theo, only getting as far as the beach by the time Theo was right next to the curtain of thundering white water.

  Two or three feet above Theo’s head, a small ledge jutted out from the cliff face. The waterfall poured over it, leaving a small gap between the powerful, rushing water and the rocky wall.

  Cautiously, Theo flattened himself against the cliff and stepped into this gap. He took another step and disappeared.

  Sam held his breath. Two seconds later, Theo was out again, shaking his head and spraying water all around. He waved at them to come with him and vanished behind the waterfall again.

  Sam picked up his pack, Marty took hers, and they all followed Theo behind the water and into what lay beyond.

  The waterfall cut out the light once they had stepped through it. “Hold on,” came Marty’s voice from a patch of darkness to Sam’s left. “I’ve got a flashlight, a waterproof one.”

  “Of course you do,” Sam said, digging in his pack for his own light.

  “Are you complaining, Sam?” A brilliant white beam sliced through the darkness and landed on Sam’s face.

  “Uh, nope. Not at all.” Sam pulled out his flashlight and looked at it in dismay. “Especially because mine’s toast,” he added, shaking broken glass from his flashlight’s shattered lens out onto the cave’s floor. “But turn that thing somewhere else, would you, Marty?”

  Marty did, and the flashlight’s beam bounced off rough gray walls, a floor slick with mud, and a lumpy ceiling that nearly brushed Theo’s head.

  “What’s that smell?” When the light touched Abby’s face, Sam saw that she was wrinkling her nose.

  Sam sniffed and winced. “The third-floor boys’ bathroom at my school?”

  “Disgusting,” Marty said. “So what are we supposed to do now? Is there another arrow or something to show us the way?”

  There wasn’t. But that was probably simply because there was only one way they could go. The narrow cave headed straight back into the cliff, a passageway that stretched far beyond the reach of Marty’s flashlight.

  “Let’s go,” Theo said. “Marty, take the light and go in front. Stay close together, everybody.”

  “You got that right,” Abby agreed, falling into step behind Sam as he followed Theo. Her voice was a little jumpy, and Sam glanced back at her, seeing her wide eyes and tense mouth in the light that reflected off the rock walls all around them.

  He shot her what he hoped was a reassuring grin. “Hey, listen. It’s not as bad as that abandoned mine in Death Valley. Did I tell you about that? And that crazy sundial that was set up to fry anybody who couldn’t figure out the puzzle? At least this time all we had to do was fall down a water—ah!”

  Sam had stepped on something that rolled beneath his foot. He staggered, trying to keep his balance, bounced off Theo, rebounded into a wall, and ended up sitting in a mud puddle on the ground.

  “Sam? What’s wrong?” Marty swept the light around.

  “I stepped on—ah!” Sam yelled again and scrambled to his feet. “That! I stepped on that!”

  It was a bone. Long and skinny, it looked like it had once been part of somebody’s leg. And there were marks on it.

  Sam bent closer, swallowing a surge of nausea. Tooth marks. The bone had been chewed on by . . . by . . . by he didn’t know what. By something with really big teeth.

  “Oh no . . . ,” Abby whispered.

  “I don’t think I like this direction after all.” Sam took a few jittery steps back toward the cave’s entrance. “It looks like the last person who made it here didn’t get any farther. Actually, it looks like a lot of people didn’t get any farther.” His eyes widened as Marty let the light play across the cave floor. Rib bones curved up from the ground. Leg bones were scattered in piles.

  Theo made an odd sound and reached out to put a hand against the wall.

  “Theo? You all right?” Sam took a step toward him and accidentally kicked a pile of vertebrae, sending them bouncing over the stone floor. “Sorry!” he muttered, in case whoever these bones belonged to were hanging around to haunt the cave and didn’t appreciate having their remains used for soccer practice.

  “Look at this!” Marty straightened up, holding something big and white in her hands.

  “Marty! You really think you should pick those things up?” Sam was getting the creeps. He’d seen enough horror movies to know that it was a really, really bad idea to hang around a pile of gnawed-up bones. “We should be getting out of here!”

  “Sam, look. For Pete’s sake!” Marty held out her bone. It had eerily empty eye sockets, a long, skinny face, and two horns branching off its forehead. “It’s a mountain goat skull. All of these are animal bones.”

  “You’re sure?” Theo asked a little hoarsely.

  “Of course I’m sure. For one thing, people don’t have horns.” Marty tossed the skull back down. “Everybody relax.”

  “I’m not so sure that’s a good idea,” Abby said.

  “Why?” Sam turned to look at her.

  “Because—”

  But Marty interrupted her. “Theo? What’s the matter?”

  Theo had found something among the tangle of b
ones. He reached down slowly to pick it up, and Sam forgot to wonder what Abby had been going to say when he saw the look on Theo’s face.

  “Theo?” He kicked his way through more goat bones to the big guy’s side. “What’s that?”

  “A pack,” Theo answered. It hung limply from his hands, a sagging pouch of dark-blue nylon. “Empty. Except—”

  From a small, zippered pocket, he pulled out a necklace. It glinted in the beam of Marty’s flashlight, a twirling silver pendant on an intricate chain. A triangular pendant. Sam put a hand out to stop the thing from twirling and held it still. On one side, etched into the silver was a pyramid with a sword inside. On the other side were two initials—C and W.

  Holding the pendant, Theo stood without moving, even his fingers frozen. But his breath came out in a long, low sigh.

  “Theo?” Marty gently pushed Sam’s hand away from the pendant. “That’s your Founders’ symbol, the one that’s tattooed on your arm. Were you expecting to find it here?”

  She’d noticed the same thing Sam had noticed—that Theo didn’t look happy to see the pendant, but he also didn’t look surprised.

  “What’s going on?” Marty asked. “What aren’t you telling us?”

  The pendant twisted gently, and the silence seemed to stretch out endlessly. Just when Sam thought he was about to scream with frustration, Theo spoke.

  “It’s my mom’s,” he said, and suddenly bunched his fist around the pendant and shoved it into a pocket.

  “Your mom was here?” Sam looked around, as if he might see a female version of Theo—tall, strong, and in charge—stepping out of the shadows.

  “I guess she was,” Theo said flatly.

  “Tell us, Theo.” Marty’s voice was gentle.

  Theo took in a slow breath and nodded. “You remember Evangeline said that one of her associates tried to check on the artifacts? That was my mom. We know she was headed here, to Glacier Park. But two months ago, we stopped hearing from her.”

  “And you didn’t come after her?” Sam asked, startled. Theo turned on him so quickly Sam had to fight the urge to take a step backward.