The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 3

by Roy MacGregor

  It was getting warm in the room. Kelly Block’s voice began to take on a purring quality. The fan turned slowly, slowly…

  Travis tried to stay with Kelly Block this time. He was talking about “generators” and “envisioning” and “imaging” and “focus,” and Travis’s own focus was beginning to slip again. He wondered how the others were hanging in, but he couldn’t see anyone. And he didn’t think he should turn his head or sit up to look. There could be no doubt that Kelly Block was sitting there, staring at the six of them, watching them…

  “Let’s head for the hoodoos!”

  Sarah’s suggestion had been enthusiastically endorsed by the rest of the “Unit,” as the six Screech Owls were now referring to themselves. They had spent nearly two hours with Kelly Block and, Travis was pleased to note, Block had never realized that at least one of the Unit had dozed off in the middle of his presentation. Jesse claimed he, too, had fallen asleep. Jenny said she had just got bored and lost her train of thought.

  They weren’t much impressed with Kelly Block’s inspirational address to the generators, but they did like his suggestion that they head out on the mountain bikes–just the six of them–for some critical “bonding” before the next game.

  “If he wants us to bond,” Andy said, “why doesn’t he just glue us to each other?”

  But Travis and Sarah knew what Kelly Block meant. Perhaps he had gone overboard, but there was something to be said for being a true team and having to depend on each other, whether falling backwards from a chair or breaking out of one’s own end. A bike ride in the barren hills across the river seemed a perfectly good idea.

  Travis and Lars exchanged a quick glance.

  The hoodoos.

  Where Nish had imagined he saw the Albertosaurus.

  “Maybe we’ll see a Tyrannosaurus rex,” Lars whispered.

  Travis giggled and kicked his pedal hard, doing a slight wheelie out onto the highway.

  The air was warm on Travis’s face. He felt happy with his friends–the Unit. He had almost forgotten about poor Nish’s run-in with his own panicking imagination.

  Poor Nish. Maybe they’d be able to see whatever it was that he had taken for an Albertosaurus.

  Maybe they’d be able to show him that it had been nothing but his mind playing tricks on him.

  Was it warm enough, Travis wondered, for Nish to have seen a mirage?

  The chinook was holding. The wind was running through the valley like hot air through a heating duct, the river swollen and the ground so quickly dry that small lassos of dust flew up from their tires as they rode off the highway towards the suspension bridge that would take them into the rolling hills and the magnificent, eerie hoodoos.

  Travis felt great. The wind was in his face. He had an excellent mountain bike under him. He was taking the runs easily, gearing down for the rises effortlessly. He had a natural eye for reading terrain and moved quicker, more sure, than any of the others. He had forgotten all about Nish and his wild story. He had forgotten all about Kelly Block and his chemistry. He had forgotten about the loss to the Werewolves.

  It was so good to be out here with his friends. Sarah was right alongside him, as graceful and sure-footed on a mountain bike as she was on a hockey rink. Lars was letting his back wheel drift around corners, causing Jesse to scream that he was going to lose it, but Lars never did. Andy was strong going up the hills, cautious going down. Jenny was exactly the same on the trails as she was in net: steady.

  Deeper and deeper into the Badlands they went. Strange rock formations rose all about them, casting long, bizarrely shaped shadows on each other and along the curling, twisting trails. There was a sense of other-worldliness here. It felt like a different planet, a different time.

  Now Travis’s thoughts did return to Nish. He could see how someone with a vivid imagination–and Nish had one of the wildest–might think he had seen anything here from giant toadstools to alien statues.

  Some of the sandstone structures even had faces–if you looked at a certain angle.

  What was that sound?

  Sarah had moved ahead of Travis on the flat, and dust rose sharply as she braked. Travis braked hard and turned, his rear wheel digging in and sliding to a fast stop. The others braked hard, dust rolling all around them, blocking any clear view.

  “Did you hear that?” Sarah asked.

  “I heard something,” Travis said.

  “I heard it, too,” said Andy. “What was it?”

  “Sounded like a sick lion,” suggested Lars.

  “There’s no lions in Alberta,” said Jenny. Travis could detect a little shiver in her voice.

  Again, the same sound–closer!

  Sarah turned sharply, ready to pump. “What the–?”

  “My God!” Andy called out. “L-L-L-OOK!”

  Travis turned to follow Andy’s line of vision. His eyes moved along the grey-brown trail past a small hoodoo and came to a break between two steeply sloping hills.

  What he saw first was the movement–a tail lashing back and forth in the space between the slopes as something moved from shadow to light.

  Something with small beady red eyes.

  Something with huge horn-like scales about the eye and down the neck.

  Something red and rust and dirt yellow and dull green.

  Something huge.

  And something impossible!

  An Albertosaurus!

  “It’s a trick!” Travis said, but he didn’t even sound convincing to himself.

  “It’s coming at us!” Jenny squealed.

  It could not be a model; it moved. It could not be a balloon; the ground rumbled as it stepped. It could not be a trick of their eyes; it roared, and their ears filled with a sound unlike anything any of them had heard before.

  It was a sound that seemed to come from the centre of the earth itself.

  The monster stepped again towards them and the ground around them trembled!

  As a perfect unit, the six Screech Owls turned on their bikes, leapt high above their seats, and pushed down so hard on their pedals that six back wheels spun uselessly in the dirt. A dustcloud rose so high and thick around them that, when Travis looked back, he could barely make out the shadow of the dinosaur.

  But it was still there, tail lashing, eyes flashing, tongue flicking. The monster hurled a mighty roar at them, and lowered its head as if preparing to charge.

  “GO!” Andy called.

  “RUN FOR IT!” Sarah shouted.

  “HELLLLLP!” Jesse screamed.

  “HELLLLLLP UUUUSSSSSSSS!”

  I told you so.”

  Travis didn’t need to hear this from Nish, but he supposed Nish had to hear himself say it. Nish had told them so–and Travis and Lars had dismissed the story as a trick of Nish’s overactive imagination.

  But now Travis knew that what Nish had seen was real.

  There was no keeping secrets this time. The six Owls who had headed out into the Badlands to bond together as a unit had become witnesses to the most extraordinary story to hit the town of Drumheller since 1884, when a young geologist names J.B. Tyrrell climbed one of these strange hills and came face to face with the seventy-million-year-old skull of an Albertosaurus.

  It seemed impossible, but now, more than a century later, six kids from a peewee hockey team had found another Albertosaurus–and this one was alive!

  Make that seven kids. Nish had already begun to claim his rightful place at centre stage.

  “I found it first,” he told anyone who would listen.

  Unfortunately for the Screech Owls, a great many people wanted to listen. The six Screech Owls who thought they had seen a living dinosaur had come flying back to Camp Victory in such a panic and with so many shouts for help that there was no keeping this a secret. Jenny and Lars had both thrown up they’d been so frightened, and Andy couldn’t talk when his father began yelling at him to tell him what had happened. Finally, Sarah and Travis managed to force the story out, in the midst of gasp
s and sobs from their teammates.

  Someone must have made a call, for within half an hour a reporter from the local newspaper, the Drumheller Mail, was at the camp gate. An hour later the Calgary Herald was there demanding interviews with the kids who claimed they’d seen a living dinosaur. And not much later people from the wire services and television stations had flooded the town.

  And then came the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

  Mr. Higgins and Kelly Block met the police car at the front gate and let them in. On Block’s insistence, the television cameras had not been allowed through, but they were set up anyway all along the edge of the highway, filming anything that moved and calling questions over the fence to any Screech Owl who happened to walk between cabins.

  “DID YOU SEE THE DINOSAUR?”

  “CAN YOU TALK TO US?”

  “WHERE ARE THE KIDS WHO SAY THEY SAW THE MONSTER?”

  On Mr. Higgins’s advice, the Owls didn’t try to answer the reporters’ questions. The police were there, he said, and the police would take charge of matters.

  After an hour or so, it struck Travis as odd that the most natural thing to do had not been done–or even suggested.

  “Why aren’t they going into the hills to look for it?” he said to Sarah.

  “They don’t believe us,” she said.

  “They think we made it up,” said Lars.

  “I know what I saw,” said Nish, growing prouder by the moment. “I know what I saw, and I know what it was.”

  Nish wanted to go out to the fence and talk to the camera crews, but the other Owls wouldn’t let him. They milled around the kitchen area, waiting to see what the Mounties and other adults would decide to do. For the first time since he had met him, Travis began to feel sorry for Kelly Block. All this attention couldn’t be doing his camp much good.

  There were now many more people here than just the police. Some looked like scientists. They had gathered with Kelly Block in a meeting room to discuss the situation. Sarah went over and sat close to the door, trying to hear what was being said inside.

  She soon reported back, unimpressed.

  “They think it has something to do with the chinook,” she said. “There’s a guy with them who I think might be a psychiatrist. He’s talking about ‘mass hysteria’ and things like that. He says we suffered some kind of ‘gang delusion.’”

  “What language are you talking?” demanded Nish.

  Fahd, who knew something about everything, explained. “He thinks you all dreamed the same thing at the same time.”

  “That’s impossible!” said Andy.

  “No,” said Fahd. “It can happen. Lots of experts think that’s what UFOs are. Somebody thinks they see a flying saucer, and suddenly everybody in town thinks they see them.”

  “We don’t think we saw anything,” said Nish a bit testily. “We did see a dinosaur. And I saw it first!”

  By morning, the story was out of control. The claim of the six kids–“Seven,” Nish kept correcting–who said they had seen a living, breathing dinosaur had travelled around the world. American stations were sending in television crews. CNN was on the scene, broadcasting live. The Screech Owls were headline news, but it was hardly the kind of publicity they might once have dreamed of as they headed into a hockey tournament:

  “CANADIAN CHILDREN TELL MONSTER FIB!”

  “TINY HOCKEY PLAYERS ATTEMPT PREHISTORIC HOAX”

  “CHINOOK BLAMED FOR YOUNGSTERS’ WILD CLAIM”

  “FAIRIES AND FLYING SAUCERS — NOW LIVING, BREATHING DINOSAURS!”

  “TERROR IN THE BADLANDS!”

  Their parents had all phoned. Some of them were beside themselves with worry. Sarah’s mother had been in tears. Travis’s father had told him to remain calm, to say only what he knew to be a fact, and not to be afraid of the truth. Nish asked his mom to clip out all the newspaper stories.

  The angle that most of the media had taken concerned children making up stories to draw attention to themselves. One story cited dozens of examples of stories where youngsters had fabricated huge lies and fooled their families and everyone else, at least for a while, and sometimes for years. Many of the news reports compared the “Drumheller Dinosaur Sighting” to an event that took place in England back in 1920. Two little girls who lived in a village in Yorkshire claimed to have played with real fairies since they were tiny, and had been able to take two photographs of the tiny flying creatures with a camera. The story had been such a sensation, and so many people had believed the two girls and their photographic evidence, that even the famous writer Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, was called upon to give his opinion. The great man gave his backing to the little girls’ amazing story. The hoax was not revealed for decades, when one of the little girls, now a very old woman, decided she could not go to her grave carrying such a fib.

  There were no photographs of the Alberta dinosaur, all the stories gleefully pointed out.

  “No one believes us,” Sarah said despondently.

  The police briefly interviewed the seven Screech Owls, and one of the Mounties, who seemed very cross with them, warned that they could be charged with public mischief if they didn’t own up to the truth.

  “This is a very serious charge, young ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “It would be a most serious blemish on your record and your families’ good names.”

  “But it’s the truth!” said an exasperated Lars. “We saw a real, live dinosaur.”

  “I saw it first,” added Nish.

  If the reporters and the Mounties didn’t believe the Screech Owls, there were soon lots of others who did. Within a day Drumheller was flooded with the curious. Before long there wasn’t a vacant hotel room to be found between Drumheller and Calgary. They arrived first from all over Canada and the United States, and in the days after from England and France and Germany and Japan…

  Several of the supermarket tabloid papers then hit the stands with stories–including photographs!–that seemed to back the seven kids’ version of what had happened. One of these papers even had a front-page headline that claimed, “CANADIAN AUTHORITIES DESPERATE TO SUPPRESS KIDS’ DISCOVERY OF THE MILLENNIUM!”

  The Owls were able to hear some of the debate on the local radio talk shows. Most of the discussion involved dinosaur jokes at the expense of the Screech Owls, but several callers seemed to think that this extraordinary chinook had somehow, in some unknown way, released a slumbering, frozen giant from prehistory. Fahd was quick to point out that this explanation didn’t make sense–but then, what part of the story did make sense? All they knew for sure was that it had somehow captured the imagination of a good part of the world.

  Traffic out to the Badlands became so frantic that the RCMP put up roadblocks and declared the barren hills beyond the suspension bridge off-limits–which only served to convince many that there really was something out there.

  It seemed insanity had come to Dinosaur Valley. European television crews rented helicopters and were even flying about at night with huge searchlights bouncing over the hills. Hikers were walking in from the opposite direction, ignoring the roadblocks.

  And hour by hour, the Mounties were getting angrier with the seven hockey players who refused to back down on their story. There was even a rumour that the seven youngsters were about to be formally charged with public mischief.

  Mr. Higgins, looking very worried, gathered the seven Owls in the camp meeting room. He had Kelly Block with him and another man, Mr. Banning, who was a Calgary lawyer.

  “The police are getting very concerned that this has gone too far,” the lawyer said. “I happen to know they are right now preparing charges against you.”

  “They should be out looking for the Albertosaurus,” said Sarah, “not worrying about us.”

  “Well, miss,” said the lawyer. Travis glanced at Sarah and saw her grimace; Sarah hated to be called “miss.” The lawyer didn’t even notice. “Well, miss, they are indeed worried about you,” he continued.
“I have been asked by them if perhaps you would all, or even a couple of you, be willing to undergo lie-detector tests.”

  The Owls looked at each other.

  “That proves they don’t believe us!” said Nish.

  Sarah shook her head. “But it also gives us a chance to prove we’re telling the truth.”

  “Let’s do it,” said Lars.

  “I don’t know, son,” cautioned Mr. Higgins. He seemed distinctly uncomfortable with the idea.

  “Come on, Dad,” said Andy. “Or don’t you believe us, either?”

  Mr. Higgins stumbled and mumbled. It was clear that he did not.

  “I’ll do it,” said Travis.

  “So will I,” said Nish.

  All around the circle, the Owls nodded their agreement.

  Perhaps, Travis thought, this was why television broadcasters called big games “The Moment of Truth.” He knew that he and the other Screech Owls had won the battle of the lie-detector test–the green line never jumped for any of them, at least when it mattered–and now they would have to win the battle of game three of the Drumheller Invitational.

  The tournament wasn’t about to stop just because the town had filled up with news reporters and the curious. There was still a schedule to be played out and a trophy to be won. The Screech Owls, however, seemed hardly in the running any more. Lose this game, and they would be headed home, with nothing to show for their trip but a bunch of newspaper clippings about an imaginary dinosaur.

  The opposition was, appropriately, called the Predators. The Prince Albert Predators from northern Saskatchewan. They were, by all accounts, a good team, strong up centre and solid in goal. In any other circumstance, the Screech Owls versus the Predators would have been a great match.

  But these were hardly normal circumstances. The little Drumheller arena was packed, not by hockey fans, but by those who wanted a look at the seven players who claimed they’d seen the monster. There was a television crew from Japan filming the game, and another one from Mexico. There were reporters and tourists and even a crazy man with a rainbow fright wig holding up a sign saying that “The End of the World Has Come,” complete with a crude drawing of a dinosaur–not even an Albertosaurus–to back up his claim.