by StacyPlays
Stacy scanned the horizon for any trace of the familiar taiga, but they’d long left it behind. Everything around them—every rock, hill, and mountain—was a rusty shade of orange. And the sky! Juxtaposed against the coppery mountains, the sky was the most brilliant shade of blue Stacy had ever seen.
“A mesa biome!” Stacy whispered in wonder, sitting up.
All of the wolves and Page were already awake. Stacy opened the flap of her satchel, half expecting Milo to have flown back to the taiga during the night. Much to Stacy’s surprise, the bat was still there. He opened one eye to the harsh mesa light and burrowed deeper inside. Stacy gave him a loving pat on the head and took out her binoculars so she could get a better view of the scenery.
Looking around, Stacy didn’t know what to take in first. There were the large plateaus to the west of her, the tops of which were as flat as tables. Farther south was a cluster of tall, spindly rock formations Stacy knew were called hoodoos. And connecting everything, stretching as far as her eyes could see, was nothing but vast red sand and clay, punctuated by the occasional cactus and sagebrush.
“We should jump off here even though you all stick out like sore thumbs in this biome,” Stacy said, looking at the white wolves and then over to her reddish dog. “You certainly blend in, Page. But look around—there’s no one here to see any of you. There’s no one here at all.”
They waited until the train was passing a particularly cactus-free patch of the desert and then leapt into a soft red sand dune. Stacy looked around to make sure everyone was accounted for. They were all fine, except for Wink, who had managed to land on the one cactus in sight.
“Oh, Wink!” Stacy said, hurrying over to help him pick the needles out of his rear. Wink whined miserably.
After helping him pluck out most of the needles, Stacy and the group set off into the mesa. Stacy couldn’t believe how beautiful the mesa biome was. Everywhere she looked she noticed something different—from the sprawling prickly pear cacti with hummingbirds flitting around them to the old Joshua trees with their spiky green leaves pointing skyward.
And the wildlife! Black-tailed jackrabbits raced from sagebrush to sagebrush while tiny baby quail scurried after their parents and massive golden eagles soared overhead.
“Noah, I don’t think this biome suits you,” Stacy teased as a sullen-looking Noah walked alongside her with his head down. “I haven’t seen a single water source.”
As soon as the words left Stacy’s lips, she realized this was a much bigger issue than she had initially thought. What she had meant to be a silly joke to Noah was actually a very real threat. Where are we going to find water? Stacy’s wolves drank quite a bit of water each day, and the canteens she had brought from the taiga were nearly empty. As soon as she thought about it, Stacy began to feel thirsty.
“All right, everyone,” Stacy said. “Here’s the plan. We’re looking for somewhere we can set up camp for a couple of months, but it needs to have a water source.”
Stacy reached into her satchel and pulled out a groggy Milo. She gently tossed him into the air and he started happily fluttering about, looking like he was glad to stretch his wings at last.
“Milo here can keep us aware of any mesa animals that might be in need of our rescue services,” Stacy said.
Basil scrambled up some jagged rocks and looked around, her head held high as she tried to spot something new in the unfamiliar landscape.
“Anything, girl?” Stacy asked.
Basil nodded, so Stacy and the others made their way up the rocks as well, until they could see what Basil was looking at. In the distance, probably about a mile from where they were standing, was a tiny village made up of two rows of dilapidated wooden buildings that looked like they hadn’t been lived in for years.
“I know what that is,” Stacy said, jumping off the rock pile and heading toward the village.
“That’s a ghost town.”
Twelve
THE DESERTED TOWN seemed strangely silent—quieter, somehow, than the rest of the mesa around it. Several of the ramshackle wooden buildings had lost their windows and red sand had blown across the floors, piling into little dunes in the corners. There was what looked like an abandoned church on one end of the row of buildings, and a blacksmith on the other, its sign weather-beaten but still legible. A wooden water tower loomed over the rest of the town, leaning to one side as if it might fall at any moment. One building looked like it might have been a saloon; another an old bank.
Stacy pressed her face against a dirty window that still remained in one of the buildings and saw rows of old-fashioned desks inside. It must have been a schoolhouse.
She was tempted to go inside, although it looked completely bare except for the desks; maybe there were old books stashed somewhere. But when she looked at her wolves, she lost interest in exploring. They were all panting. Wink flopped down in the shade of the schoolhouse, looking hot and miserable. She had to find them water. Soon.
“You don’t suppose . . .” Stacy said, reaching into Noah’s pack and pulling out a canteen while looking up at the rickety water tower.
Noah eagerly ran over to the rusty pump that fed into a barrel at its base and pumped it several times. The pump hissed and sizzled and then spurted out a short blast of brown water before weakening to just a drip.
“Well, it was worth a try, Noah,” Stacy said, screwing the cap back on her canteen. “Let’s go, everyone.”
Stacy and the pack continued walking west from the ghost town through the desert, following the setting sun.
“Wow,” Stacy said, looking at the horizon. “I think sunsets in the mesa are one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.”
They wandered a bit longer. Stacy noticed everyone was yawning, herself included. She knew her wolves needed some type of liquid. Suddenly, she had an idea of how to get them rehydrated.
“Let’s set up temporary camp for the night before it gets too much darker,” she said to the group. “Here is just as good a place as any.”
The wolves circled back to where Stacy was standing and began prepping for the long night ahead of them. Basil and Noah started collecting rocks and positioning them in a circle so Stacy could build a fire. Everest was sniffing the area thoroughly, always on the lookout for potential danger. Tucker curled up with Page and Milo and began grooming them, while Wink continued to pick the last of the cactus needles out of his rump with his teeth.
“Addi, could you give me a hand?” Stacy called out to Addison. The amber-eyed wolf came over to where Stacy was standing in front of a towering prickly pear cactus. “Here, hold this, please.”
Stacy hung her leather satchel around Addison’s neck with the flap flipped open. Next, she took her hunting knife and began chopping the purple fruit off the top of the cactus cladodes. Once there were twenty or so of the fruit on the ground, Stacy carefully used her knife to spear them. Then she used a stick to knock them from the tip of her knife into the satchel Addison was holding.
When the satchel was full of fruit, Stacy and Addison went over to the circle of stones, where Basil and Noah had placed a pile of kindling. Examining the wood more closely, Stacy saw that the wolves had gathered dried sagebrush branches. Those’ll probably smell good when they burn, she thought. There was even a small heap of additional branches outside the stone circle, so that they could keep the fire burning for as long as they needed.
Taking out the flint and steel Basil had given her, Stacy rested the end of the C-shaped steel near the pile of kindling and scraped it quickly with the flint. There was no spark. Stacy tried again, and again. This should be easier for me than for Basil, she thought, frustrated. I have hands, after all!
Basil nudged the flint with her nose, changing the angle slightly, then nodded to Stacy. Gritting her teeth, Stacy tried again.
This time, a bright spark flew off the flint and onto the kindling. Dropping onto her belly, Stacy blew gently on the spark, coaxing it into a flame. Basil panted approvingly.
Once the fire was burning brightly, Stacy turned to Addison and took the satchel from her, pouring the prickly pears out onto the ground.
“Careful,” she told the wolves, who were looking at them curiously. “Those thorns are sharp!” The egg-shaped purple fruits were covered with dozens of tiny hairlike thorns. She had to be careful not to touch the skin of the pear, or the thorns would embed themselves into her hands. Stacy grabbed a pointy sage branch from the pile and speared one of the pears with it. She held it over the fire until the thorns had been singed off. After letting it cool, she picked up her old hunting knife and cut into the fruit, making a deep slit in its skin. Inside, she could see the dark purple fruit, studded with tiny seeds.
Stacy chopped it into several pieces. “Try this,” she said to Addison and Basil.
The female wolves nosed the fruit warily. They had gotten used to eating pumpkin and sometimes apples or berries, but prickly pear was far from an Arctic wolf’s natural diet.
Stacy picked up a piece of the pulpy fruit and popped it into her own mouth. “Oh!” she gasped in delight. The watery juice flooded her dry mouth, beginning to quench her thirst. “It’s as good as a drink,” she explained. Basil and Addison, encouraged, each took a bite.
Stacy peeled pears until she, Page, and the wolves weren’t thirsty anymore. They also shared a couple of loaves of bread and some dried berries, almost the last of what she had brought from their pantry back at the cave. She offered a pear to Milo, but he seemed happy to flap through the air, hunting insects.
By the time the moon was high in the sky, everyone had had enough to eat. We’ll have to find new food sources soon, Stacy thought. The mesa had gotten chillier after the sun set, and she was glad they had the crackling fire to keep them warm. She and Page and the wolves curled up together as they always did. Tonight, Stacy rested her head on Tucker’s back and gazed up at the glittering stars. She pulled her necklace from beneath her striped shirt and looked at the charms as they reflected the starlight. My human parents gave these to me, she thought. For a moment, it felt as if they were with her and her pack.
Just as Stacy was drifting off to sleep, a loud coyote howl rang out over the mesa.
Thirteen
WITHIN SECONDS, AN entire cacophony of coyote howls could be heard, first coming from the north. And then, a minute later, another pack replying from the south. Stacy and her pack were caught in the middle.
“What do we do?” Stacy whispered, straining to see any of her wolves’ faces with the low light from the embers that were left of their campfire. Everest opened one eye and twitched an ear at her. Tucker yawned.
Stacy realized the wolves were unfazed by the coyotes. Interesting, she thought. While the idea of dozens of scrappy coyotes was terrifying to her, Stacy’s wolves knew their place at the top of the food chain and were completely unworried. She instantly felt safer and nestled in closer to Page and Tucker. Finally, she drifted off to sleep, the coyote howls echoing in her ears.
The next morning, the group set off in search of a better campsite. Somewhere a little less out in the open and with a water source, and (if Stacy had her way) not in the middle of rival coyote packs.
They headed south toward the hoodoos, much to Stacy’s delight. She’d read a page about them in an H encyclopedia book she had. She had pored over the pages for honeybees, hoodoos, horses, horticulture, and hot springs. And lamented that she didn’t have books for more of the letters of the alphabet. Stacy had been especially fascinated by the hoodoos—how majestic they were . . . how each one was unique, kind of like the mesa’s fingerprints . . . how they were actually formed by water, but now resided in dry desert biomes. She was quite excited to see one in person.
As they approached the hoodoos, Stacy hopped onto Wink’s back so she could stare up at them without tripping. She couldn’t get over how tall they were. And up close she could see that they almost appeared to be striped, with different-colored striations in the rocks.
Suddenly there was a bat blocking her view.
“Milo, move,” Stacy said, swatting the air gently, not to actually hit Milo but to get her point across that he was blocking her breathtaking view of the hoodoos.
But Milo was relentless. He circled around Stacy’s head and then flew over to Page, whose ears were swiveling wildly.
“Wait, a rescue?” Stacy asked. She knew Milo could alert them to an animal rescue at any time, but for some reason Stacy had assumed it would be after they had settled into their mesa home and built a proper campsite. But an animal in trouble had to be their priority.
“All right, Milo,” Stacy said. “Lead the way!”
The wolves and Page raced down the steep trails surrounding the hoodoos with Stacy still on Wink’s back. Stacy was relieved she wasn’t running herself when she looked over the side of the switchbacks they were traversing and saw the small rocks rolling straight down the sides of the thin trail they were on.
Milo came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the trail, causing all the wolves to dig their paws into the red dirt, sending more rocks and pebbles careening off the trail and into the ravines on either side of them. Stacy’s eyes followed the falling rocks as they rolled down and down until they landed about twenty feet below her at the bottom of the ravine next to a small donkey. A donkey!
The donkey was gray with patches of white on his ears and his muzzle. He had a saddle, a saddlebag, and a striped blanket draped over his back. He didn’t appear injured, but he looked sad. Stacy couldn’t tell if he looked so sad because that’s how all donkeys looked, or if it was because he was at the bottom of a ravine.
“He’s stuck,” Stacy said. “It’s too steep for him to climb up.”
Stacy hopped off Wink and, before she could form a plan with the wolves, she was sliding (or falling, rather) down the red sand on the side of the ravine. She landed with a soft thud next to the donkey.
“Oops!” Stacy said, hopping up and steadying herself by placing her hands on the donkey’s back. “Well, I can see how you could have slid down here accidentally. I’m just going to climb back up and talk to my wolf pack about how best to rescue you. Don’t worry, they aren’t interested in eating you. We do this kind of thing all the time. Animal rescues, that is, not finding donkeys in ravines next to hoodoos. No, that’s definitely a first.” The donkey nosed curiously at her face, and Stacy patted him on his muzzle. “I’m rambling. You don’t understand me. I’m going to gooooo . . . but I’ll be right back.”
Stacy started to walk up the side of the ravine, but slid right back down to where she started with every step she took.
Okay, this should make for an interesting animal rescue. It appears that I need rescuing now, too. Stacy peered up at her wolves and Page, who were all staring down at her with concerned expressions.
“Not to worry, guys!” Stacy hollered up to them. “I came down to, uh, assess the situation. Noah, could you please throw me that rope from your pack?”
Noah reached into the pack, pulled out the rope with his teeth, and tossed it down to where Stacy and the donkey were standing, keeping one end of it in his mouth.
“Great!” Stacy shouted. “Okay, now I’m going to need a bunch of small, sturdy sticks, about three feet in length. I think I saw some dead bushes a little ways back on the trail that you might be able to break.”
The wolves and Page disappeared for a few minutes. One by one they returned with sticks in their mouths that they then tossed down to Stacy. While they continued tossing down the sticks, Stacy rummaged through the donkey’s saddlebag for anything that might prove useful to their current situation. There wasn’t much, but there was rope—good, sturdy climbing rope—and that was all that Stacy needed to begin to formulate an escape plan.
She took one of the sticks and lashed it onto the climbing rope so that a piece of the stick poked out from either side of the rope. She repeated this, spacing the sticks about two feet apart, until she’d reached the end of the rope. Then, she tied off
a large loop at one of the ends and tossed it up the hill, where Everest caught it.
“All right,” she muttered to herself. “Time to see if this works.”
Leaning forward onto the slope of the ravine, Stacy grabbed hold of the highest stick she could reach on the rope. She held the stick with both hands on opposite sides of the rope and then did the same with her feet, stepping up onto the stick closest to her boots. She wobbled back and forth for a bit, but it worked—the stick that her feet were on sank into the sand, giving her a sturdy foothold that prevented her from sliding back down. The line of sticks would form a track to support her feet as she walked.
“Okay,” Stacy said. “It works for me. Whether I can teach a donkey to do it is another matter entirely.”
Stacy looked up at Everest. He was holding the rope in his mouth and suddenly realized what Stacy was about to do. He quickly motioned for all the other wolves to grab hold of the rope. Meanwhile, Noah tightened his hold on the vine rope that Stacy was grasping as a guide.
“Okay, here goes nothing,” Stacy said, hopping onto the donkey and holding the vine rope in one hand while taking the reins in her other. The donkey brayed loudly and then took a step forward.
“Easy,” Stacy said softly. “Easy, boy.”
Stacy had never used reins before. She’d never ridden a horse before, let alone a donkey. But she realized she was going to need to learn how to use reins pretty quickly if she had any hope of getting this donkey out of the ravine.
Luckily, the donkey had naturally found the first stick on his own when he’d stepped forward. Now, the tricky part would be getting him to take the perfect step forward to the next one, in hopes he would find his footing again. If Stacy could get him to do that, she was pretty confident she could guide him in a straight line up and out of the ravine. But if he didn’t step in the right places, the track of sticks in the sand wouldn’t stop his hooves from sliding backward.
Stacy and the donkey walked back and forth for what must have been half an hour. Stacy imagined they must have looked as if they were dancing. It was midday now and the sun was directly over Stacy’s head, beating down on her and the donkey. She was covered in sweat, but determined to succeed in this rescue.
