Mission to Moon Farm

by K. E. Rocha

  For Barbara Ferguson Young

  Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  Property of Spencer Plain

  Egg in the Hole Productions Thanks

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Spencer Plain raced down the wooden dock. His eyes were glued to the bear cub in the river. He had to get her out of there, and fast. He could practically hear the clock ticking in his head.

  The bear gave a feeble kick, fighting the current that threatened to carry her downriver. Spencer took a flying leap and launched himself off the end of the dock. He plunged into the cold water, kicked back up to the surface, and swam as hard as he could straight at the bear. As soon as Spencer reached the cub, he clamped one arm around her and started back toward shore.

  Thank goodness she’s just a cub, Spencer thought. His muscles were straining. He wasn’t sure he’d be able to swim at all if she was any bigger.

  Something scratched his arm, his lungs were burning, and sopping wet chestnut-colored fur kept getting in his eyes. Spencer ignored all of it. He couldn’t let anything distract him from getting the cub out of the water now. He swam as hard as he could until his feet connected with the riverbed. Almost there! Spencer pulled the bear through the shallow water, then collapsed on the shore.

  “Time!” a voice called from the dock.

  Spencer sat up, trying to catch his breath. Beside him, Kate Weaver, his bear cub best friend, popped up to all fours. She gave a huge shake of her fur and drenched Spencer in a fresh coat of river water. She had mastered her drowning act in order to make Spencer’s river rescue training feel more real, but now the training exercise was over. She didn’t have to pretend she was in deep trouble anymore.

  “You did great, Spencer!” Kate exclaimed. Spencer shook water out of his ear, relieved. Even though he knew Kate hadn’t really been in danger, he always felt better when the exercise was finished and she returned to her playful, enthusiastic self. Kate scooped up a nearby towel in her teeth and swung her head toward Spencer, offering it to him.

  “Thanks, Kate.” He took the towel. “I think your BEAR-COM got me again,” he added, showing her the scratch on his arm.

  “I’m sorry.” The cub dipped her snout up close to the pink scratch. Her eyes were wide.

  Spencer shrugged. He didn’t want Kate to feel bad. “It’s okay. It’s kind of like a battle wound.” He glanced over at the BEAR-COM fastened around her neck, the only sparkly BEAR-COM in Bearhaven. The high-tech device translated the growls of the bears’ language, Ragayo, into English. Kate had decorated her BEAR-COM with pink crystals, and those crystals kept scratching Spencer during river rescues.

  It wasn’t like he could ask Kate to take her BEAR-COM off during his training. Without it, they wouldn’t have any way of talking to each other. At least not the way they could now. Kate had taught Spencer a few words in Ragayo, but without those phrases, and without the BEAR-COM, they wouldn’t get very far in these rescue training sessions.

  “Don’t worry, it’s just a scratch.” Spencer moved his arm away from Kate’s inspection.

  “If you say so!” Her enthusiasm returned. “That was your fastest river rescue yet! Right, Aldo?” she called to her older brother, Spencer’s training tutor. The much larger black bear was padding down the riverbank toward them. Aldo was carrying Spencer’s backpack in his mouth and couldn’t answer.

  Spencer jumped to his feet and rushed over to take the backpack. He was too excited to hear if he’d broken his river rescue record to wait any longer.

  “You’re definitely getting faster, Spencer,” Aldo answered once he’d released the bag from between his jaws. “That was fifty-eight seconds. Well done.”

  “You beat your record!” Kate cheered.

  “Finally!” Spencer had been training after school all week and up to now hadn’t been able to get Kate to shore in under a minute. He couldn’t wait to record his new time.

  “Finally? I’d say you’re a pretty quick learner, little man. And, Kate,” Aldo went on, “your bear-in-need-of-rescue performance has gotten too convincing. I almost jumped in to save you myself.” The bear nuzzled his little sister playfully.

  Kate took a goofy, four-legged bow. “Spencer is training to be an operative, but I’m training to star in the next Bearhaven play.”

  Spencer laughed as he dug around in his backpack, pushing aside his sneakers and T-shirt. He imagined the cub taking her bow in the middle of a brightly lit stage. The idea was less crazy to him now than it would have been two weeks ago. Two weeks ago, he hadn’t even known that Bearhaven, a secret community of rescued bears and their families, existed. Now he was living in it.

  Spencer’s hand closed around the notebook he’d been searching for. He pulled it out, then grabbed a pen from the backpack’s front pocket.

  STORM was written in big bold letters across the front of Spencer’s training notebook. He flipped to the first page, where he and Aldo had outlined the skills Spencer would need to master in order to become an operative. The list was based on exercises Bearhaven’s security squad, the Bear Guard, had to do in their own training.

  Aldo was a new member of the guard himself, with the silver cuffs on his front legs to prove it. Spencer wouldn’t get cuffs when he completed his training, because he wasn’t trying to become an actual member of the Bear Guard. He was training so he could become a human operative and get approval to go on bear rescue missions. He’d go with a team of other operatives to save bears from dangerous places and evil people who treated them badly. Then he’d help bring the bears to Bearhaven, following in his parents’ footsteps and joining them in the bear rescue work they had been doing for Spencer’s whole life. The only thing was: Spencer had no idea about his mom and dad’s work until two weeks ago when their disappearance from a bear rescue mission had landed him here.

  Spencer tried not to think about the fact that his parents’ whereabouts were still a mystery. Everyone kept telling him Mom and Dad were closer than ever to making it back to Bearhaven. They told him he didn’t need to worry. But aside from STORM training and going to school with Kate, there wasn’t much that could truly distract him from thinking about his missing parents.

  Spencer turned his attention back to his notebook, flipping through it. Each section started with a big bold letter that stood for one part of his training. S was for stealth, T for tree climbing, O for operative communications, R for river rescues, and M for muscle. He turned back to the R section of the notebook and wrote 58 seconds on the next empty line, along with the date.

  “Sun’s setting, you two. I have to get to a guard workout soon,” Aldo said. “How about you run home, Spencer. Record it in the ‘Muscle’ section. Kate can set a pace for you.”

  “Okay. Thanks for—”

  “What pace?” Kate interrupted. “Fast, slow, or in the middle?” She always took her part in Spencer’s training very seriously. The cub was just as dedicated
to Spencer becoming an operative as he was.

  “Between in the middle and fast,” Aldo answered, giving Kate something to puzzle over for the next few minutes.

  Spencer returned his training notebook to his backpack and pulled on his T-shirt. He laced up his sneakers, then got to his feet and slung his backpack over his shoulder. “Hey Aldo, stealth or operative communications tomorrow?”

  “Let’s give tree climbing another try.”

  “Oh.” Of all the things Spencer did in STORM training, tree climbing was his least favorite.

  “On your marks,” Aldo said. Obviously, tomorrow’s training wasn’t up for discussion. Kate rushed over to get into position beside Spencer, her eyes already zeroing in on the path that led into the center of Bearhaven, toward the Weavers’ home.

  “Get set.”

  Spencer took a deep breath. He didn’t know how Kate would interpret Aldo’s instructions, but he was determined to stay with her, no matter how fast she decided to go.

  “GO!” Aldo cried from behind them. Spencer took off running. In the same instant, a chestnut-colored streak of fur flew out ahead of him.

  “A little slower! Closer to in the middle!” Aldo yelled, but it was too late. Kate was setting the pace, and that pace was fast.

  Spencer burst through the Weavers’ front door a few paces behind Kate. He didn’t slow down as he careened into the large, honey-colored room. Instead, he sped up and, using his last little bit of energy, hurtled over the armrest of the closest couch. He stretched out midair and belly flopped onto bear-sized cushions.

  “Nice!” someone called. Spencer’s body sank into the soft couch. He lay there for a second, catching his breath after the hard run back from the river. There were things about Bearhaven Spencer knew he’d miss when he went back to his real home. Entering a room by belly flopping onto an extra-large couch was definitely one of them.

  Spencer swung his feet to the ground and stood up. Winston and Jo-Jo Weaver were in the kitchen, arranging wooden plates around the table for dinner. The “nice” comment had to have come from one of them.

  Winston and Jo-Jo were two more of Kate’s brothers. Unlike Aldo, they weren’t older than Kate by very much, and it showed. For one thing, they weren’t as big as Aldo yet. For another, they were the ones who’d taught Spencer the belly flop move. At first, Spencer had thought Winston and Jo-Jo were tricking him by teaching him something that would only get him in trouble. But then their mom, Bunny Weaver, had walked into the room during the tutorial, and she hadn’t minded the belly flops at all. Cubs were always allowed to run and climb on things like they would in the wild, and couches were just the same to them as trees and boulders.

  “I’m glad to see some of your training is paying off, Spencer. But I’m going to guess Aldo didn’t teach you that move,” said Lisle Weaver, the eldest of the Weaver siblings, who was in the kitchen, piling wooden platters high with food.

  “Winston and Jo-Jo taught him,” Kate chimed in. She’d already taken her seat at the table and was resting her muzzle on the stone surface. Her brown snout was only inches from a platter of troutloaf, a dish Spencer knew tasted something like fish sticks and meatloaf combined. Some of the bears’ food was delicious, but Spencer wouldn’t put troutloaf in that category.

  “They did,” Spencer agreed as he slid off his backpack and dropped it beside the couch. He was surprised to see Lisle putting dinner on the table. Usually, Bunny was in charge of dinner, and Lisle spent most evenings with Fitch, her father’s assistant and the bear she was going to marry at the end of the summer.

  “So did you learn how to get insects out of a log in school today, Spencer?” Jo-Jo teased, making space on the table for Lisle’s platters of food. He and Winston loved to poke fun at Spencer for attending the bears’ school.

  “Actually … yeah, I did,” Spencer answered. He didn’t mind the teasing. It wasn’t like he had any choice: Professor Weaver and Uncle Mark told him he had to attend school with the cubs. Besides, learning about bear stuff from real bears was pretty cool, and it certainly beat his sixth grade science class back home.

  “Just wait,” said Winston. “Right now you’re the only human in our school, but by the time you leave Bearhaven, you’ll be the only bear in your human school!”

  “Where are Mom and Dad?” Kate asked, moving her snout away from the troutloaf just long enough to sniff for her parents. Spencer glanced around the large room. It was split into two spaces: one half was the family room, where he stood now, with couches arranged around a huge fireplace; in the other half of the room was a massive stone kitchen. Off the kitchen, a bear-sized set of stairs led down to the lower level of the Weavers’ house. Professor Weaver and Bunny must not be here, Spencer realized when neither of the Weaver parents appeared at the top of the steps for dinner.

  “They were called to a last-minute Bear Council meeting.” Lisle said. “Ready for dinner, Spencer?”

  “Thanks, Lisle,” Spencer said, sitting down between Lisle and Kate. Beside Spencer’s wooden plate there was a fork, knife, and spoon. He was the only one who needed utensils. The bears used their claws to spear things, or they just put their mouths to their food and ate.

  “You’re welcome. Eat up, everyone.”

  After two weeks in Bearhaven, Spencer was starting to recognize the different dishes the Weavers served. Tonight they were having troutloaf, moss slaw, berry cakes, and tons of salad. The bears dug in. Spencer reached for a berry cake. Winston did the same.

  “Yikes!” Spencer jerked his hand back just in time to avoid a painful run-in with Winston’s claws.

  “Oops,” Winston growled, spearing the berry cake he’d been eyeing. “Sorry, Spencer.” The bear chomped the berry cake off his claw and gulped it down, then reached to fill his plate with food.

  “It’s okay.” Spencer was glad not to have lost a finger. “I’ll just wait until you guys finish getting your food.”

  Once the bears turned their attention from the platters of food to eating the heaping portions on their own plates, Spencer served himself.

  “What’s the Bear Council meeting about?” he asked, helping himself to a very little bit of troutloaf.

  “They didn’t say.” Lisle tilted her head. “The Bear Council tends to keep things under wraps.” Spencer knew all about that. The Bear Council was the group of Bearhaven’s wisest, most important bears. They made all the major decisions for the community, but their meetings were almost always restricted to council members only. Just getting into their meeting room was nearly impossible if you weren’t a member. Spencer had managed to break the rules and get in there once before, but not everyone had been very happy about that.

  Spencer started to ask if Lisle thought the meeting might be about Mom and Dad, but Kate was already changing the subject.

  “Spencer, if your parents get back to Bearhaven tomorrow, will you leave right away?”

  “Um … ” Spencer didn’t know what to say. For a second, the idea of Mom and Dad walking through the Weavers’ front door tomorrow made him so happy he couldn’t think of anything else.

  “Well, will you?” Kate pushed.

  “I don’t know.” Spencer shrugged. He didn’t want to disappoint Kate, but when Mom and Dad finally did get to Bearhaven, Spencer thought they would all leave for home together right away. “But even if I do, I’ll come back to Bearhaven,” he added. “I’ll have to finish my operative training, and after that, I’ll come back all the time so I can use my training and go on bear rescue missions with my parents.”

  “You won’t miss my concert though, will you?” Kate asked. “No matter what?”

  “Nope,” Spencer answered. “There’s no way I’m missing that.” He filled his mouth with a big bite of salad so he couldn’t say any more.

  “Your concert?” Jo-Jo exclaimed.

  “Since when did it become your concert?” said Winston.

  Kate rolled her eyes dramatically. Spencer shoveled more salad into his mouth to hide
his grin. Winston and Jo-Jo were right: Kate was really only one member of the Weaver Family Singers. Winston, Jo-Jo, Aldo, Lisle, and Bunny would all be up there together, singing with her when the family band performed their concert in Bearhaven’s town center.

  “Oh, leave her alone.” Lisle shook her head at her younger brothers. “Kate’s just excited about her first solo.”

  “SOLO!” Winston hooted. “It’s just ten words in the middle of the song!”

  “It’s twelve words,” Kate huffed. “Twelve words that I sing alone. As in solo.”

  Winston and Jo-Jo rolled off their seats they were laughing so hard. The second their paws hit the ground, they were tripping over each other, racing toward the stairs.

  “Thanks for dinner, Lisle!” Jo-Jo called over his shoulder. “I have to go show Winston what it means to bow down to the Salmon King!”

  “No way!” Winston yelled over his brother as they thundered down the stairs.

  “Well, I’m glad they’re gone,” Kate said, once the clamoring of paws had quieted.

  “Oh, Spencer!” Lisle exclaimed as she stood up from the table. “I was waiting to tell you, your uncle Mark isn’t going to be able to call tonight. He’s in the council meeting, too.” The silver-colored bear started to clear the table using her mouth and the special handles that were attached to each of the now-empty platters.

  “Oh. Okay.” Spencer didn’t try to hide his disappointment. After Mom and Dad’s disappearance, Uncle Mark had pulled Spencer out of school and brought him to Bearhaven for his own safety. Spencer hadn’t exactly stayed put—he’d snuck onto the next bear rescue mission, determined to help—but since returning to Bearhaven, he’d been the only human here.

  With Mom and Dad missing, Uncle Mark was the only family Spencer really had. They talked on video conference calls every night so they could at least see each other even though they weren’t in the same place. Their calls always made Spencer miss his family a little bit less, and Uncle Mark usually gave Spencer an update on Mom and Dad. He’d been hoping for more good news from Uncle Mark tonight, and he’d wanted to tell his uncle about the progress he was making in STORM training.