The Long Trail Home (Quartz Creek Ranch)

by Amber J. Keyser

  “Sounds good,” said Paul. “Can you manage without me so I can get all zen with my fly rod?”

  She waved him off. “Pshaw! We’ve got this.”

  After Paul had trekked out of the campsite, Madison started herding everyone else into action. “Time for the great eagle adventure.”

  Sam had been up since dawn, it seemed. He had already completed five sudoku puzzles and a crossword. Now, he had a baseball cap on backward and binoculars slung around his neck. He tapped a pencil on the edge of his bird notebook. “Come on, people. Time’s a-wasting!”

  Lauren sidled up next to him. “Can I see your bird list?”

  His face brightened. He flipped the notebook open and started to read. “Nighthawk. Did you see them last night? Super cool. Northern flicker. Hairy woodpecker. Scrub jay. Cliff swallow . . .”

  Rivka tuned him out.

  Cat finally crawled out of the tent and joined her. “Where’s Paul?”

  “Gone fishing.”

  Cat’s face fell. “What? He’s gone already?”

  Rivka nodded. “I heard him tell Madison he wouldn’t be back until this afternoon.”

  “Crap.”

  “You wanted to go?”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s a bummer,” said Rivka. “Apparently, we’re all going eagle watching.”

  Cat shot a death glare at Sam. “Great. Just freaking great. I can hardly wait to spend all day on a cliff top watching eagles.” She grabbed the bannock Madison had saved for her, slumped back into the tent, flopped on her sleeping bag, and buried her nose in a Swamp Thing comic book.

  “Mountain chickadee, pygmy nuthatch, song sparrow,” Sam droned on.

  Rivka looked at her sleeping bag with longing. What about reading? What about being lazy? Hadn’t Madison said that was her favorite thing about camping?

  But apparently the bird-watching trip up the mountain was not optional. Rivka went to work grooming Rowdy. As she brushed him, she listened to the buzzing, twittering, whirring sounds all around. At least during the daytime, nothing sounded like ghost children.

  “Come on, Cat,” said Madison, shaking the top of the tent. “You need to saddle up your horse.”

  Her response came through the zipped door. “Not coming.”

  “We need to stick together,” said Madison, pursing her lips. When she made that face, she reminded Rivka of her mom.

  And the arguments.

  And her refusals.

  “I’m tired and my butt hurts,” said Cat. “I hate birds.”

  Madison unzipped the door of the tent and crouched. Rivka couldn’t hear what she was saying, but after a moment, Cat crawled out scowling.

  \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\

  Cat had been distant since Paul’s ghost story.

  Things did not improve once the eagle adventure was underway.

  They rode single file for as long as the trail followed the river, and Cat complained about being stuck last, eating everyone else’s dust. When the trail turned away from the water, Fletch led them through a jumbled section of rocky outcrops. Vertical walls rose above their heads, throwing them into shadows. The trail twisted and turned. At every fork, Fletch consulted a map that Mr. Bridle had marked up for them.

  Rivka, who was riding second to last, turned around in the saddle to talk to Cat. “This is cool, isn’t it? Like being in a maze.” Cat glowered at her so ferociously that Rivka whipped back around in the saddle without another word.

  An hour later, the rock maze spat them out onto a wide expanse of grass, and the horses fanned out. Fletch and Sam trotted ahead, making for the cliff with the eagle’s nest. Even without binoculars, Rivka could see the giant pile of sticks on a narrow ledge. The rock below was stained white from their droppings.

  Madison and the three girls spread out until they were all riding side by side.

  “Hey, look!” Lauren said, pointing excitedly. A huge bird swooped over the edge of the cliff and soared over their heads.

  Rivka craned her neck to watch it pass over. “I’ve never seen an eagle before.”

  “I wish my mom were here,” said Lauren. “She’d love it.”

  “Is she a bird-watcher like Sam?” Rivka asked.

  “Nope, but she loves all things science and nature. That’s the best part of homeschooling.”

  The eagle circled higher and higher until it was only a dark speck in the sky.

  “Don’t you get tired of being with your mom all the time?” Rivka asked, wondering what it would be like to have her mom teaching her stuff.

  “Not really,” said Lauren. “She’s a great teacher.”

  Cat made a disgusted sound. “ ‘My mom’s a great teacher,’ ” she mocked.

  “Well, she is,” Lauren said, bristling.

  Cat rolled her eyes. “Lucky you.”

  Rivka shifted uneasily in her saddle.

  “Come on, Cat,” Madison urged. “Don’t pick a fight.”

  “What I want to know,” Cat went on in the same needling tone, “is why your super-sweet, perfect mother shipped you off here for smoking a few measly cigarettes.”

  “Cat—” Madison warned.

  “Seriously,” Cat blustered. “Who flies off the handle for something like that? Her mom must not be that great.”

  Rivka could see that Lauren was getting more and more upset. So were the horses. Rowdy must have sensed her discomfort because he shifted nervously beneath her. Lauren’s grip on the reins was getting tighter and tighter, and her horse was getting twitchy.

  “She thought I was getting in with a bad crowd,” Lauren protested.

  “You’re homeschooled, for gosh sakes. Where’s the crowd?”

  Lauren reined her horse to a stop. “If you have to know, I got the cigarettes from a girl at my fencing studio. And you know what?” She was yelling now. “She was a lot like you—trouble!”

  Cat’s face contorted and turned bright red, and she kicked her heels into Bucky’s sides. When the horse jolted into a run, Lauren’s horse startled and she dropped her reins. Madison made a grab for them but missed, and the horse bolted with Lauren clinging to its back.

  “Stay here!” Madison yelled at Rivka as she urged Snow White to follow Lauren.

  Cat wheeled around on Bucky and raced back the way they had come.

  “Stop!” Rivka yelled after her, but Cat kept going.

  Panic buzzed through Rivka. Fletch and Sam were out of sight. Madison had caught up with Lauren, and both horses were slowing down together. But Cat was leaving all by herself.

  Buddy system. Buddy system. Buddy system.

  The words pounded along with her thudding pulse.

  They were supposed to stick together.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Rivka watched Cat disappear behind an outcrop of rocks.

  Her stomach knotted into a hard ball, and she thought she might throw up. Going after Cat definitely meant getting in trouble—big trouble. But she had to do something. She couldn’t leave Cat alone in the big wild everything. Especially not when she was upset. Ma Etty wanted them to look out for each other, and Rivka didn’t want anything bad to happen to Cat. Especially not now that they were starting to be friends.

  Rachel Jacobs, the pioneer woman with her own cattle brand, would have gone after Cat. No doubt about it. Rivka sat tall in the saddle, leaned forward, and gave a squeeze with her legs. The sturdy pony broke into a trot, and Rivka urged him on the trail after Cat.

  It seemed like it took forever to get back to the place where the trail dove into the rocks, and when they did, it was darker inside the narrow passage than she remembered. She called to Cat and got nothing back but her own voice, echoing in the shadows.

  Rowdy paused, sensing her hesitation, and swung his head from side to side like there was something making him nervous too. She thought of the ghost children in Paul’s story and shuddered.

  “It’s okay,” she murmured to Rowdy, trying to convince herself as well.

 
Together, they headed into the maze.

  At the first fork in the trail, Rivka asked Rowdy to halt so she could figure out which was the right way to go. He shook his head, and the bridle jingled. Then he waited. Suddenly it was quiet. Her ears strained to hear some sound of Cat ahead of her.

  Nothing.

  Rivka tipped her head up to the slot of blue sky visible overhead. A whistling, keening sound filtered down into the shadowed silence.

  “It’s wind,” she told herself. “Wind overhead.”

  But it rose and fell almost like voices, and she shivered.

  “Cat!” she called again, and her voice reverberated off the walls of rock.

  She looked again at the fork in the trail. The sand on the left-hand side was trampled. That must have been the way they’d come. She leaned forward, and Rowdy followed her body’s cue. As they walked, she scanned for landmarks, anything that might tell her which way they’d come. Cat had to be heading for camp.

  She wouldn’t run away, would she?

  Out here, there was nowhere to run. Rivka clung to the idea of the campfire and Paul. He’d be there, or he’d be back soon. He’d make everything okay.

  The path twisted and turned. The walls were even higher overhead now. At the next fork, Rowdy was walking on solid rock, not sand. Nothing looked familiar. There were no hoof prints to follow. Rivka had no idea which one led back to camp.

  Rivka stopped again to listen, trying not to think of ghosts and disaster. For a long moment, she waited, but the fear of being lost rose in great waves. Rivka was about to head down the right-hand trail when she felt Rowdy stiffen underneath her. His ears flicked forward and back and in all directions.

  All at once, she heard a tangle of sounds, tumbling against the rock walls. A guttural snarl from some large animal very nearby. The terrified scream of a horse. The pounding of hooves.

  And then a high-pitched shriek and the thud of a body on the ground.

  Rowdy snorted and stomped, shifting nervously from hoof to hoof.

  Rivka tried to calm him, stroking his neck and murmuring to him. Easy, boy. Easy, boy. Her own breath was coming a mile a minute. She had to see what had happened. She had to find Cat!

  The urge to hurry raced through her.

  “Come on,” she said to Rowdy, clucking her tongue at him, but no matter how hard she dug her heels into his sides, the pony wouldn’t move.

  Rivka slid off his back and slipped the reins over Rowdy’s head.

  The rock walls pressed against her.

  The wind voices twisted overhead.

  Hurry, hurry, hurry.

  She was small, so small, nothing but a speck of dust.

  Rivka clutched the reins, one hand near Rowdy’s chin and the other near the knot in the leather.

  She had to keep going.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  What Rivka saw around the next bend made her heart batter her ribcage.

  Cat was sprawled in the middle of the trail.

  Terror dug claws into Rivka.

  Was she . . . ?

  Rivka couldn’t think it. She pulled the pony toward Cat.

  Suddenly Cat’s body convulsed. Her mouth opened and closed, sucking air, trying to fill her stunned lungs. One of her arms twitched and fell back against the dirt.

  Rivka fought the urge to turn and run.

  Cat’s eyes widened when she saw Rivka, and her ragged gasps of breath sped up.

  “It’s okay,” Rivka murmured even though she was pretty sure this was about as far from okay as you could get. Cat’s pupils seemed too large, and she moaned when she tried to sit up. Rivka put a hand on her shoulder and eased her down. “Don’t move yet. Let’s figure out where you’re hurt.”

  “Everywhere,” Cat groaned. “Everything hurts.”

  Scattered bits of first aid from the babysitter class she’d taken came to mind. Don’t move the victim if you suspect a spinal injury. Stanch bleeding. Watch for signs of shock. It was a hodgepodge of words that seemed to mean next to nothing. Except the idea of wounds. Rivka ran her hands over Cat’s shoulders and down her arms and legs. She wasn’t bleeding anywhere. That was good.

  “Can you wiggle your fingers?” she asked.

  Cat wiggled.

  “How about your feet?”

  Cat’s boots traced an arc as she swung them.

  In the movies, an injured person got their eyes checked. Rivka bent over Cat’s face, holding up her index finger. “Watch my finger,” she said, moving it slowly from left to right and back again. Cat was tracking her, and her pupils were the same size. “You can see, right?” she asked.

  Cat closed her eyes. “I can see.”

  She took several labored breaths, wincing when she tried to breathe too deeply.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Hurts.”

  Cat still didn’t open her eyes, but her chest rose and fell more regularly.

  “Cat?”

  She opened her eyes and locked them with Rivka’s.

  “Do you want to try to sit up?” Rivka asked.

  The girl nodded.

  Rivka slid her arm under Cat’s shoulders, helped her into a sitting position, and unclipped her riding helmet.

  Cat wrapped her arms around herself, leaning heavily against Rivka. “My ribs hurt.”

  “Do you think they’re broken?”

  Cat tried to shrug but gasped at the pain. “Don’t know. Could be.”

  Inch by inch, pausing often so Cat could catch her breath, Rivka helped her move out of the center of the trail and find a rock to lean against. “Let’s rest a little and then figure out what we need to do,” she said, retrieving water and granola bars from Rowdy’s saddlebags.

  Cat nodded and took the water bottle.

  After a moment, Rivka asked, “What happened?”

  Cat shook her head slowly, looking down at her hands like they held some answer she couldn’t quite grasp. “I’m not sure. Everything happened so fast. Something scared Bucky. I hit the ground before I even knew what was happening.”

  Rivka glanced around the high-walled slot of rock they were in. The sun was nearly overhead now, and it pounded down on them. A few scraggly plants clung to life in the cracks, but other than that it was stark and empty. “What do you think it was?” she asked, remembering the snarl.

  “Ghost,” Cat said, grimacing at the joke no one in their right mind would think was funny.

  Rivka’s face tightened. “Could it have been a wolf?”

  “Paul said there weren’t any,” Cat wailed.

  “What about Bucky?” Rivka asked.

  “He took off that way.” Cat pointed down the trail. “We’ll never catch him. What if he’s lost?”

  Rivka bit her lower lip. “Aren’t they supposed to be able to find their own way home?”

  “What about us? What are we going to do?”

  Rivka took stock: two girls and one pony in the middle of nowhere. “We’re going to do what Rachel Jacobs would have done,” she said. “We’re getting out of this mess. We’ll try to follow Bucky. Can you ride?”

  Cat took a deep breath. “Let’s see.”

  Rivka stood, dusted the sand off her pants, and held out her hands. Cat took them, and Rivka could feel her shaking. “Ready?”

  Cat nodded.

  “On three,” said Rivka, and at the end of the countdown, she pulled Cat to her feet as gently as she could.

  “Oh, man,” said Cat, panting hard, but she stayed upright, looping her arm around Rivka’s shoulder.

  Getting her on Rowdy’s back was harder. Cat nearly fainted from the pain in her ribs, but the patient little pony stood still while Rivka helped her into the saddle. Once Cat was up, Rivka led the pony, and they set off in the direction Cat’s horse had fled.

  Cat didn’t complain again, but Rivka could tell that every step hurt. After about twenty minutes, they reached another fork in the trail and paused, peering down one path and then the other.

  “Does this look familia
r to you?” Rivka asked.

  “Not at all.”

  “Me either.”

  The weather was shifting. It was still hot, but clouds were gathering. Huge thunderheads billowed in the sky above, white and fluffy like sheep on top but dark and heavy with rain on the bottoms.

  The wind picked up.

  Rivka could hear it whistling overhead, and gusts of hot air billowed through the narrow canyon where they walked. Any trace of their passing had been scoured away by the wind.

  “Right or left?” asked Cat.

  Rivka looked from one path to the other. Nothing differentiated them. Rock, sand, and lime-green lichen in both directions. “Let’s take the wider path,” she suggested, and they did. After another half an hour, the temperature dropped suddenly. The air around them felt charged. Thunder rumbled in the distance. Somewhere not too far away, it was raining.

  “I need to rest,” said Cat, and Rivka nodded. Her feet ached in her cowboy boots.

  “Let’s go a little farther. Try to find some protection. I think it’s going to rain on us.”

  Around the next bend, the trail widened. The walls around them were less vertical and more like great jumbled piles of rock. It made Rivka think they might be close to a way out of the confusing twists and turns. A few scraggly pines grew out of the barest patches of soil. Behind them was a rock overhang that looked promising. There were also a few tufts of grass for Rowdy.

  After Cat was as comfortable as she could be, Rivka decided to unsaddle Rowdy and replace his bridle with the halter and rope that were in her saddlebag. As soon as she did, he smacked his lips and went for the grass. “Silly old pig,” she said, scratching him under the forelock. “You must be tired too.” She tied Rowdy to one of the trees within reach of the grass and put his tack on a rocky ledge.

  When she plopped down next to Cat, she groaned. “I’m so tired.”

  Rivka checked her watch. Almost four o’clock. Surely, Madison and Fletch and Paul were looking for them. Surely, they would find them soon. But find them where? She had no doubt that they had taken a wrong turn. This bowl-shaped area of rock and sand was unmistakable. They had not come this way.