Chapter 2

Many years ago, bald eagles were hunted for sport. They were also killed to protect livestock and fishing spots. As a result, eagles almost became extinct. It’s been illegal to hunt them since 1940.

After the goons crashed their way through the trees and brush, back toward the way they’d come, I heard three barn owl hoots in a row and answered with my chickadee call. Chick-a-dee-dee-dee!

Packrat peeked out from the narrow gorge on the floor at the other end of the canyon. I raised my arm to give the all-clear signal, and he raised his in return to say he’d be right over.

I attached the geocache box to my backpack strap with a utility clip. Then I reached out from the cave, leapt to a pine-tree trunk, and shimmied down. I waved Packrat over to my right, toward another small cave opening. This one was on the ground level, so we’d have something to duck into if those goons doubled back to look down on the canyon.

“We’re in big trouble,” I whispered. Putting the geocache box on the ground, I filled him in on everything the bad guys had said about losing their stuff, and what their boss would think.

“So, they chased us ’cause they thought we had their box?” Packrat stared at it like it’d grown horns and legs. “But it was hidden at our geocache coordinates! Kind of.” He took a deep breath, and slowly let it out. “It wasn’t in the exact same spot, but the finders sometimes mess up when they put them back.” He sighed. “Okay. So, we just open it up, right? If it has their—what did you say, parts?—it’s theirs. If it has our prizes and logbook, then it’s ours.”

We stared at it. Finally, for the second time in the last ten minutes, I reached out a hand to flip the big latch.

“Wait!” Packrat grabbed my arm to stop me. “I changed my mind. If we don’t open it—if we leave it right here,” he said, pointing at the ground, “we can honestly say we have no clue what they’re talking about if anyone asks us about anything we might or might not have seen out here.”

“Are you kidding?” I said. “I have to know! If it’s not our stuff, then what was so important that two hulk goons in suits chased us through the woods and are now wicked scared ’cause they lost it?” I shook my head. “Uh-uh. I gotta know. Besides … umm … they found my pen.”

“So?” Packrat said. “A pen isn’t—”

“The one with Maxwell Moose on it. And my campground name. And the address.”

“What?!” Packrat cried.

I ran a hand through my short brown hair. “I know, I know. They did say they didn’t get a good look at us.” I glanced hopefully at Packrat, but my friend still stared at the geocache box like it would explode any minute. “I want to know what’s in there,” I insisted. “Don’t you? If we know what it is, maybe we can figure out what to do about it. They’re tromping through my woods. On our geocache course.”

Packrat stood a little taller. “Yeah. We worked hard to hide all the boxes and make a list of the coordinates—”

“And we made the hiking trail to get to them. We cut brush and marked the way with red spray-paint dots. It took weeks!” I added.

“Those guys were soooooo not campers. That’s weird too.” Packrat nodded toward the box. “Okay. Go ahead. Do it.”

I crouched back down beside the box and took a deep breath. I felt my friend lean over me as I flipped up the big latch on the side. Grabbing the cover, I lifted the long, skinny lid slowly to the left.

Bright yellow eyes stared back at me! Eagle eyes! I threw open the lid the rest of the way and scrambled back before realizing the eyes were lifeless.

Packrat gasped. “Is it … is it … dead?”

Blood pounded through my head, worse than when I’d run away from those goons. Reaching down, I gently pulled out an eagle head attached to a foot-long stick whittled with Native American designs. Blue-colored suede strings were wrapped two or three times around the top of the stick, then hung loosely the rest of the way down. On the strings were red- and yellow-colored beads. Two pairs of claws also lay in the box, along with about twenty loose eagle feathers.

I looked at the fierce, proud face and my stomach turned. A redhot ball formed inside it, rising slowly through my chest, taking over my brain. Gone was fear. In its place was anger.

“It’s just parts,” I spat out. “Eagle parts.”

“Are they real?” Packrat reached out to hold a feather. “They look so real!”

“I think so.” I took a closer look at the eagle head. “I think it’s one of those—you know … what do they call it when you stuff a real, dead animal?”

“Like a trophy fish on a plaque on a wall.” Packrat held the eagle wing, carefully pulling it out, as if the eagle were in flight. His eyes darted to mine in a panic. “Wait, wait, wait! Have you seen our eagles lately? This isn’t one of the parents, is it?”

I put my fist to my forehead and tapped it, thinking back. “Yesterday. Yesterday morning. Early. Both eagles were on the nest. All three of their eaglets too.”

“If someone knew what they were doing, could they kill an eagle one day and put this all together in the box the next?”

I didn’t know the answer to that. The eagle head rested in the palm of my hand, the stick reaching just past my elbow. Its eyes stared up at me eerily.

Packrat motioned to the box. “So now that we know, what are we gonna do with it?”

“Well, I’m not giving it back. It’s not theirs! They stole it from somebody who’s missing it.”

“Take it to the warden?”

“She’s out of town for a couple of days.” I scuffed the tip of my hiking boot through the leaves to the dirt. It was too bad, ’cause Warden Kate had been a big help last summer when one of our campers, a sad misguided man named Mr. Bakeman, had decided the loons on Pine Lake were a nuisance and had tried to get rid of them.

“What if those goons meet us on the way back?” Packrat scanned the ledge above us. “Or what if they’re waiting for us at the campground? They’ll see we’ve got the box. They’ll make us hand it over.”

I studied it. Rectangular in shape. Eighteen inches long, twelve inches high, and six inches wide. Hunter green. One large clip on the right side. A black handle on the top. Side by side with the boxes on our geocache course, you wouldn’t know whose was whose. Now I wished we’d painted WILDER FAMILY CAMPGROUND on ours. Or Maxwell Moose’s face. But what were the odds some goons would be hiding stolen stuff in our woods?

Packrat gave a small laugh. “Do you suppose the boxes got mixed up? Someone has ours? I’d like to see their face when they open it up and find McDonald’s toys and plastic key rings.”

“Packrat! That’s it!” Suddenly, I knew what we had to do. “We’re going to hide this box down here until we know the goons are gone and we can get it to Warden Kate. On the way back, we’ll grab another one of our boxes off the trail.”

“The one in the old stump is on the way,” Packrat suggested.

“If the goons catch up with us before we can turn this one in, we’ll show them ours and make them think they chased the wrong box. Got a notebook?” I asked Packrat, even though I already knew the answer.

He dug into one of the many pockets of his detective-style coat. “Yep. And a camera too.”

That coat had been one of the first things I noticed about Pete—his real name—when we met last summer. He and his mom had come to the campground to be near his grandmother, who’d broken her hip. Packrat always wore a long tan trench coat that had tons and tons of pockets, loaded with everything you needed, and then some. When we met, we were both twelve, going into seventh grade. He liked that I was a nature geek and I liked that he was goofy. We’d been best friends ever since.

This year, Packrat and his mom were gonna stay at the campground for the whole summer. School had just ended, and as soon as Packrat’s mom had closed up her classroom, they’d moved in to their trailer here. His mom was working for my mom, and Packrat was working for my dad.

I took off my black sweatshirt, the one with our new Wilder Family logo on it, and spread it on the ground. Then I carefully laid the eagle head and stick down on top of it. The head rolled to the left. I turned it beak up. The head rolled to the right.

“Can you hold it?” Packrat asked. I put it back in my palm and laid my arm over the sweatshirt. Click went the camera as he took three photos, one from each side.

Laying the head back across the sweatshirt, I set out all the other pieces as well. “You take the photos. I’ll write notes about them—all the details and markings.”

Packrat leaned his head toward the cave. “Then we’ll hide it in there?”

“Yeah,” I said. “But I don’t want to just leave it on the floor in the open. Let’s see if we can find somewhere to hide it—a hole in the wall or something. Just in case someone finds this place by accident.”

“But no one knows how to get down here but us,” Packrat said, looking up at the rim of the canyon.

“Yeah, and we thought we’d be the only ones to hide geocache boxes on campground property,” I said. “Look where that got us.”