FINDING OUT THAT IVY was a changeling was a great comfort to Martha, although she never understood exactly why. She only knew that she believed it in a different and fiercer way than she believed in most other things she couldn’t exactly prove.
She believed in changelings more fiercely than she believed in reincarnation or divining rods, and even more than she believed in the Monster of Lake Onowora—and that was a great deal. Believing in the Monster was important because it was the Monster, and Ivy, who saved Martha from a whole lifetime of being a Brownie.
Martha became a Brownie not long after she and Ivy met, because being a Brownie is the first stage in becoming a Girl Scout, and the Abbott family had a long history of Girl Scouting. Martha’s grandfather, Thomas Abbott the first, had given money to help build the Scout Cabin at Lake Onowora. Martha’s grandmother and mother had both been Scout leaders in the past. And, of course, Cath was just about the champion Girl Scout of Rosewood Manor Estates. She had started out as a Brownie as soon as she was seven and gone all the way through. By sixth grade she already had medals on top of medals.
Martha, however, had known instinctively at a very early age that she was not cut out to be a Girl Scout. Of course, when Cath had started as a Brownie, Martha’s mother had been the Brownie Leader, and perhaps that made a difference. Martha thought she would have liked that. It would be nice to have a definite appointment with your mother once a week, even if it had to be in uniform. As it was, by the time Martha was Brownie age, her mother was all involved in other important things, and there was a new leader named Mrs. Wonburg. Martha supposed that there were all sorts of ways to run a Brownie troop, but Mrs. Wonburg’s troop was sort of a cross between an old ladies’ sewing circle and boot camp for the Green Berets. Martha didn’t like embroidering samplers with the Girl Scout laws any better than she liked taking nature walks in lockstep. Besides, Ivy was not a member.
But, of course, the Abbotts wouldn’t hear of Martha’s quitting, and so all that fall she daydreamed during meetings, puffed and staggered during calisthenics, and wandered off and got lost during hikes. Mrs. Wonburg reported to Mrs. Abbott that Martha was emotionally unsound, but that scouting would save her, if anything could.
So, on Thursdays, Mrs. Wonburg worked very hard at the salvation of Martha; but on all the other days there was Ivy. Fortunately, Martha’s grandmother had decided to spend that winter in Florida, as she often did, and with all the other Abbotts on such full schedules, Martha had many unsupervised hours. Nearly all of those hours were spent with Ivy, at Bent Oaks or in other favorite places in the Rosewood Hills. One of the best of these was Lake Onowora.
Lake Onowora was a large county reservoir a few miles back along the ridge of Rosewood Hills, where the smaller Rosewood range ran into the coast range. By highway it was several miles to the lake and Onowora Park, but on the Ridge Trail it was less than a half hour’s fast walk. On weekends when the weather was good, Martha and Ivy went there often on explorations. One day they took along a camera that Martha had inherited from Tom when he got a new one for his birthday. They took turns taking pictures all that day—along the trail, at the stables near the lake, on the steps of the Scout Cabin, and along the lake itself. When the pictures were developed, Martha and Ivy discovered the Monster.
Even when the picture was first developed, it was a little blurry; but you could plainly make out the top of the smooth dark body and the strange sea horse head, rearing up out of the water of the lake. Ivy had heard, from Aunt Evaline of course, all about a wonderful monster who lived in a lake in Scotland, and who was famous all over the world. Ivy and Martha were sure that their monster was every bit as good. They decided, however, to keep it a secret until they could find some way to prove that they had seen him first and therefore he really belonged to them. At first they planned to set a trap.
For days they scouted the lake nearly every afternoon, lying in wait behind boulders and in the midst of prickly bushes. They saw any number of interesting things: wild deer coming down to drink, immense blurry tracks in a muddy bank near the skeleton of an unidentified animal, a bunch of little boys skinny-dipping—but nothing of the Monster himself.
But they had a clue that seemed helpful. The tracks had surely been made by the Monster, and it had probably killed and eaten the one-time owner of the skeleton. Therefore, they knew that their Monster was a meat-eating monster, and it would be necessary to use meat to bait their trap.
Their first plan was to dig a pit trap and cover it with twigs and grass. They borrowed a huge man-sized shovel, and took turns carrying it up the trail to the lake. There, choosing a likely spot in the main trail, they started to dig. But the soil around the lake was clayey, and the shovel was hard to handle. They soon found that the only way two seven-year-old girls could drive it into the ground at all was for both of them to leap up onto the top of the blade at once, one on each side. That worked fairly well until Martha misjudged her leap and missed the blade, and the shovel tipped over on top of Ivy, whacking her on the side of the head.
After that, they decided that it probably wasn’t necessary to catch the Monster itself, if they could only get absolute proof of its existence. Perhaps a closer and clearer photograph would do. Then the credit would be theirs, and somebody else could do the shovel work.
As time went by, the catching of the Monster, or at least the sighting of it, became almost an obsession with them. All sorts of other things were forgotten for the moment in the heat and excitement of the chase—even fear. Martha even found herself one day, when Ivy had gone back to Bent Oaks for something they’d forgotten there, all alone out on a limb. She had been left with the camera, astride a limb of a rather low tree, hanging directly above the spot where a pork chop, borrowed from the Abbott’s deep freeze, hung temptingly on a string a little way above the ground.
Ivy had been gone for some time when it suddenly occurred to Martha that if the Monster was as big as Ivy sometimes said he would be, he might not be satisfied with one small pork chop—and the limb on which she was sitting was not so terribly high. Not long afterwards there was a splashing noise out in the lake; and Martha, suddenly amazingly improved as a tree climber, shinnied to the ground and was halfway down the Ridge Trail before she stopped to think. But when she did, she realized with pride that, considering everything, it was pretty amazing that she had been there at all.
The Monster continued to be camera-shy, and Martha and Ivy finally decided that he probably only came up on land during the night. They went so far as to discuss lying in wait for him at night, but Martha’s newfound courage didn’t stretch quite that far.
“Couldn’t we tell someone else and get some help?” Martha suggested.
“Who?”
“Well, I don’t know,” Martha said. “Not my family I guess. They would just laugh and say things about Martha’s imagination. Besides they’re awful busy. We might tell the ranger, though.”
“The ranger wouldn’t believe us,” Ivy said.
“How do you know he wouldn’t? He seems like a nice man.”
“I just know,” Ivy said. “It’s probably because of second sight. I have it sometimes.”
“Second sight?” Martha asked.
“Sure,” Ivy said. “Second sight is when you know something without knowing why you know it. It comes from inside instead of outside of you. That’s why it’s called second sight. First sight is outside. I have second sight about things sometimes.”
“Does Aunt Evaline have second sight?” Martha asked. She was pretty sure what the answer would be, but she wanted to ask anyway. She liked the way Ivy looked when she talked about Aunt Evaline.
“Aunt Evaline even has third and fourth sight,” Ivy said. “But anyway, I think we better think up some way to prove that there’s a monster before we tell the ranger. If we could get some better footprints even.”
“What if we made another pork chop trap and poured paint around it?” Martha said. Martha had once walked absentmindedly through a finger painting drying on the schoolroom floor. She had left very clear footprints across the schoolroom, and the teacher had had some very strong things to say about day-dreamers who never knew where they were going. The memory was very clear in Martha’s mind.
Ivy liked the idea, but she pointed out that the paint would sink into the ground if they poured it out ahead of time. The final solution was a pork chop baited trap rigged to a can of paint balanced on a tree limb overhead. The Monster would spill the paint as he ate the pork chop and tromp around in it while it was still fresh. They picked a good spot on the trail near the lake before they went home that night.
Martha, as usual, collected most of the supplies. They needed a new pork chop—the hunt had dragged on for so long that it had become necessary to bury the old one—and a can of paint. The pork chop was no problem, but the only paint she could find was a small can of purple bicycle enamel that belonged to Tom. She smuggled the supplies to school on the day they were planning to set the paint trap, only to be struck down that very afternoon with chicken pox and sent home to spend a week in bed. The Carsons’ phone was disconnected that month, as it often was, so Martha didn’t know what Ivy decided to do about the Monster. That is, she didn’t know until Thursday.
Thursday, of course, was Brownie afternoon. Safely home in bed, Martha was congratulating herself on the fact that even chicken pox had its good points, when Cath came home with a horrifying story. It seemed that Mrs. Wonburg, leading her troop on a hike to Onowora Park, had stepped on a pork chop and been struck above the left ear by a can of purple paint. Fortunately the can hadn’t been large, but the enamel was “easy-spreading” and “fast-drying.” Mrs. Wonburg was undoubtedly livid.
Martha immediately cast suspicion on herself by bursting into tears, and soon afterwards the can of paint was traced to the Abbotts through Tom’s newly purple bicycle. And so Martha—who refused to implicate Ivy, even though, or maybe because the Abbotts were so sure that Ivy was largely to blame—was permanently expelled from the Brownies.