Our ranger had told us that there would be just one more stop, and it would be at the farthest point the bus would go into the badlands. When we got out we were in a little opening among a series of steep hills that encircled us—supposedly a very good place for fossils.
Dorothy seemed to have totally forgotten about the Reptile by then and was getting more and more adventurous with each stop. She had barely been out of the bus for a minute when she ran up to the top of a hill and challenged the rest of us to try it, too. We did, of course. You can’t let a girl beat you doing something like that.
So we were standing near the top of this hill. When we looked in one direction we could see the tour group, and in the other direction was this almost sheer drop. A few steps farther would have put us onto a thin, narrow piece of rock that jutted way out over the canyon, a hanging ledge. It looked dangerous. But suddenly, Dorothy ran onto it and stood there glaring back at us.
“Queen of the castle!” she shouted.
We piled up after her.
And that’s when it happened. The whole thing just collapsed. Dorothy didn’t scream because she wasn’t the type to do that. And we didn’t, of course, because we just couldn’t. But we should have—maybe somebody would have heard us. Instead, we just fell. And fell. We rolled down the side of this mini-mountain in a five-kid avalanche, picking up speed as we went, like snowballs out of control. It seemed like an hour before we came to the bottom.
Bruised and battered, we got to our feet and looked up. We couldn’t believe it. We were at the bottom of a mountainous cliff and there was no one in sight. We couldn’t hear anything. Not even the wind.
“Uh-oh,” said Terry.
At first we tried to climb back up, but that was useless. Then we resorted to yelling, but no one came. So we made a decision, the dumbest of the whole trip. We decided to take a different route back to the top of the hill. It would be a long way, and we’d have to start out in a direction almost the opposite of the one we had come from. But if we went that way we could get to another hill that looked easy to climb, and from there we could double back towards our group. We started running. Before long we were sweating like pigs (and that includes Dorothy), and we were all out of breath.
When we got to the place we had seen from the bottom of the cliff, and looked back, we were surprised to discover that it was very hard to tell exactly where we were.
“This way,” gasped Bomber, pointing to his left.
“Not a chance,” said Rhett. “It’s this direction.” He pointed the opposite way.
I was confused, Dorothy was unsure, and Terry thought a third direction was right. We went with Rhett’s idea. He just has a way about him that makes you want to do what he thinks is best. It’s the way he is when he’s killing a penalty and everybody else is nervous and freaking out.
Half an hour passed and we still hadn’t found the hill. An hour later we were lost.
It’s hard to describe the emotions that were going through me. I guess, all together, they would make up what people call a “sinking feeling.” I was one part terrified, another part worried, and another part ready to cry.
You could see that Bomber and Terry were feeling the same way, but Dorothy and Rhett both had these calm, determined looks on their faces, as though they were going to solve this disaster. We kept walking, hoping something familiar would turn up. But finally we all stopped and sat down. At first no one said anything. We just kind of looked at each other. I glanced at my watch. We had been lost for three hours!
The ranger would have searched for us for a long time, but by now she would have taken the bus back to the field station. She would have alerted other rangers, and maybe even the RCMP, and a search party would be getting ready. Newcombe had to be just going nuts, and Ophelia…she would have fainted about a hundred more times. Thinking about her fainting didn’t seem funny any more.
I was starting to really panic. I was wondering what would happen to us, and what the parental units would do when they heard. My mother always kidded me about things, and lately she was pretending not to be such a typical mom around me, because I was getting older, I guess, but she still got in just as many hugs and kisses as before. My dad’s mind was always in the clouds, thinking about some case he was working on or some vacation adventure he was planning, but when he was doing something really exciting, he could hardly wait to tell me. They weren’t nearly as bad as I usually said they were. I missed home. This would kill them. I’m their only kid.
I glanced around at the other guys. Dorothy still seemed okay, but Rhett was beginning to look as depressed as the rest of us.
This was actually happening to us. We were lost in the middle of nowhere, it was blazing hot, we had no food, and our only water was what was left in Dorothy’s canteen. I felt a cry coming on again. So I stood up. I had to say something. First, because it would prevent me from blubbering, and second, because we needed a plan.
“So,” I said as calmly as I could, my voice holding on, “what are we going to do?”
Bomber rose to his feet. He started to pace. “I don’t know. I’m not the one with the brain. That’s your job, Terry. If I had your smarts, I’d have us out of here in no time.”
But Terry was silent. Our fearless goaltender was sitting with his head down and his hands were shaking. “I’m afraid,” he said quietly. “I don’t have the guts for this. I can face a million pucks coming at me but I don’t want to be lost in this place. I’m too scared to think.” I heard him sniffle. “Rhett?” Surely Rhett, Mr. Cool, would have an idea.
“We’ll be all right, Dylan,” he replied without even thinking. “No problem.”
“No problem!” I shouted. “What are you talking about, Norton?”
“I don’t know, Maples, I’m just not the emotional sort! I’m trying not to freak out here. Maybe if I was all emotional like you seem to be, I’d come up with something. But I can’t. Okay? Why don’t you ask Osborne…And I need a drink of that water…NOW!” Dorothy hadn’t been allowing anyone to drink from her canteen. She said we needed to preserve what we had for as long as we could. But Rhett wasn’t just mad about that. He had never forgiven her for the things she had said to him back at the museum. He was funny that way. He acted cool, but he held grudges, took things personally.
Dorothy didn’t even respond to him. The canteen stayed strapped over her shoulder. Instead she kind of leapt to her feet and tried to smile. “Why don’t we just look at this as an adventure?” she said.
We couldn’t believe it.
“An ADVENTURE?” cried Rhett.
She started walking as she talked. “Don’t tell me I’m being unrealistic again! What else can we do? It is very important that we keep a positive outlook. If we panic, if we are frightened out of our minds, WE WILL DIE!”
Her voice echoed around the hills. She stopped for a moment, then continued.
“I’m just as afraid as the rest of you, and I don’t have some perfect plan, but we have to get it together here. Besides, I’ve spent my whole life in Drumheller without anything exciting to do, and today I have something. This is life-and-death. I’m going to make the best of it. Now…think for a second, you guys, and let’s come up with a plan.”
There was silence. We were all staring at each other.
“Well, we can look for the flag,” I said quietly.
We had been so freaked out that we hadn’t even thought of the simplest solution to our problem: find the flag. I guess we had all felt, at first, that our sense of direction would eventually lead us back to the tour bus, but now we knew we couldn’t trust our instincts in a badlands desert for a minute.
“Let’s see,” I continued, “when we were looking at it in the late afternoon the sun was kind of getting in my eyes, so that means…”
“The flag was in the west,” said Terry.
“Right!” exclaimed Rhett, still sounding emotional.
“You’re right, Bomber,” said Dorothy.
“But…it’s still a good idea to try to find the flag—we just won’t know exactly where to look.”
We all got up and started checking out the horizon. We spun around in every direction. No flag. But how could that be? Hadn’t KD said that you could see it from everywhere?
“We must be really, really lost,” said Rhett, sounding frightened again.
Our other problem was even scarier. In about half an hour we wouldn’t even be able to see the flag if we were looking straight at it. It was getting dark.
“We have to get to higher ground,” said Dorothy.
There was a hill not too far away that all of us were sure was higher than most of the others we could see. We started out towards it. But trying to reach it seemed like a bad dream. The more we walked, the farther away it seemed to get. Slowly the sun began to set.
“We have to stop,” said Dorothy. “We have to find a place to sleep tonight and try our luck in the morning.”
As frightening as that sounded, she was right. Human beings are useless in the dark.
We had passed quite a few caves during our walks, but no one wanted any part of them. Who knew what lurked inside? The best idea was to get down low somewhere so we would be sheltered from the wind if it picked up and wouldn’t be easy prey for an animal. We wanted to be as hard to detect as possible.
Soon we found a place that seemed well protected, and we settled in. All of us were shaking by now and not trying to hide it. We were petrified out of our minds.
Dorothy tried to get us to play the “I wish I were…” game to get our thoughts off our fears. She went first and said “Somewhere else!” She tried to make a joke of it, but no one laughed. The answers got kind of weird. Terry said, very quietly, that he wished he were “brave”; Bomber said “smart,” and Rhett said “emotional.” I didn’t know what to say, so I just whispered, “Something I’m not right now,” and that ended the game. We all grew silent and kind of huddled near each other, and had a little drink of our water. I heard someone sniffling and thought of the parental units again. I wanted them near me in a way I hadn’t since I was a little kid. This had to be one of my nightmares.
But it wasn’t. It was so brutally real that I couldn’t even sleep. It was deathly silent in the badlands at night, and I lay there listening. Then I heard a coyote howl and some sort of a growl…a bobcat? Suddenly, I felt something crawling on me. No! I leapt to my feet, quivering, and shook at it, jumping up and down and shrieking.
“Sorry,” said Rhett. It had been his hand. He had reached out and put it on my shoulder. I couldn’t believe that he, of all people, needed comfort. We were all feeling pretty freaked.
I lay down again. After a while I heard louder breathing and knew the others had somehow gone to sleep. I felt alone in the middle of the badlands. Mom and Dad always talked about the beauty of nature, and here I was out in one of the most stunning parts of our country…and absolutely terrified by it. It just didn’t seem beautiful now. I remembered that when we were in Horsethief Canyon I’d thought that trekking way into that dangerous terrain and even getting lost would have been thrilling. That seemed incredibly stupid now. I sat there with my eyes open, not seeing very much in the darkness, just the outlines of those evil hills. Once or twice I thought I heard footsteps, and then a crawling sound, and a hiss. But it was all in my mind.
I lay there for what seemed like hours. Then, still unable to sleep, I sat up. Far off in the distance, I thought I saw something. I stood up and walked a couple of steps towards it. It was a light! And it seemed to flicker like a flame.
But then I started getting realistic. What could we do about it now? If we got up and walked towards it we would soon be even more lost, and who knew what we might stumble upon out there in that black wasteland? Cactus spikes through our shoes? Real black widow spiders crawling up our legs? There just had to be light to move.
I lay down again. Who, or what, could have made that fire? I finally drifted off to sleep, curled up and lying on my side, still trying to focus on that distant flicker until my eyelids became too heavy, despite all my worry and fear and desperation. A tear rolled down my cheek. For some reason, that light didn’t comfort me. Did it mean hope…or danger?
Who was out there?