I told you so.”

Travis didn’t need to hear this from Nish, but he supposed Nish had to hear himself say it. Nish had told them so–and Travis and Lars had dismissed the story as a trick of Nish’s overactive imagination.

But now Travis knew that what Nish had seen was real.

There was no keeping secrets this time. The six Owls who had headed out into the Badlands to bond together as a unit had become witnesses to the most extraordinary story to hit the town of Drumheller since 1884, when a young geologist names J.B. Tyrrell climbed one of these strange hills and came face to face with the seventy-million-year-old skull of an Albertosaurus.

It seemed impossible, but now, more than a century later, six kids from a peewee hockey team had found another Albertosaurus–and this one was alive!

Make that seven kids. Nish had already begun to claim his rightful place at centre stage.

“I found it first,” he told anyone who would listen.

Unfortunately for the Screech Owls, a great many people wanted to listen. The six Screech Owls who thought they had seen a living dinosaur had come flying back to Camp Victory in such a panic and with so many shouts for help that there was no keeping this a secret. Jenny and Lars had both thrown up they’d been so frightened, and Andy couldn’t talk when his father began yelling at him to tell him what had happened. Finally, Sarah and Travis managed to force the story out, in the midst of gasps and sobs from their teammates.

Someone must have made a call, for within half an hour a reporter from the local newspaper, the Drumheller Mail, was at the camp gate. An hour later the Calgary Herald was there demanding interviews with the kids who claimed they’d seen a living dinosaur. And not much later people from the wire services and television stations had flooded the town.

And then came the Royal Canadian Mounted Police.

Mr. Higgins and Kelly Block met the police car at the front gate and let them in. On Block’s insistence, the television cameras had not been allowed through, but they were set up anyway all along the edge of the highway, filming anything that moved and calling questions over the fence to any Screech Owl who happened to walk between cabins.

“DID YOU SEE THE DINOSAUR?”

“CAN YOU TALK TO US?”

“WHERE ARE THE KIDS WHO SAY THEY SAW THE MONSTER?”

On Mr. Higgins’s advice, the Owls didn’t try to answer the reporters’ questions. The police were there, he said, and the police would take charge of matters.

After an hour or so, it struck Travis as odd that the most natural thing to do had not been done–or even suggested.

“Why aren’t they going into the hills to look for it?” he said to Sarah.

“They don’t believe us,” she said.

“They think we made it up,” said Lars.

“I know what I saw,” said Nish, growing prouder by the moment. “I know what I saw, and I know what it was.”

Nish wanted to go out to the fence and talk to the camera crews, but the other Owls wouldn’t let him. They milled around the kitchen area, waiting to see what the Mounties and other adults would decide to do. For the first time since he had met him, Travis began to feel sorry for Kelly Block. All this attention couldn’t be doing his camp much good.

There were now many more people here than just the police. Some looked like scientists. They had gathered with Kelly Block in a meeting room to discuss the situation. Sarah went over and sat close to the door, trying to hear what was being said inside.

She soon reported back, unimpressed.

“They think it has something to do with the chinook,” she said. “There’s a guy with them who I think might be a psychiatrist. He’s talking about ‘mass hysteria’ and things like that. He says we suffered some kind of ‘gang delusion.’”

“What language are you talking?” demanded Nish.

Fahd, who knew something about everything, explained. “He thinks you all dreamed the same thing at the same time.”

“That’s impossible!” said Andy.

“No,” said Fahd. “It can happen. Lots of experts think that’s what UFOs are. Somebody thinks they see a flying saucer, and suddenly everybody in town thinks they see them.”

“We don’t think we saw anything,” said Nish a bit testily. “We did see a dinosaur. And I saw it first!”