Fire on headless mountai.., p.1
Fire on Headless Mountain, page 1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Day One 1. On the Boneyard
2. The Lightning Strike
3. Old Rusty
4. The Lookout
5. House of Horrors
6. The Spotter
7. The Rule of Three
8. The Wicked One
9. Screaming in the Night
Day Two 10. The Beast
11. Just Like Uncle Birdy
12. Climbing the Tree
13. Like a Hive of Bees
14. On the Mountain
15. Flinging Flames
16. A Flock of Crows
17. Only Silence
18. Don’t wait; Just go.
19. The Witching Hour
20. The Burning Valley
21. A Strange Moon
22. A Light in the Darkness
Day Three—Morning 23. What Uncle Birdy Would Do
24. The Bucket
25. Seeing the Light
26. The Cardboard Robot
27. At the Lookout
28. A Thing of Beauty
29. In the Driver’s Seat
30. The Helicopter
31. Turn the Wheels!
32. Flying Out
33. Down the Boneyard
34. What’s Down There?
35. The Danger Zone
36. A Shattered Wreck
37. It’s Fear That Will Kill You
Day Three—Afternoon 38. The Burning Period
39. The Wooden Box
40. In the Darkness
41. A Flash of Orange
42. Down Here!
43. All Alone on the Boneyard
44. Air Tankers
45. You Have to Be Lucky
46. At the Cliff
47. Over the Edge
48. Hush Little Baby
49. The Sasquatch
50. Carried Away
51. Ashes to Ashes
Copyright © 2022 by Iain Lawrence
All Rights Reserved
HOLIDAY HOUSE is registered in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
Printed and bound in June 2022 at Maple Press, York, PA, USA.
www.holidayhouse.com
First edition
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Lawrence, Iain, 1955- author.
Title: Fire on Headless Mountain / Iain Lawrence.
Description: First edition. | New York City : Holiday House, [2022]. | Audience: Ages 9 to 12. | Audience: Grades 4-6. | Summary: Eleven-year-old Virgil Pepper is returning to Little Lost Lake in Oregon with his older brother and sister to scatter their mother’s ashes in the place she loved best, but when their van breaks down in the middle nowhere, it is up to Virgil, who shared his mother’s love of science and the wild, to remember and use all the lessons she taught him to survive a forest fire started by a lightning strike.
Identifiers: LCCN 2021036081 | ISBN 9780823446544 (hardcover)
Subjects: LCSH: Forest fires—Juvenile fiction. | Survival—Juvenile fiction. Mothers and sons—Juvenile fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Juvenile fiction. Grief—Juvenile fiction. | Oregon—Juvenile fiction. | CYAC: Forest fires—Fiction. Survival—Fiction. | Mothers and sons—Fiction. | Brothers and sisters—Fiction. Grief—Fiction. | Oregon—Fiction. | LCGFT: Novels.
Classification: LCC PZ7.L43545 Fi 2022 | DDC 813.54 [Fic]—dc23/eng/20211018
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021036081
ISBN: 978-0-8234-4654-4 (hardcover)
For Annie
DAY ONE
1
On the Boneyard
Down through the valley of the Bigfoot River runs a road called the Boneyard. Eighty miles of dirt and gravel as cratered as the moon, it snakes through the forest to Little Lost Lake, where the water is robin-egg blue.
The Peppers had gone there every summer for as long as Virgil could remember. Little Lost Lake was his mother’s favorite place in the whole world, and it was there that she had taught him how to use the stars for a compass, how to paddle a canoe and make a fire without a match—all those wonderful things that only bored his father.
“Make me a promise,” she had said when she was dying. “Scatter my ashes on Little Lost Lake.”
It was a blistering day in August when the Pepper children went back down the Boneyard to carry out that last wish. Their father had asked if they’d go without him, and then had flown to a writer’s conference in San Francisco to make sure he was far away. “I just can’t go back there,” he’d told them. “Not now nor ever, I think. I’m sorry, kids, but this is something you’re going to have to do by yourselves.”
Joshua was happy with that. He was nineteen, but he’d had his driver’s license for less than three months. He had never driven the old Westfalia camper van they called Rusty, but his father had told him not to worry. “You’ll do just fine. You’re in good hands with Rusty.”
As they turned off the highway and onto the Boneyard, Joshua drove even slower than his dad would have done. He gripped the wheel with both hands and dodged round the potholes. But no matter how carefully he drove, the van rattled down the road like an old tricycle, banging over the rough spots.
Kaitlyn, the middle child, was playing music on her iPhone. In shorts and a tank top, sprawled in the passenger’s seat beside Joshua, she bobbed her head to the booming in her earbuds.
In the back sat Virgil. The shadows of the trees flickered across his face as he stared out at the forest going by. In two weeks he’d turn twelve, but he was small for his age, as thin as a stick figure, and everyone thought he was younger.
In years past, the Peppers had laughed their way down the Boneyard, singing songs and playing silly games. Now they traveled for miles without saying a word, only three of them where there’d always been five. They were nearly twenty miles from the highway before anyone spoke. It was Joshua, calling out above the racket from the van.
“Hey, look at those clouds.”
Virgil turned his head. Through the windshield, he saw the flattened top of Headless Mountain rising above the trees like the hump on a grizzly bear. Enormous clouds churned above it in shades of yellow and gray.
“They look foreboding,” said Joshua. Like his dad, he often used fancy words and colorful phrases. Sometimes Kaitlyn teased him about it, but all he would do was laugh—just as his dad would have done. Leaning forward over the steering wheel, he gazed at the churning sky. “What kind are they, Virg?” he asked.
“Cumulonimbus!” cried Virgil. He knew every type of cloud, from stratus to cirrus, and this was his favorite. “They might be ten miles high. Maybe more. They could be—”
“What do they mean?” Joshua interrupted.
“There’s going to be an electrical storm.” Virgil sounded excited. “Those are thunderheads, Josh! They’re lightning factories.”
He had always loved science. When he was four years old, his favorite bedtime book was Atom Alphabet. At six, he was making strange machines out of things he found around the house. His father jokingly called him Leonardo da Virgil.
“I’m getting goose bumps,” said Kaitlyn. She pulled out her earbuds and rubbed her arms fiercely. “It feels prickly.”
“That’s ozone!” Virgil had to shout above the noise of the road and the rattle of the van. “It’s made by lightning. So when you smell a storm coming, that’s the ozone. And you know what else?”
It was their mother who’d taught him the science of storms, and he was eager to share what he’d learned. But as though he’d commanded it, the sky suddenly exploded in a flash of light. The clouds gleamed like yellow lanterns, then faded and gleamed again.
“Fantastic!” said Joshua.
Silently, Virgil started counting. One, steamboat. Two, steamboat. The thunder came as he reached thirty-nine, a low rumble that made him shiver happily. He divided the number by five and announced, “That was eight miles away!”
Kaitlyn glanced back at him. “Don’t worry, Virg. It’s not going to hurt us.”
Virgil wasn’t worried. It thrilled him to think of electrical charges racing across the sky, of the clouds becoming colossal batteries. He wanted to drive right through the middle of the storm and see it all around him, to feel the thunder booming in his chest.
As the clouds churned above the mountain, flaring with lightning bolts, Joshua slowed the van to watch the storm. He said, “Oh, I wish Mom could see this.”
And that changed everything.
With a sigh, Virgil flopped back in his seat. He heard the wheels grinding over the gravel, taking him deeper into the valley with every turn, closer and closer to Little Lost Lake.
His mom had loved everything wild and exciting, but she had loved storms most of all. If she still was alive, if she was with them right then, she would be turned in her seat to face them, talking about the storm with her voice full of excitement and her hands making shapes in the air. She would be explaining why the clouds were oozing over the mountain like mustard gas, how the thunder made its ominous sounds. And she would make it so interesting that even Kaitlyn would start asking questions—and no one cared less about science than Kaitlyn.
That lack of interest had been a big disappointment for Virgil’s mom, though she’d never said so. With a pang, Virgil remembered the look on her face when Kaitlyn’s words had hurt her. It had been only a year before, on his mom’
s last trip down the Boneyard.
---
It’s a rainy morning at Little Lost Lake. They’re all huddled inside the van, and the windows are wet with the fog from their breathing. Water blown from the trees is drumming down on Rusty’s pop-up roof. On the back seat, Kaitlyn and Joshua are playing War with a deck of cards. In the front, Dad has swiveled the driver’s seat to work on a little watercolor painting on the swing-out table. The tip of his tongue pokes out between his lips.
Mom wipes the window with the red-handled squeegee they call the “vindow-viper.” It squeals across the glass with a sound that makes Virgil cringe. Then she peers out at the rain, at the treetops bending in the wind. “I think it’s time,” she says. “You ready, Virg?”
“Sure,” says Virgil. He’s already bundled up in his yellow rainsuit.
Mom tightens the drawstring on her day pack and hoists it up onto one shoulder. “Do you want to come along, Josh?”
“No, thanks,” says Joshua.
“Kait?”
Kaitlyn doesn’t even look up from the cards. “I’d rather stick pins in my eyes.”
Mom looks disappointed. It’s only for an instant, but it hurts Virgil to see the twitch in her mouth, the sad blink in her eyes. Then she’s smiling again, as happy as ever. “Well, I guess it’s just you and me, Virgil,” she says, and out they go into the rising storm.
Down at the lake the wind is whipping the water into tiny spikes. The trees bend and bow, and tiny twigs torn from their branches go tumbling past without touching the ground.
Mom kneels on the wet grass and empties her pack. She pulls out things that make no sense: an empty jar and a red balloon, a needle, a roll of tape, a straw, and a rubber band. Then she takes those things and builds a barometer.
Virgil watches her hands. Red with cold on this summer morning, they stretch the balloon across the mouth of the jar to make a flexible lid. They snap the rubber band around it to hold it in place, then fix the needle to one end of the straw. They lay the other end across the balloon and tape it down. The straw becomes a lever, with the edge of the jar for its fulcrum.
“Now we watch,” says Mom when she’s finished.
Like a pointing finger, the needle at the end of the straw moves steadily downward.
“That’s the storm coming closer,” says Mom. “The air pressure’s falling, so the atmosphere inside the jar is pushing up on the balloon.”
The needle drops a quarter inch in half an hour, then begins to rise again as the storm moves on. The wind that had gusted and roared begins to calm down. Shafts of sunlight spear through the clouds.
“It always gets brighter when a storm passes over,” says Mom. Suddenly she’s serious, staring right into his eyes. “Listen, Virgil, don’t ever forget that. No matter how bad the storm, it always gets sunny again.”
---
Virgil was suddenly shaken out of his memory as Rusty bounced over ruts in the Boneyard. Aware again of the trees going by and the pulsing roar of the engine, he thought of what his mom had said that day and decided she’d been wrong. There had been a storm inside him ever since she’d died, and he didn’t believe it would ever pass over. He could not imagine a day when he would be ready to go on without his mother.
It didn’t seem so hard for the others. Joshua had left right after the funeral to study Spanish in Costa Rica. Kaitlyn kept herself busy with sports, going out every evening to play some sort of game. But Virgil hadn’t known his mom for as long as the others, and he felt cheated by that. She had started teaching at his middle school just one year before he got there, so neither Kaitlyn nor Joshua had been in her class. He had loved to see her breezing down the hall with a huge smile on her face, every kid calling out, “Hi, Mrs. Pepper” or “Good morning, Mrs. Pepper.”
And then there was his dad, who didn’t understand at all. Every day and every night, just as he’d always done, he closed the door to his writing room and worked in a din of classical music. “We don’t have to pretend that nothing has changed,” he’d told Virgil. “Our happiness has been snatched away, and our lives will never be the same. But wallowing in sadness won’t help anybody. We have to shake ourselves out of our terrible dream and keep living.”
But to Virgil, that was impossible. When summer ended, he would start seventh grade in the same school. He would hear all over again the whispering behind him wherever he went, and the endless, hollow things that people said to help him: “I bet you miss your mom a lot.” “I can’t believe she’s gone.” Every morning, he would walk past her science room. Every afternoon, he would play on the field where his whole class had spent a rainy hour making those crazy barometers that she had tried out first on him. He had always been her guinea pig, and he missed that most of all.
Before he knew it, Virgil was crying. Silently, unashamed, he let tears spill from his eyes. They tickled on his skin as though flies were walking down his cheeks, but he didn’t try to wipe them away. He just stared blankly through the window as lightning flickered over Headless Mountain.
One peal of thunder rumbled right into the next one. Joshua cried out in Spanish, “Ay, caramba!”—making Kaitlyn laugh.
With everywhere to look at once, only Virgil saw the one long bolt of lightning that zigzagged through the clouds. Thin and spidery, dazzled by his tears, it went sizzling down behind Headless Mountain. At almost the same moment another flare of light appeared, as though a giant had struck a match along the mountain’s ragged ridge.
A crack of thunder and a shuddering boom followed seconds later. Virgil had always loved that sound.
He remembered asking his parents about it. And again he was carried back into his memories.
---
He’s so small that he can sit on his father’s bent arm like a ventriloquist’s doll. His pudgy hands are pressed against the living room window, and he’s looking out through tiny rivers of rain that run down the glass. Outside, lightning is flashing in a dark sky.
“Dad, what makes the thunder?”
“Monsters,” his dad tells him. “Big thunder monsters thumping around on the clouds.”
“Really?” he asks. “Do they live up there? Do they have houses?”
“Houses? Now you’re being silly,” says his dad. “They live in castles, of course. Great cloudy castles with yellow flags on the turrets.”
Virgil looks up at the night sky, at the clouds that appear in the flashes of lightning.
“Of course,” says Dad, smiling, “your mother would tell you something different.”
So Virgil turns to her and asks, “What’s thunder, Mom?” And she answers matter-of-factly, “It’s an explosion of superheated air compressed by lightning.”
---
Virgil came out of his memory with a sniff and a smile. That was the last time he’d ever gone to his dad with a question about science. It was different if he wanted to know about words or books or big ideas, but he’d never trusted his father again about things like thunder and lightning.
His father was a writer who made the world seem wonderfully magical. But his mother had never lied to him.
Virgil sniffed again. At last he rubbed his eyes, pressing hard with his knuckles, trying to squeeze out the tears.
There was no more lightning after that last, unusual flash on the mountain, and no more booming thunder. The road began to turn in a long, slow curve and Headless Mountain slipped away behind the trees. The clouds broke apart, and patches of blue sky appeared between them. Before long, the day was again sunny and hot, and nobody talked in the van.
They went over a rise and plunged into the darkness of the forest. The trees closed around them, hiding the sky and the mountain. Joshua steered through a tunnel of trees until they burst out into sunshine on the crest of a hill. For the next forty miles it would be the same thing, into the forest and out again, from sunshine to darkness to sunshine again, all the way to Little Lost Lake.
Virgil wondered about the flash of light he’d seen. Ball lightning? A superbolt? He wished he could ask his mother about it, as he had asked so many times about so many things. The thought reminded him of the little wooden box on the shelf above his head, the tiny ark that held his mother’s ashes, and the strange light vanished from his mind.
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