Three shrinking tales, p.11
Three Shrinking Tales, page 11
“He wasn’t standing on the red steps,” Emily said.
Dick thought about this. “You’re right, Em. That’s where the magic is. You feel it as soon as you step on them.”
Emily sat down on the drop cloth Pete had spread over the carpet. “I think I know why the ladder brought us home to our yard.”
“Why?” Dick asked.
“Because I was standing on a red step when I told the store man we only wanted to be in our own yard,” Emily said.
“You mean the ladder takes you where you say you want to be?” Dick said.
Emily nodded. “But I can’t figure out why the ladder took us to the fish store.”
Dick started to laugh. “When you were on top of the ladder trying to get Domino out of the tree, you told him you wanted to help him get where he wanted to be.”
Emily thought about this. “He must have been hungry.”
“And you know how cats love fish,” Dick said. “I’ll bet that nutty cat would rather be in a fish store than anywhere else in the world!”
Emily was thinking hard. “I was just trying to get Domino to come down from the tree. I never thought he’d understand what I said.”
“He’s no ordinary cat,” Dick told her. “I wish we could keep him.”
“So do I. But you know Daddy is allergic to cat fur. It makes him sick if there’s a cat in the house.” Emily got up and walked to the window. “I don’t see Pete anywhere. He’s not using his ladder. It’s a shame to let it go to waste, now that we know how it works.”
“Gee, what a great idea!” Dick said. “It’s my turn to say where we go—I’m hungry. It must be nearly lunchtime. Why don’t we have a picnic?”
“We’d better hurry.” Emily ran into the kitchen. Dick came after her. He found a shopping bag folded up among the paper bags in the cupboard on the back stairs.
Emily packed a loaf of bread and a jar of peanut butter in the shopping bag. She put in two bananas and the box of graham crackers.
Dick added a knife from the kitchen drawer. “To spread the peanut butter.”
Emily pulled two paper cups from the kitchen dispenser and took a container of milk out of the refrigerator. She tucked in a couple of paper napkins. “All set.”
Dick and Emily went back to the living room and looked out at the street. Two girls had tied a rope to a fence three doors away. They were trying to jump double-Dutch. The retired fireman was standing in his usual place on the corner. A lady was walking a frizzy dog. But there was no sign of Pete the plumber.
“All clear.” Dick ran to the ladder and climbed to the very top. “Come on, Em.”
Emily started up the ladder. The handles of the shopping bag were looped over her arm. “Where are we going?”
“It’s a surprise,” Dick said.
Emily climbed up until she was standing on the red step below Dick. At once her head began to spin, and there was that ringing in her ears. Emily was so dizzy she was afraid she’d fall off the ladder.
Dick was sitting on the top of the ladder, holding on with both hands. “Ready, Em?”
“Ready!” Emily felt something soft and furry rub against her ankle.
Dick said something to the ladder but Emily was looking at her feet and didn’t hear what it was. Two green eyes were looking up at her. Domino was next to her on the red step.
Emily scooped up the black and white cat and started down the ladder. The shopping bag brushed against her leg. A cool breeze blew through her hair. Emily heard the sound of rushing water.
She went two steps farther down.
“Meow!” The cat tried to jump out of her arms.
Dick turned to look down. “How did that cat get here?”
“We must have left the door to the yard open,” Emily said. “I guess he’s awfully hungry. Maybe he thought we were going back to the fish store. I wish we could find a home for him.”
“Meow!” Domino tried to climb back up the ladder,
Emily held him tight and backed onto the step below. “Dick, there’s water down here. My feet are getting splashed.”
“Cats hate water,” Dick said. “Give him to me. Then you can take off your shoes.”
Emily handed the cat to her brother. “Hang on to this, too.” She gave him the shopping bag.
Emily pulled off her sneakers and tied the laces together. She hung the shoes around her neck and stuffed her socks into her pockets. Then she rolled up the legs of her jeans. “I can take Domino now.”
Dick gave her the cat and the shopping bag. He began to take off his shoes. Emily backed down the ladder and stepped into water up to her knees. She felt stones under her bare feet.
The ladder was standing in a rocky stream. Thick slabs of rock made a wall on one side. Deep woods grew close to the shores. In the distance Emily could see the tops of mountains rising above the trees.
The stream tumbled and splashed around the rocks. Just before it came to an iron bridge, it dropped in a foaming waterfall.
“What a beautiful place!” Emily held the cat and the shopping bag as high as she could to keep them from getting wet.
Dick was off the ladder now. He had slung his shoes over his shoulder. “Don’t you remember Wangum Falls?”
Emily put the cat and the shopping bag on a flat rock in the middle of the stream. She climbed onto the rock and sat down. Domino crawled into her lap.
Dick folded the ladder. At once it was not much bigger than a paper clip. “I’ll take care of this.” Dick dropped the ladder into the pocket of his shirt. Then he scrambled onto the rock beside his sister. “Look, Em.” Dick pointed to the iron bridge. “There’s the road we drove over last summer. I wanted to explore this place then, but Dad was in too much of a rush to stop.”
“We were late,” Emily reminded him. “Mother had lunch ready at the cottage.”
Dick was staring at a dark crack between two rocks along the shore. “Em, what do you think that is?”
Emily looked hard at the rocks. “Oh, Dick! Do you suppose it’s a cave?”
“Let’s go see.” Dick climbed off the rock into the water. “Maybe we can picnic in it.”
“I can’t carry both the cat and the shopping bag,” Emily told him.
Dick reached for the cat. “I’ll take Domino.”
The children waded through the swirling water. When they reached the shore, Emily stood on her toes to shove the shopping bag into the crack in the rocks. She pulled herself up after it.
The crack was just wide enough for Emily to fit through. She peeked into it. “It’s a cave, all right.”
She lay down on her stomach in the crack and held out her arms. Dick handed the cat up to her.
Domino took a look at the crack in the rock. He perked up his ears and slipped away from Emily to run into the cave.
Emily grabbed Dick’s hand to help him climb up the rock. Then she squeezed through the crack.
Dick came after her. He looked around. “Isn’t this great!”
It was cool in the cave. The big rocks leaned toward each other to make a pointed roof A soft green light flickered through the places where the rocks didn’t quite meet.
The floor was rough and uneven. Right in the center there was a dent. Rainwater had come through the crack in the roof and made a little pool there. The cat crouched beside it, looking down into the water.
“You won’t find any fish here, Domino,” Emily said.
Dick walked over to the pool. He stared into the shadows in the water. “There’s something in there, Em. It looks like a lobster.”
Emily got down on her hands and knees beside the pool. “That’s a crayfish. It does look like a little lobster. There’s another one. And what’s hiding behind that stone?”
Dick leaned way over and reached into the water to move the stone. A small black fish swam across the pool. “Hey, Em, this fish has whiskers.”
Emily laughed. “A catfish for Domino!”
The cat flattened his ears and hunched his shoulders. The end of his black and white tail twitched. He got up and walked away from the pool.
Emily got to her feet. She went over to stroke the cat. “I’m sorry, Domino. I didn’t mean to make fun of you.”
Dick opened the shopping bag. “Time for lunch.”
The children sat cross-legged on the stone floor. Emily took the bread and the knife out of the shopping bag. Dick unscrewed the top of the peanut butter jar.
Emily spread peanut butter on a slice of bread. She started to put another slice on top to make a sandwich.
“If that’s for me,” Dick said, “I’ll take one piece of bread at a time. I like to taste the peanut butter.”
“Doesn’t it stick to the roof of your mouth?” Emily handed him the bread and peanut butter. She peeled a banana and began to eat it.
Domino sat beside Emily and watched every bite she took. She offered him some peanut butter. He took one sniff and turned his back to her.
“I didn’t know you were coming with us, Domino,” Emily said, “or I’d have brought something for you to eat.”
Dick opened the box of crackers. He bit into one. “That’s funny.”
“What is?” Emily asked.
“This doesn’t taste like a graham cracker at all,” Dick said.
“We had some out of that box yesterday,” Emily told him. “There wasn’t anything wrong with them.”
“I didn’t say there was anything wrong with it.” Dick looked at the cracker he was holding. “The light’s not very bright in here. But this doesn’t even look like a graham cracker.”
Emily felt in the box for a cracker. She sniffed it. “Smells like coconut.” She took a bite. “M-m-m, a macaroon!”
Dick was nibbling his cracker. “This one tastes like a chocolate chip cookie.”
Emily picked up the graham cracker box. She carried it to a place where the sunlight streamed through a crack in the roof “There’s some writing on the box.”
“Pete wrote on it with that pencil he sticks behind his ear,” Dick reminded her. “What does it say?”
Emily looked at the box. There was a line drawn through Graham Crackers.
“Cookies,” she read. “More magic!”
Emily pulled a stubby yellow pencil out of the pocket of her jeans. “I found this on the kitchen table when I was packing our picnic.”
“That looks like Pete’s pencil. He must have dropped it. Let me have it for a minute, Em.” Dick took the pencil and wrote FISH in big letters on a strip of banana peel.
The peel flipped out of Dick’s hand and began to flop around on the floor. Now it had round eyes and a fan-shaped tail. A second later there were shiny scales on the slippery peel.
“Hey, Em!” Dick yelled. “It did turn into a fish!”
“Meow!” The cat leaped across the cave toward the fish.
“Stop it, Domino!” Emily grabbed the cat. “Dick, get that fish out of here.”
Dick chased the fish around the cave. Whenever he tried to pick it up, it slipped out of his hands.
“Hold Domino.” Emily gave the cat to her brother. She used the shopping bag to trap the fish. Then she went out of the cave and dumped the fish into the stream.
Emily came back with the empty shopping bag. “Now, what did you do with the pencil?”
Dick put the cat down. Domino turned his back to Emily and started to clean himself.
They looked all over the cave. Dick found the pencil wrapped up in a curl of banana peel. “I just wanted to give Domino some lunch. I didn’t know the fish would be alive.” Dick scratched his head. “How do you spell sardine, Em?” Emily came over to help. “Let’s try it with one little piece.”
Dick used the butter knife they had brought from home to cut the banana peel into narrow strips.
“I’m going to make sure this one isn’t alive.” Emily wrote canned sardine in small neat letters on one of the strips.
“It sure smells like a sardine,” Dick said.
Emily took the little strip of peel over to the cat. “I know you’d rather play with a live fish, Domino. But see if you can make do with this.”
Domino’s pink nose started to quiver. He stopped cleaning his left shoulder.
Emily put the sardine on the floor of the cave in front of him. The cat ate it slowly. When every bit was gone, he looked up at Emily. “Meow!”
She wrote on another strip of banana peel and gave it to the cat. Domino worked his way through four sardines before he was finished. Then he licked his whiskers and walked over to Emily to give her leg a friendly bump with his furry head.
Emily and Dick were all done with their lunch now, too.
“If we wrote licorice on the leftover strips of banana peel,” Dick said, “we could save it and eat it later.”
Emily thought this was a good idea. But they kept spelling licorice wrong and wasted all the banana peel.
“We should have written taffy,” Emily said. “It’s not as good as licorice, but at least we can spell it.” She put the pencil back into her pocket. “You said you wanted to explore this place, Dick. Now’s our chance.”
Emily put the jar of peanut butter and the knife back into the shopping bag along with the empty milk container and the rest of the trash from their picnic. Dick picked up the cat.
They squeezed through the crack in the rock to the open air.
Emily held on to Domino and the shopping bag while Dick climbed down the rock to the stream. Then she handed him the cat and slid down to join him.
They were up to their knees in the water. It splashed around their legs.
“Meow!” Domino tried to climb onto Dick’s head to get away from the spray.
Emily grabbed the cat and held him up in the air. She waded across the stream. Dick followed her.
The trees grew right down to the edge of the water here.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Emily said. “Put your sneakers on, Dick.”
Dick sat down in the shadow of a bush. His shoes were still slung over his shoulder. Dick pulled them into his lap. The laces were tied together. “I can’t get the knots out.”
Emily sat beside her brother to untangle the knots in his shoelaces. Domino poked at the laces with his paw.
Crack! A twig snapped in the underbrush.
“Freeze!” Emily whispered.
A slender deer stepped out of the woods and looked around. The children sat so still that the deer didn’t know they were there. She took a long drink from the stream. Then she flapped her white tail like a flag.
Two little speckled fawns came out into the open. They went to join their mother.
Dick and Emily held their breath. Domino stared at the deer without blinking.
The mother deer kept watch while the two fawns drank from the stream. Then all three bounded back into the forest.
Emily went back to working on the knots in Dick’s shoelaces. When they were untangled, she handed him the shoes and started to put on her own.
“Look, Em.” Dick pointed to a little path that led into the woods.
Emily got to her feet. “Maybe it’s a deer trail. Let’s follow it and see if we can find out where they went.” She picked up the cat and started down the path. Dick came after her.
Tap, tap, tap.
Emily looked up. A little black and white bird with a red patch on his head was pecking at the bark of an old tree.
Emily could feel the cat’s muscles harden under his soft fur. His eyes gleamed.
“Stop it, Domino! You’re not hungry now,” Emily said.
It was dark in the woods. But here and there the sunlight came through the leaves and made bright patches on the soft ground.
A chipmunk squeaked and ran across the path. Domino tried to jump out of Emily’s arms. She held him tight.
“What’s that on the tree over there?” Dick asked.
“It looks like a sign.” Emily left the path and pushed through a clump of blueberry bushes to get to the tree. Dick was right behind her.
“No hunting,” Dick read. “Do you hear that, Domino?”
Emily was reading the small print. “It says No trespassing, too. And if they catch anybody in these woods, they fine them or put them in jail. We’d better get out of here, Dick.”
“Anyway, it’s time we went home.” Dick reached into his shirt pocket.
“Hurry up,” Emily said. “Open the ladder.”
Dick went on feeling around in his pocket. Emily looked at him. “What’s the matter?”
Dick looked sick. “The ladder must have fallen out of my pocket. It’s gone, Em.”
A blue jay screamed overhead. Emily held tight to the cat. But she got down on her hands and knees beside Dick to help him look for the ladder.
There was no sign of it among the pine needles on the ground.
“The ladder’s so small,” Emily said, “we’ll never find it. We’d better get out of these woods before anybody sees us here.”
“Listen!” Dick said.
Emily heard the motor of a car.
The road can’t be far away. Dick started in the direction of the sound.
Emily went after him, carrying the cat. They crossed a ridge and found themselves on a narrow road. Huge trees grew on each side of it. The branches curved over the road to make a leafy tunnel. There were no cars in sight now.
“Nobody can fine us or put us in jail if we stay on the road,” Dick said.
Emily was scared. She knew they were a long way from home. But there was no sense in letting Dick know she was afraid. They walked along the road under the arching branches. Domino seemed to get heavier all the time.
A wind was blowing through the trees now. The sunlight no longer flickered down between the leaves. Far off they heard a rumble of thunder. Emily knew it wasn’t safe to be in the woods during a storm.
All at once the road came out of the woods onto an iron bridge. Under the bridge the water tumbled and splashed.
“We’re right back at Wangum Falls.” Dick walked onto the bridge. “There’s our cave, Em.” He pointed to the wall of rocks on one side of the stream. “We can see it from here.”
