Every other week we have a field trip, and every other field trip the babies come along. They are usually not very exciting, some grownup explaining what kind of flower this is, or what will happen in a few weeks when the rainy season starts. But last field trip was crazy!
We hiked up to the top of Acorn Mountain, intending to go down to Opal Lake. At the top of Acorn Mountain, however, disaster struck. While every critter was eating lunch, the babies, who were supposed to turn around at the top, ran off. Many of my friends and I started running after them. We chased them through thicker and thicker underbrush. We were just about to give up, and ask Arthur to send a more formal search party, when to our surprise we heard, "It's okay! We found the babies, you can go home now. We'll be back in a few hours!" Shane Sandy was the first one to realize what had happened. "Packbat said that!" he exclaimed. "I hope they didn't listen to him." We tried to go back, but had lost our way. "We'll keep going," Shane said. "We have to meet up with some path sometime." But "sometime" seemed slow coming. It was evening before we realized we were not going to find the path by the end of the day. So we had to find food and camp out for the night. It was a good thing we had several explorers with us.
For about five days that followed, things were about the same. We tried to find Acorn Mountain again but could not. Every so often we thought we crossed our tracks, but they were not useful tracks, as we seemed to be always following them and getting nowhere. "It's funny," said Dominic, crossing a bridge, "but I feel like I saw this before, but not on this field-trip-turned-expedition."
And in trying to find our way, little mishaps seemed to happen every moment. Once, while I was climbing a tree to see if I could view more from high up, a camera dropped on my head. I looked up and saw Grumpy Treefellow flying overhead. "Sorry," he muttered. "I knew nothing was going to go right today. It even looks like rain."
Suddenly I heard a shout. "Hello! Is anyone here?" It was Samuel Border! "We are! We are! We are!" everyone seemed to be saying. "How is everything going with you?" Samuel asked. "We've been looking for you quite a bit. It was John's idea to see if we could see you from the Skyride Adventure." Grumpy Treefellow piped up at that moment. "Sure, everything's going great. We know where we are: somewhere. We should be getting home in about a thousand hours at the least. And most everybody has a bump on their head from a camera that I dropped." "No, I didn't get a bump on my head," said Aidan. "I thought not," said Samuel. And at that moment a fish, caught by Dominic, whacked him on the head. He took us home, which was a very short walk, and we told him where all we had been. "Why, I think you've just been going in circles around Calico Village!" he said. "I feel silly," Shane Sandy said.
In case you were wondering, the babies knew their way better than we did, and they went home the long way.
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