Read Online Bearwalker by Joseph Bruchac - Free Book Online Page A

company strung their lines over the hill rather than through that gap.
    Poe-boy bumps his wide flat head against my arm. He looks up at me with his big, sympathetic Labrador eyes. It’s like he’s trying to tell me something. I reach out and rub his head and neck and his tail thumps on the floor inresponse. Before he left, Mr. Osgood told him to stay, even though he whimpered and struggled so much to follow him at first that he had to be shut in the kitchen. It was like he knew it wasn’t safe for his master to go off like that on his own. It was only after Mr. Osgood had been gone for half an hour and he stopped scratching at the door that Mrs. Osgood finally let him out.
    The explosion had surprised just about everyone, except the Philos, who knew what it was right away.
    â€œThat was your dynamite, dear,” Mrs. Philo had said in an admonitory voice to her husband while the blast was still echoing over the lake and people were running around like chickens with their heads cut off.
    Mr. Philo’s dynamite, as his wife kept calling it, was indeed what caused the explosion. That shack with the KEEP OUT and STAY AWAY warnings painted on its side had been built by a professional contractor to store the explosives that were supposed to have been used to widen that narrow gap between the rocky hills. Mr. Philo’s heart attack a year ago had stopped that construction project, though. What surprised the Philos was that the dynamite was still there. Itwas supposed to have been removed because dynamite can become unstable if it isn’t stored properly.
    â€œWe’ll be having a word with that contractor,” Mr. Philo said to the crowd of campers gathered in the main building, who had become an appreciative audience for him and his wife.
    â€œMore likely a number of words we won’t repeat in polite company,” Mrs. Philo added. Just about everyone laughed.
    I didn’t. I was worrying about too many things. The dynamite shed was so close to that gap in the hills that when it blew, it brought down tons and tons of stone as well as the trees that were growing higher up. Halfway through the gap the road just ended in a twenty-foot-tall wall of stone and earth, topped with toppled cedars. On either side of those hills the land rose into mountains. There was a walking trail that swung around the now closed gap and rejoined the road. But even an off-trail vehicle wouldn’t be able to negotiate that. The only way around the landslide was on foot.
    Other trails, of course, led out of Camp Chuckamuck. They were all hiking paths or old overgrown logging roads that snowmobilersused in the winter months. You couldn’t get a car or a truck down any of them. And the shortest of those trails was twenty miles around the mountain with two rivers to cross before reaching the nearest town.
    No one was supposed to be coming in to Chuckamuck until our bus driver returned to pick us up. But that was not scheduled for another three days. We were stuck until then unless someone did something.
    â€œWell,” Mr. Osgood had said when the road situation had been explained to everyone, “I appear to have been elected.”
    As the camp caretaker, he saw it as his job to go out and make contact with those who could bring in earthmoving equipment and open the road again. With dozers and a backhoe, it would take no more than a day or two. The idea of a long walk didn’t bother him at all.
    â€œTen miles is naught but a random scoot,” he said. “But I do not expect to have to hoof it that far.” He reached into the pocket of his green wool jacket and pulled out a spark plug. “I’ll just pop this into Matilda and ride in style.”
    Matilda was Mr. Osgood’s all-terrain vehicle, a four-wheeler that he kept parked under a tarp a mile down the road past the now vaporizedexplosives shed. Keeping Matilda spark-plugless was his way of ensuring no one else took her for a joy