The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 5 Read online

  How could it run away any more than it had last night?

  Aliens from outer space! Abducted into a flying saucer! Implanted with a special transmitter that turned out to be a horsefly bite!

  “What are you thinking about?” Travis asked at one point.

  “Huh?” Nish had asked, half turning and nearly tipping the canoe.

  “What’s going through your head right now?” Travis asked.

  “I was just wondering …,” Nish began.

  “What?”

  “I don’t know …”

  “No, tell me.”

  “I was just wondering …”

  “What?”

  “…whether fish fart.”

  Travis stared straight at the back of the thick neck of his thick friend. He could see Nish’s colour rising. “I keep seeing these bubbles coming up,” Nish went on. “Like when I’m in the bathtub, you know – and I was wondering if fish or turtles fart, that’s all.”

  “You’re sick!”

  “Well, you asked.”

  6

  The Owls were starving by the time they returned to the campsite on Big Crow Lake. As they drew near they could smell smoke, and it carried the hint of something delicious. Mr. Dillinger was back and cooking up a late lunch. In the distance, Travis could see Muck’s party also paddling back towards the campsite. He knew, without even asking, that there was no news.

  “Not a sign of anything,” Muck said as he hauled his old red canoe up onto the beach.

  “None of us saw anything, either,” Mr. Dillinger called from the firepit area, where he was whipping up some sort of pasta dish in a large tin bowl.

  “What do you think happened?” Sarah asked.

  Muck shook his head. “We’re only presuming the plane passed over us. Nish saw something all right. A plane, I would guess – but maybe not that plane. And even if it was, who’s to say it didn’t go on for miles beyond?”

  “I saw the plane,” Nish argued. “It was in trouble.”

  “I thought it was a flying saucer,” sneered Sam, “and it was you that was in trouble.”

  Nish said nothing. None of his usual cracks about her outfits. Not even a stuck-out tongue.

  Travis knew his friend was too upset to act like the normal Nish – if, in fact, there was such a thing as a normal Nish. He had been ridiculed for his story about the alien abduction, and now he had to deal with the fact that his new NHL hero was missing, perhaps dead in a plane crash. Not even “perhaps.” Probably.

  They ate in relative silence for a peewee team that had, essentially, grown up together. The Owls were, by now, almost a family: the players got along, or did not get along, much as brothers and sisters, with Muck and Mr. Dillinger each a sort of extra parent to every youngster on the team. Silence wasn’t usual for the Owls, particularly when they were out on an adventure. But silence seemed appropriate, under the circumstances.

  Mr. Dillinger was pouring out hot chocolate when the quiet of the campsite was broken by a strange, distant drone from well beyond the tops of the high pines.

  “Another plane,” said Fahd, pointing out the obvious as usual.

  They laid down their cups and hurried out onto the point in order to see.

  Seemingly out of nowhere, a large yellow bush plane broke with a roar over the treetops, banked steeply, and went out over the lake, turning and slowly descending.

  “It’s coming in!” shouted Fahd.

  The plane seemed to pause in mid-air as it neared the water, then touched down lightly, skipped up, touched down again with a large spray, then settled on the lake, a high rooster tail of water pluming from each pontoon.

  “He’s carrying canoes,” Mr. Dillinger said.

  Travis could see two dark-green canoes lashed to the pontoons. What a wonderful way to travel, he thought. Flying into lakes, then having the canoes to explore the shoreline. But then it struck him that these rangers were not here to explore; they had come to find Jake Tyson’s plane.

  The yellow Otter taxied up to the beach, the doors opened, and two young rangers jumped out into the water, the splash spreading black up the legs of their green work pants.

  The pilot cut the engine, and the absence of sound was almost as startling as the roar had been when the plane first passed over the treetops. The engine died with a wheeze, the propeller slowed, and the two rangers muscled the plane in closer to the beach area, where it settled, soft and safe, on the fine sand just as the propeller came to a complete stop.

  The front doors opened, and two more rangers, older men, one grey-haired, one completely bald, used the wing struts to swing down onto the pontoons.

  The young rangers unlashed the two canoes, turned them over, dropped them down into the water, and pushed them towards the sand.

  “Pitch in,” Muck said.

  The Owls flew down into the water, helping the rangers haul the canoes up onto the sand and then forming a human chain to help load the canoes with the supplies the rangers were pulling from a rear cargo door: paddles, life preservers, tents, ropes, a radio pack, a stretcher, food barrels, rain gear, and cooking utensils.

  The older rangers jumped off the end of the pontoons, splashed lightly in the shallow water, and then hiked up the sand and the small ridge in front of the camping area to talk with Muck and Mr. Dillinger. The four men moved back to the firepit area, where Mr. Dillinger had coffee brewing over the fire.

  Travis looked at the two younger rangers. They seemed so big and fit, almost like hockey players – one had dark, curling hair that splashed over his collar, the other was blond, or likely blond, as he had shaved his head bald and was tanned darker than the ranger’s uniform he was wearing.

  “You kids with a summer camp?” the dark one asked.

  “We’re a hockey team,” Fahd told him.

  “A hockey team?” The ranger burst out laughing. “This lake won’t freeze over till Christmas. You plan to wait here that long?”

  “We’re here for the week,” said Sam. “And we don’t play on lakes. We play in the Tamarack rink.”

  “Ohhhh, a little sensitive, are we?” kidded the dark-haired ranger.

  Nish couldn’t resist. “Ask her about her sissy camping clothes. You’d think she’s a figure skater, not a hockey player!”

  The rangers looked at each other, making faces. “I’m not touching that one,” said the dark ranger.

  “Me neither,” laughed the blond one. “You kids know who Jake Tyson is?”

  “We know,” said Fahd. “We heard about it on my radio. Nish here saw the plane go down.”

  Both rangers stopped what they were doing and turned to Nish, who was stepping forward to brag.

  “Yeah, I saw it,” said Nish, beginning to blush.

  “He said it was a flying saucer,” said Sam.

  “Put a cork in it, fancy pants!” Nish snapped. “I saw a plane go over last night – lights on, but no engine. It was coughing and choking and then nothing.”

  The rangers looked at each other, suddenly very curious. “Where did it go?”

  “He doesn’t know,” said Sam.

  Nish ignored her. “That way,” he said, pointing vaguely across the lake.

  The rangers looked out. “Towards the river?” the dark one asked.

  “We searched the river,” said Sarah. “Nothing we could see. We also checked the bay and the far shore. Nothing there, either.”

  “What do you know about it?” Travis asked the rangers.

  The blond one looked hard at Travis, then shook his head. “Probably not even as much as you. The plane’s missing. That’s about all we know. The air base at Trenton thought they picked up the emergency signal and placed it somewhere around Big Crow Lake, but then the signal went dead. They’re still flying search-and-rescue – you probably saw some planes go over.”

  “We saw them,” said Fahd.

  “We’re here for a preliminary ground search,” said the dark ranger. “If they pick up the signal again at the air base, they
can radio us and we should be able to get to them.”

  “Do you think they’re alive?” asked Fahd.

  The rangers looked at each other as if trying to decide whether to say what they truly felt.

  “We don’t know,” said the dark ranger.

  “We can only hope,” said the blond ranger.

  7

  The two young rangers were Dick Chancey, the blond one, and André Girard, with the curly dark hair. The two senior rangers were Tom McCormick, the grey-haired one, and Jerry Kennedy, the bald one, and they spent considerable time out on the point with Nish, going over and over and over again the events of the previous night as best as Nish could recall them.

  The rangers were going to take over an area of the large campsite not being used by the Owls. The smaller campsites on the lake were taken up with canoe trippers, this being the busiest time of summer for travel into the park interior, and the rangers needed a convenient base to work from as they conducted their searches. Besides, the Owls’ campsite was the only one with a good wide beach, which made it the only place on all of Big Crow Lake where a float plane could pull right up to the shore.

  But the float plane that had brought the rangers was already gone. The canoes and supplies had barely been unloaded when the pilot announced he was heading back to the base. The rangers pushed him off, and the pilot started up the engine, taxied out past the island, and turned into the light wind. The plane roared loudly and moved down the lake in a longer and longer spray until, magically, the spray vanished, the plane lifted, and, in an instant, was gone over the trees in the direction from which it had come.

  Travis, Jesse, and Rachel had gone out to the far end of the point to watch. Travis liked being with the two Highboys. They knew so much about nature. They could identify every bird and animal, every fish in the water, even most of the bugs. And they knew everything about the float planes, which Rachel kept calling “Cree taxis.”

  It was wonderful to see Rachel again. Travis had thought of her often since the Owls’ trip to Waskaganish, the little Cree village on James Bay where Jesse had come from and where Rachel, Jesse’s cousin, still lived and went to school.

  The last memory Travis had of leaving Waskaganish after that amazing northern adventure had been the feel of Rachel’s mitten as the two new friends had briefly held hands before the Owls had to go.

  It was a feeling Travis had never felt before. A feeling that, he could not help but notice, was back again the moment he saw Rachel waving from Jesse’s father’s truck as the Highboys pulled up to the Tamarack arena for the final lacrosse game of the season.

  Rachel had watched the game, and Travis felt her eyes burning into him as if they carried some kind of powerful energy. He scored four goals and set up three others for a seven-point game, the greatest single lacrosse game he had ever played. Sam and Sarah teased him in the dressing room for playing his heart out for Rachel, and while he had yelled at them to shut up, he knew that they were right.

  Rachel had lived up to her promise to come to Tamarack to visit. She was there for the two weeks before school, and Muck, when he heard that Jesse would have to skip the canoe trip to be with his cousin, suggested instead that Rachel join them.

  So far, the trip had been marvellous. Rachel and Travis had picked up their friendship exactly where they had left it that day the plane took off from James Bay. Travis felt like he could talk to her about anything.

  They were staring out after the rising float plane when Travis happened to look down into the water where it was clear, in the shelter of the narrow point. There were three or four large bass near a stump, their black bodies like darting shadows as they moved in and out between the roots.

  There were bubbles rising, small bubbles that seemed to come up out of the sand and vanish when they hit the surface. The words were out of Travis’s mouth before he could stop them.

  “Do fish fart?”

  Rachel turned, her eyes narrowing, as if she were looking at one of Nish’s aliens, not her good friend from the Screech Owls.

  “What?”

  “Nish,” Travis said quickly, feeling his face heat up like a stove element, “Nish wants to know what makes those bubbles.

  See them?”

  Rachel looked out by the submerged stump. Jesse also looked, leaning forward, his brow furrowed.

  “I see them,” said Jesse. “It’s just swamp gas. Leaves rot. Wood rots. You see it all the time.”

  Rachel smiled. “But don’t tell Nish.”

  “Why not?” asked Travis.

  “We might have some fun with him.”

  8

  The rangers took off in their canoes shortly after setting up camp, Ranger McCormick with young Chancey heading east, Ranger Kennedy with Girard heading west. They would paddle the shoreline, then take to the old lumbering trails around the lake in the hope of seeing some sign of the downed craft.

  The Owls continued with their activities, but no one could really concentrate on what they were doing. They swam before heading out on a long hike in the afternoon to see a rare stand of towering white pine while Muck, the history nut, talked about how most of Canada had once been covered by these giants before they’d been wiped out by too much logging.

  Normally, Travis would have listened, but he couldn’t help thinking instead about the plane and Jake Tyson and what might have happened. They walked back in silence and were just finishing up their evening meal when the two pairs of rangers returned, almost simultaneously, neither party with any more of a clue than they had setting out hours earlier.

  “Not a sign anywhere,” said Ranger McCormick. “We got quite a way back on the old trails – but nothing.”

  “I spoke to headquarters on the radio,” said Ranger Kennedy. “Nothing there, either. The emergency signal must have died soon after it started up.”

  They seemed deeply disappointed.

  “Kind of reminds you of Bill Barilko, doesn’t it?” Ranger McCormick said to Muck.

  Muck nodded, his face downcast.

  Jesse Highboy spoke up. “I know about him. We come from Waskaganish. It used to be called Rupert House before we got the Cree name back.”

  “Rupert House was where he was supposed to go fishing,” said Ranger Kennedy.

  “He did go fishing there,” Rachel said. “Our grandfather was his guide. He still has a signed picture Bill Barilko left him.”

  The other Owls were in the dark. Finally Andy Higgins spoke up.

  “Who is Bill Barilko?”

  “Toronto Maple Leafs. Number 5, defence,” announced Willie Granger, the team trivia expert. “Nickname, Bashing Bill. Scored the Stanley Cup-winning goal in overtime against the Montreal Canadiens, April 21, 1951. Never played another game in the NHL. His sweater number is retired. It’s hanging from the rafters at the Air Canada Centre. I’ve seen it.”

  “Pretty good, son,” said Ranger McCormick. “But that’s only half the story. Bill Barilko and a friend went off fishing that summer and their plane never returned from Rupert House – sorry, kids, what do you call it now?”

  “Waskaganish,” answered Rachel.

  “Whatever,” continued the older ranger, not willing to try the Cree word. “Biggest search-and-rescue ever launched in Canadian history.”

  “They never found him?” Fahd asked.

  “The Leafs never won another Stanley Cup all the time he was missing,” said Ranger McCormick. “Years went by, and people began to think of it as a curse. Some people even said he wasn’t missing at all, that they’d flown over the North Pole to the Communists and he was the one who taught the Russians how to play the game. Some said he was wandering the bush as a madman, his brain gone wonky from the crash.

  “Ten years went by and they were still looking for him, and the Leafs still hadn’t won another Stanley Cup. It was really, really strange. Then, in the spring of 1962, this bush pilot is out on timber-cruising patrol and gets blown way off course and sees an old plane sticking up out of the muskeg.


  “They go in to investigate, and it’s the old Fairchild 24 Bill Barilko and his pal took off in. Wings sheared off by the trees, plane half buried in the muck and swamp, both of them still strapped into their seats, except now they were just two skeletons, staring straight ahead like they were still flying home.

  “And guess what? That same spring the Leafs win the Stanley Cup for the first time since Bill Barilko scored in overtime.”

  Nish turned to Muck. “That true?”

  “It’s true,” said Muck. “I knew a couple of guys on the Leafs team that won in ’62 – Tim Horton and Billy Harris – and they thought there was something to it all. They were convinced that Bill Barilko was haunting Maple Leaf Gardens and they wouldn’t win again until Bill’s body had been found.

  “One of the strangest stories in hockey, that one.”

  “Well,” Ranger Kennedy said, hitching his pants as he stood up from the stump he’d been sitting on, “this here crash is all of one day old. We’ve still got eleven years to go before we’re worrying about any ghost, so we’d better get something to eat and figure out what we’re going to do next.”

  The four rangers set to work preparing their evening meal. Muck went out and stood on the edge of the point, staring out over the water, and no one dared go near him.

  Travis knew when the Owls’ coach wanted to be alone. Muck had been considered unlucky when he broke his leg so badly while playing for the Hamilton Red Wings that he was never able to play junior again. He never felt sorry for himself, though. In fact, right now, Travis was absolutely sure, he’d be out there feeling sorry instead for Bill Barilko and Jake Tyson and thinking about what truly bad luck was.

  Muck returned to the campfire after the rangers had eaten, and the older men sat sipping coffee – and, Travis thought, something out of a small silver flask Muck pulled out of the tent he was sharing with Mr. Dillinger.

  The night was warm, the moon now out and very low in the sky, and several of the Owls went down and sat along the point, some of them dipping their bare legs into the water, and talked about the day just past and the plane crash and what was going to happen next.