The Complete Screech Owls, Volume 3 Page 9

  “A dinosaur.”

  Travis looked from one Mountie to the other, waiting for a reaction. The first Mountie was staring down at his monitor, watching the thin green line. The second was also staring at a monitor.

  The first Mountie expelled a burst of air just as Travis had done moments earlier. The colour had drained completely from his face. He looked ashen.

  Travis knew why. He felt queasy himself.

  The line hadn’t even flickered!

  Where to begin? Travis wondered. He had already telephoned home to talk to his mother and father, and even though they’d been sympathetic and supportive, Travis couldn’t shake the feeling that they didn’t believe him either. And who could blame them? If his best friend Nish had come up with this story, Travis would have aimed his index finger at his right temple and spun it around and around and around. It was absolutely insane.

  The Screech Owls hockey team had flown to Calgary, Alberta, on a sparkling-clear and bitterly cold March day. They had stuffed their thick winter coats into the overhead containers and settled down with their books, and portable CD players and iPods, and hockey magazines for what was sure to be one of the greatest Screech Owls escapades of all time.

  They were headed for the town of Drumheller, where the Owls were going to combine a hockey tournament with a tour of the famous Badlands and a visit to the world-famous Royal Tyrrell Museum. At the Royal Tyrrell, they were going to learn all about prehistoric life in North America. They were headed, claimed Data, who always seemed to know about such things, to “The Dinosaur Capital of Canada.”

  They would be seeing prehistoric fossils and models of the giant reptiles that had lived in the Badlands nearly a hundred million years ago–a time so far in the past that Travis and the rest of the Owls couldn’t even comprehend its distance. Data said to think of it this way: at twelve years of age, they had each been alive 4,380 days, or 105,120 hours, or 6,307,200 minutes. If every minute of their lives had really taken twenty years to live, that’s how long ago the dinosaurs lived in Alberta.

  “Every minute does last twenty years!” Nish had roared. “At least when you’re in Mr. Schultz’s math class!”

  The Owls were so excited about the trip they had all but forgotten about the hockey. Muck Munro hadn’t been able to get off work and so they were without a coach. One of the assistants, Ty Barrett, had managed to get time off, but Ty wasn’t that much older than the Owls themselves. Control of the team had pretty much fallen to Mr. Higgins, Andy’s father, and good old Mr. Dillinger, who had actually taken an extra week off work so he could drive the Screech Owls’ bus to Calgary, meet them there, and then drive them around Drumheller and the surrounding area while the tournament was on. Once it was over, Mr. Dillinger was going to drive all the way back home while everyone else flew.

  They could never have afforded the trip if Mr. Higgins hadn’t become involved. Before Andy’s family had moved to Ontario so Mr. Higgins could supervise a huge gas-pipeline project, he had been an executive with one of the biggest oil companies in Alberta. Through years of travel, he had built up enough air-travel points, Andy once said, to fly the family five times around the world. When Mr. Higgins then won a special airline draw that gave him a million bonus points on his air-travel program, he had generously donated all his points to the Owls. The entire team was able to fly out and back–at no cost at all to the players!

  Once Mr. Higgins got involved, there was no holding him back. A big man with a salesman’s gift for persuasion, he had easily talked Mr. Dillinger into taking the old bus across country so the Owls would have cheap transportation once they got to Calgary. He also arranged accommodation on the outskirts of Drumheller where an old friend of his, Kelly Block, had a sports camp that specialized in motivation and teamwork. They might not win the hockey tournament, Mr. Higgins had said at a meeting of all the players and their parents, but they’d come back a better team!

  Most of the parents had seemed quite pleased with the arrangement, and were even excited about the idea of a motivational sports camp. Travis had noticed, however, that Muck, who had earlier said he might not even come to the meeting, slipped out of the hall before it was over. From his seat by the window, Travis could see Muck walking in the freezing parking lot, his breath lingering in heavy clouds as he moved slowly back and forth on his bad leg. He knew Muck well enough to know that the coach was unhappy about something.

  Now that they had arrived, Travis thought he knew what had disturbed his old coach. Following supper that first night in Drumheller, he had overheard Mr. Higgins and Kelly Block talking, and he hadn’t liked the tone Kelly Block was using. The camp owner–an athletic-looking man with his blond hair strangely combed over the bald spots–seemed to be dumping on Muck, whom he didn’t even know, for being old-fashioned and out of touch with modern coaching techniques. At one point Block had even said it was “time for the Screech Owls to move on, get a new coach who understands the way the game is played today.” Travis had felt his cheeks burn with anger. Already he didn’t like Kelly Block.

  “Mental Block” was the nickname Nish had already given the head of the sports camp, and it seemed to be sticking–at least when the Owls talked to each other in private.

  Travis had tried to imagine the trip west for weeks, but his daydreams had fallen very far short of reality. Three hours into their flight, they had flown straight into a chinook that had blown up across the Rocky Mountains from the United States. The plane had bounced into the rush of warm air from the south like a fishing bobber in a rough current. Poor Nish barely had time to scream “I’M GONNA HURL!” before he turned pure white and was reaching for a barf bag.

  They landed in summer weather–an entire hockey team wearing three layers of clothing, including long underwear, and carrying their bulky Screech Owls parkas, scarves, tuques, and heavy winter mitts. It was as if they’d flown to Florida, not Calgary. The heat made them itchy and cranky. Mr. Dillinger, who was there to meet them, was having trouble with the bus overheating and twice had to stop to let the engine cool down while the Owls filed out along the shoulder of the road in their shirtsleeves and marvelled at the extraordinarily warm wind.

  “It’s a chinook,” Andy said.

  “We get sudden thaws back home in Tamarack sometimes,” said Fahd.

  Andy shook his head sharply. “Not the same thing. You only get chinooks out here. I’ve seen them last for more than a week.”

  They drove with the windows open, the tired travellers dozing, the road straight as a ruler, the landscape flat for the most part and sometimes rolling slightly. There were small lakes in the fields from the quickly melting snow.

  They were passing through a small town–Beiseker, the sign said–when, up ahead in the bus, Sarah suddenly broke into wild laughter.

  “We’re in Nish’s home town! They even put up a statue to him!”

  Everyone sat up and looked outside. They were passing a baseball diamond, and then a park, and in the middle of the park was a large black-and-white statue of–a skunk!

  The big statue even had a sign with the skunk’s name: SQUIRT.

  Nish stood in the aisle, turning as he bowed in acceptance. “Thank you very much, thank you very much.”

  Soon, however, the joking died down. Several of the Owls were asleep. Travis put his jacket against the window and leaned against it, one eye barely watching the rolling fields and the telephone poles pass by.

  The next thing Travis knew, he was being jarred awake by a wildly honking horn. Travis sat up sharply, his chin on the seat in front. All the other Owls were also popping up wide awake. At the front, Mr. Dillinger’s bald head was turning rapidly back and forth as he leaned on the horn and tried to see if everyone was up and watching. He was laughing and excited.

  “Get ready to drop o? the edge of the Earth!” Mr. Dillinger shouted, giggling at the end of his warning.

  “THE ROAD’S WASHED OUT!” Nish screamed from the back of the bus.

  Travis stared ahe
ad through the patch in the windshield where the wipers had cleared the muddy spray from passing vehicles. To either side he could still see the wet brown fields of the flat Alberta countryside, but up ahead the ground–and the road they were following–had vanished!

  “HERE WE GO!” shouted Mr. Dillinger. “HANG ONTO YOUR HATS!”

  Travis could not even get his breath. The bus rumbled on, Mr. Dillinger seemingly unconcerned that up ahead there was no road whatsoever, just open space and fog!

  “WE’RE GONNA DIE!” Nish shouted. “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE!”

  The bus hurtled towards the edge, then dropped. Not like a stone, but like a glider, sailing down into thick fog.

  Travis felt his ears pop as the bus seemed to float, down, down, down the steep slope of the highway into the fog.

  It really did seem they had dropped off the edge of the Earth, just as the old explorers were warned would happen if they dared set out to sail around a world that everyone knew was flat as a board.

  “WE’RE GONNA DIE!”

  Travis didn’t have to see Nish’s face, or anyone else’s for that matter, to know that they were as delighted as he was by the thrilling ride. This was an added bonus.

  A hockey tournament.

  A visit to a fabulous dinosaur museum.

  And a brand-new world to explore.

  This was going to be an unbelievable Screech Owls adventure.

  Question 3: would you rather pass wind or make a speech?’” Nish read out loud from his dressing-room locker. “WHAT IS THIS?” “Aren’t they pretty well the same thing for you?” Sarah asked from a stall on the other side.

  The Owls all had their heads down, trying to fill in the blanks on a document they were balancing on the tops of their shin pads and hockey pants. They had just had their first practice at the Drumheller arena–a marvellous rink, where the Zamboni drove onto the ice through the mouth of a dinosaur and green dinosaurs were painted into each side of the faceoff circle–and then Kelly Block had handed out an eight-page questionnaire that he said would help him get to know the team. He wanted what he called “psychological profiles” of the whole team.

  Travis understood some of the questions–“Do you feel you have leadership qualities?…If you play well but the team still loses, are you satisfied?”–but a good many of them made no sense whatsoever. The Owls were asked about their ambitions and interests, as might be expected, but also about daydreaming and private fears and, as Nish had just loudly pointed out, even passing wind.

  “GIVE ME A BREAK!” Nish shouted from the corner. “‘Question 14: Would you rather kiss a member of the opposite sex or finish your homework?’”

  “I picked homework,” Sarah said.

  “I’d rather pick my nose,” grumbled Nish, burying his head in the final page of the questionnaire.

  Kelly Block came in and rounded up the finished questionnaires. He had that slightly knock-kneed, bounce-on-the-balls-of-the-feet way of moving. He was wearing expensive running shoes without the laces tied up, and he had on a track suit with his name stencilled over the heart and the name of his business–Camp Victory–emblazoned across the back.

  Camp Victory must have been mostly a summer operation, for it had a musty smell to it that suggested the place had only recently been opened up and still needed some airing out. Fortunately, it was like summer right now. If it had been typical March weather, and the windows had remained locked up tight, the camp buildings might have been unbearable. Travis figured Kelly Block spent most of the winter months working for big companies like the one Mr. Higgins was with. Judging from Block’s clothes and the expensive 4x4 sports utility vehicle he drove, Travis figured he must do pretty well as a motivational psychologist.

  Certainly, he had spent a lot of money setting up this camp. There was a main building with a full gymnasium–weights, workout bikes, treadmills–and a kitchen that served meals so good that Nish forgot he’d seen the golden arches of McDonald’s on the drive into town. There were individual cabins, each with four beds and the hottest, softest showers Travis had ever been under. There was a small enclosed rink for Rollerblade hockey, a basketball court, and a “garage” filled with mountain bikes, good ones with full shocks.

  The Drumheller area was a mountain-biker’s dream, with deep valleys and high rounded hills and natural trails everywhere you looked. The camp was out along the Red Deer River, halfway to a suspension footbridge at Rosedale that headed deep into the hills. They had already been out past Rosedale to see the hoodoos–bizarre, cartoon-like pillars of rock the shape of mushrooms and monsters that had been formed by thousands of years of erosion–and there were said to be more hoodoos farther up a trail beyond the swinging bridge. It was more like they’d come to another planet than another town.

  “We did die when the bus went over that hill,” Nish announced. “And this is heaven!”

  “Not if you’re here, it isn’t,” corrected Sarah.

  In Mr. Dillinger’s old team bus, they had toured the town and the surrounding countryside. Drumheller was fascinating, with dinosaur models–some of them life-size–at every corner, and dinosaur murals painted on most of the buildings. They visited the Little Church, a building so tiny they had to take turns just to get inside and see. “SEATS 10,000,” a sign said. “SIX AT A TIME.”

  “How come they don’t have a little priest?” Nish asked aloud when the others were trying to sit and kneel in their seats. “And a little Bible and a little God and a little Jesus?”

  “How about a little quiet?” Sarah said over her shoulder.

  They stopped for the better part of the afternoon at the fabulous Royal Tyrrell Museum of Paleontology, a huge complex on the other side of town, deep in the high, barren hills. Travis had seen dozens of museums in his lifetime, but never one so spectacular as this. It sat, like a spaceship on the moon, perfectly placed in what seemed its very own canyon.

  Outside were bronzed, full-sized models of various dinosaurs. Travis thought if the museum weren’t there, someone who happened to walk in here over the hills could easily think they had stepped back in time a hundred million years. It sent a shudder of excitement up his spine.

  Mr. Higgins had arranged for a special tour of the museum. Mr. Dillinger got Data’s wheelchair out of the bus, and Sarah was quick to move in behind it to push him around. The Owls set off, and were soon swarming around displays of huge jawbones and skulls of dozens of prehistoric beasts, including one magnificent model of what looked like a giant flesh-eating Tyrannosaurus rex. The monster was fighting a couple of small, vicious Domeosaurs over the bloody remains of a dead Parasaurolophus.

  “Sick,” said Jenny.

  “Awesome,” said Fahd.

  “It’s not a Tyrannosaurus,” corrected Data. “It’s an Albertosaurus.”

  “Good for you,” smiled the guide. “A much tougher beast than T. rex. How did you know that?”

  “I study dinosaurs,” Data said, blushing.

  “I want to see an Ontariosaurus!” called Nish.

  “Sorry,” said the guide. “There’s no such thing.”

  “That’s not true,” Sarah whispered to the rest of the Owls. “There’s Nish. He’s creepy. He’s got a brain the size of a peanut. He makes your skin crawl. And he’s from Ontario.”

  Nish turned sharply as the others began giggling. “What’s so funny?” he demanded. But no one would tell him.

  Travis had never had such a marvellous day. The Owls were taken on a hike around the neighbouring hills, and were shown where fossils had been dug out of the ground. They were told that alligators had once lived here. They were told that there were still dangerous beasts about, not dinosaurs but poisonous snakes and scorpions and black widow spiders, and that they had better be careful where they stepped.

  The Owls visited a lab and saw scientists cleaning newly discovered fossils and getting ready to assemble the skeletons. They saw fossils embedded in rocks, and whole reconstructed skeletons, and artists’ depictions of life, an
d death, as it must have been more than a hundred million years ago. They learned that dinosaurs might have lived to be as much as 150 years old. They learned that no one really knows what the largest dinosaurs were, though the Brachiosaurus stood as tall as a five-storey building and weighed as much as eighty tonnes. They learned that the smallest dinosaur was no bigger than a chicken, and that the toughest dinosaur was not, as they had thought, Tyrannosaurus rex. The most fearsome of all was a little featherweight called Deinonychus, which was no bigger than a man but could move so fast and slash so quickly with its long, sickle-shaped claws and razor-sharp teeth that no dinosaur would dare tangle with it. They learned that they were standing on the richest dinosaur land known on Earth: some thirty-five different dinosaur species had been identified in the Alberta Badlands.

  “There’s so much we don’t know,” said the guide. “Before 1824 they didn’t even know dinosaurs once existed. We don’t know whether they were cold-or warm-blooded. We don’t know what colour they were. We don’t even know what they sounded like.”

  “Did they fart?” a small voice squeaked from the back.

  “Excuse me?” the guide said, trying to see who had spoken.

  No one spoke. Travis cringed, knowing at once who it was.

  “You said something, young man?” the guide said pointedly to Nish.

  “N–no,” Nish mumbled.

  “I didn’t think so,” the guide said. “If you have something to say, please tell us all, though, will you?”

  “O…kay,” Nish mumbled even lower.

  “Ontariosaurus,” Sarah said. Everyone, the guide included, laughed.

  “Actually, young man, we do have something over here you might be interested in.”

  They crossed to a special display, and the guide stopped in front of what appeared to be a polished rock.

  “Any idea what this might be, young man?” the guide asked Nish.