Jackrabbit
Ivy On The Trail: Episode Four
Ivy On The Trail is a supernatural adventure novella, serialized in ten projected parts. This is Episode Four.
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Previously, the campers arrived, and Ivy joined in on a first-night prank.
In this episode, Ivy helps out on a hike with the littles, and notices some strange behavior from the counselors.
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That night, Ivy dreamed of the spare cabin, the old Cabin Three, in its lonely woodland graveyard.
But in her dream it was not a frightening or tragic place at all. It was freshly painted, with clean yellow curtains hanging in the sparkling windows and a cherry-red door, and the sun filtered down through the treetops and bathed the old mossy roof in golden light.
Scraps of singing could be heard from within. An old song, something Ivy thought maybe she had heard before.
Under her feet was a deep thrumming, like a great heartbeat, like resting your ear on the chest of someone you love.
But when Ivy stood on tip-toe to peer through the windows, she still could see nothing except an empty space, humid-warm and cavernous.
*******
After breakfast and a morning meeting on the second day of camp, it was time for the scavenger hunt.
The hunt was a fine and long-standing tradition, a fun way for the older campers to get their bearings and work as a team as they followed clues and ran all over the camp property to collect trinkets and funny props.
That said, by mid-morning it was already too hot to think, and Ivy was relieved that she hadn’t been tasked with working the hunt. She had, once again, been assigned to help the littles. And they weren’t old enough to handle running all over camp.
Instead, Loki and Willow’s cabins of little kids had been given a different structure to their morning: a slow, gentle nature walk on the winding trail that led away from camp and out toward the Circle, a hidden meeting place in the woods where they would eat a picnic lunch before the rest of the older kids arrived there as the final stop of the hunt.
In the distance, the happy shouts of campers on the scavenger hunt shocked the summer stillness. While it was a bit disappointing to once again feel like she was missing out on the game, Ivy consoled herself that it was much, much cooler out here in the green woods, the interlacing branches shading the ribbon of well-cleared and well-traveled trail that stretched out before them. Birdsong filled the air with trills and tattoos. A frustrated Douglas squirrel perched head-downward on a tree’s trunk and punctuated the air with its staccato squeaks, failing at ferocity.
The twelve littles walked in a fascinated yet fidgety line, peering up at the trees and the birds and bending down to look at a passing beetle or an interesting leaf. They were an easily distracted bunch, but also easily delighted. Everything was new to them and their enchantment was infectious. The line of children constantly stretched, bunched, and then snapped back into place like a rubber band, alive with chatter. Even timid little Oliver seemed to be having a good time. Loki led the way, Willow walked in the middle, and Ivy brought up the rear.
Loki was the quiet type, and Willow fielded constant questions from the kids, so Ivy’s mind wandered. She thought back to her dreamscape, to the old Cabin Three. The song from her dream itched at her brain. She couldn’t remember enough of it to recognize it.
To distract herself she took a headcount of the campers:
One…two…three…four…
Five…six…seven…eight…
Nine…ten…eleven…twelve.
“Heard a lot of commotion last night.”
Ivy snapped back to attention and looked up to see that Willow had fallen back a little bit so she could speak to Ivy over her shoulder without Loki hearing. “It sounds like someone visited the first-night campfire, huh?”
Ivy flushed pink, remembering her part in the prank. “Oh. Yeah.”
“It’s a creepy little tale. The Woodmother.”
Ivy nodded. She glanced down, not wanting any of the kids to overhear and get spooked, but none of them were paying any attention. “I didn’t know it was a true story. I thought it was made up.”
Willow smiled, but her expression was complicated. “Feels a little strange to make a joke out of it the way Sabrina and Turtle and Buck do.”
Ivy felt a flicker of defensiveness run through her. “It’s a camp tradition. It’s not a big deal, just a bit of fun. No one gets hurt. The real story was a long time ago, anyway.”
“Camp tradition,” Willow repeated, almost to herself. “Yeah, I’m getting that. There’s a lot I don’t know about this place, I guess. Probably a lot that nobody knows. Not even you.”
“You’ll get the hang of it,” Ivy replied, hoping that would end the increasingly uncomfortable conversation. But Willow only laughed quietly in response, a humorless sound.
“I don’t know about that. It’s not as—”
Willow stopped and tensed at the same time that Loki paused the line, clapped his hands, and put a finger to his lips. The kids—mostly startled by the noise he made—did as they were told, looking up at Loki with wide, questioning eyes.
That’s when Ivy heard the heavy rustling off in the bushes to the left of the line. The underbrush here was thick and suffocating, walls of salal grown to unusual heights in a desperate bid for sunlight.
The bushes shivered and shook with the passage of something. Something big.
Ivy glanced at Willow, and even though the older girl had her back slightly turned to her, Ivy thought she could see Willow’s nose twitching.
Like she was sniffing the air.
Loki stared into the brush, one hand on little Oliver’s shoulder—who was standing beside him—the other frozen by his side like a gunslinger hovering his hand over an imaginary holster. Waiting.
Then, the brush parted and a doe wandered into the gap, long ears swiveling, white-lined tail waving like a flag. At the sight of her the kids could no longer hold in their excitement. They pointed and waved at the doe, chirping to each other in their thrill. She accepted their admiration warily for a few moments before continuing on her way, disappearing into the trees.
Ivy glanced over the heads of the kids just in time to see something pass between Loki and Willow. A look. A knowing look, not the kind of look strangers—or new co-workers, for that matter—give to one another. It was startlingly intimate and impossible to read.
Then, as quickly as it arrived, the spell broke.
“Wasn’t that amazing?” Willow said to the littles, her tension gone, her face serene with joy and relief. “What a beautiful doe!”
The kids peppered her anew with questions—is that a boy deer or girl deer? where are her babies? where does she sleep at night time? why doesn’t she have horns like Santa’s reindeer?—and Willow answered them patiently as Loki continued the line forward.
Ivy looked back over her shoulder, but the deer had vanished fully into the forest. And Loki and Willow had returned to normal, speaking gently with the kids, never once looking at each other.
One little girl, the one walking directly in front of Ivy, didn’t seem all that interested in the deer. Instead, she turned and held up something in her hand to show Ivy.
“What’s this called?” the little girl asked. It was a sprig of a plant with vibrant green leaves and a complicated purple flower with a pleasant scent. Ivy knew it immediately.
“Oh,” she replied, “that’s birdmint. Isn’t it pretty?”
The little girl nodded, brought the flower to her nose. “It smells nice.”
“It does,” Ivy said. She had always loved birdmint. “The bees love it, too. It only grows here on Ferris Island, you know. It won’t grow anywhere else.”
The little camper pondered this for a moment, twirling the purple flower in her fingers, before reaching it up again.
“It’s for you,” she said.
Touched, Ivy took the sprig of birdmint and gave it a sniff, then tucked it behind her ear.
“Thank you,” she said. “That’s really sweet of you.”
The little girl smiled, missing a bottom tooth, her brown hair in two low pigtails. “I’m Jack. It’s short for Jacqueline but my brothers and sisters call me Jack.”
“Hi, Jack,” Ivy said. “I’m Ivy.”
“I know,” said Jack. Then she turned to continue forward with the rest of the chattering line, still buzzing about the beautiful deer.
*******
They reached the Circle right on time, just before lunch, emerging from the woodland trail into a large clearing ringed ‘round with old-growth trees. In the clearing was a circle of several small heavy-duty canvas tents—permanent fixtures, weathered with age—around a central firepit and bench seats. To the west was a sliver of sea-view, shining silver through the arms of the cedar and fir.
In camp lore, the Circle was treated like a hidden treasure, a secret village in the woods far from the safety of camp that you could only get to by hiking for a long, long time through the deep, dark woods. In truth, it wasn’t that far away from the main camp building as the crow flies; the magic of the Circle was all in the meandering path to get there.
When the line of littles pushed through the last stretch of trail and arrived in the Circle, Maia and Bailey were already waiting there to welcome them with sandwiches and chips and pitchers of lemonade laid out on the long old tables, the firepit smoldering with a low flame mostly for show. The old canvas tents seemed to watch the proceedings, their open mouths yawning in the noonday warmth. Sea-crows and Steller’s jays perched cackling in the treetops like dark ghosts and kept an eye out for unattended food.
The kids filled their paper plates and sat around the firepit, their little feet dangling from the bench seats. Oliver had made friends with another boy and they sat together, laughing about a joke one of them had made up. Jack sat alone at the edge of one bench; she seemed content to take it all in and listen to the other kids’ conversations.
When all the kids had been served, Ivy and Bailey picked a bench and sat beside each other to eat.
“How was the hike?” Bailey asked. “Exciting?”
Ivy swallowed her bite of sandwich and nodded casually. “Pretty chill. We barely escaped a mountain lion attack. It was no big deal, though. I wrestled it to the ground and defeated it with my superior strength.”
Ivy flexed her bicep. Bailey gasped in mock surprise and flicked a chip at her.
“Another exciting camp adventure to report to Jake,” Bailey said. “He’ll be so impressed.”
Ivy rolled her eyes, then glanced over her shoulder to make sure neither Willow nor Loki were nearby. Both counselors stood beside Maia off to the side, monitoring the kids and eating their own lunches.
“There was one thing, though,” Ivy said, keeping her voice low. “A deer startled us on the trail and…Willow and Loki acted really weird about it.”
Bailey shrugged. “People get spooked in the woods.”
“No, I mean…” Ivy paused. She realized she had no real proof of what she had seen, and no good way to explain it. She didn’t even know where to begin with Willow sniffing the air and Loki standing like he was ready to pounce on the threat like an animal. “I dunno, they acted like they knew each other. Outside of camp, from before. It’s hard to explain.”
Bailey frowned. “They didn’t act that way at orientation. Remember? They did all the icebreaker stuff like it was the first time they had ever introduced themselves. They’ve never even sat next to each other. I don’t think I’ve seen them talk one-on-one at all.”
“Same, but…I dunno. It was just a hunch.”
A knack.
Bailey looked over her shoulder at the two counselors, and Ivy copied the movement. Even now Loki and Willow were standing at a safe and too-appropriate distance from each other, cheated outward as if on stage, every fiber of their body language suggesting new acquaintances, unsure of each other. Willow with her long hair pulled away from her face, and Loki relaxed, observant.
There was no evidence of it ever happening, but Ivy knew what she saw, even if she didn’t know where it had come from.
“Okay, friends,” Maia said suddenly, clapping her hands for attention. “Willow is going to tell us a story while we finish our food! Are we ready for a story?”
The kids wiggled, and Willow’s cabin of girls clapped their hands and cheered.
Willow flounced up to the firepit, sweeping her arms like a dancer to make the kids laugh, and then settled herself in front of them. She proceeded to tell a colorful story, sort of a folktale—though Ivy had never heard it before—about two clever sisters who ignored their parents’ warnings and wandered into the woods on their own, then escaped from a big scary bear by turning into a bird and a dog. The bird flew away, and the dog ran too fast for the bear to catch. They tricked the bear into getting stuck in a thicket of thorns, then helped it get out when it promised to leave them alone.
It was all in good fun, and the kids were rapt. Willow was a good storyteller, using her hands and her voice to act it out and make it fun and engaging. But Ivy was only half paying attention. She couldn’t help but sneak looks at Loki as Willow told her story.
His face—a handsome face, Ivy supposed—was a mask of polite indifference, but his eyes…he couldn’t hide what was in his eyes.
You know her, Ivy thought. How do you two know each other? And why are you pretending you don’t?
She nudged Bailey, and Bailey turned to look, too.
When she turned back to Ivy, Bailey’s lips were pursed with devious delight, the cat that swallowed the canary.
“Oooooh,” she whispered. “Somebody’s got a secret!”
*******
The raucous roar of the older campers arriving from the end of their scavenger hunt filled the air, heading down the trail toward the Circle, and it was the cue for the littles to head back to camp via the direct short-cut route.
The littles lined up to head back, and Ivy said goodbye to Bailey and took her place at the back of the line again. The kids were a little sleepy and overtired from the excitement of the morning, full bellies, and the heat of the day. They were all a bit quieter on the walk back, ready for some post-lunch downtime when they returned to their cabins.
As the line moved down the short-cut trail in the golden afternoon, the little camper called Jack turned and held out her hand so that Ivy could hold it. They walked side by side, Jack yawning a little, scuffing the trail with the toes of her shoes.
“Did you have a good lunch?” Ivy asked.
Jack nodded. “It was good. And I had a fun walk with everyone.”
“That’s great,” Ivy said, a bit distracted. She couldn’t stop thinking about Willow and Loki. She couldn’t think of a good reason why the two of them would want to pretend they don’t know each other.
Were they a couple? If so, that wasn’t a problem. Sabrina and Turtle had been a couple for a long time, and everyone knew it. They didn’t need to keep secrets.
Did they want to stay anonymous or unknown? That didn’t track, either. Ivy knew that all of their legal information was on file in the camp office, including background checks and other important stuff. They would only be anonymous to the campers, and why would that matter?
The thought of this—the files of information in the office—gave Ivy the stirrings of an idea. She determined to talk to Bailey about it when they saw each other later.
To forcibly shift her thoughts elsewhere, she took a headcount of the campers in the line again:
One…two…three…four…
Five…six…seven…eight…
Nine…ten…eleven…twelve…
…thirteen.
Ivy narrowed her eyes, confused. Must have miscounted. She shook her head as if to clear it, then tried again:
One…two…three…four…
Five…six…seven…eight…
Nine…ten…eleven…twelve…
…thirteen?
But before she could say or do anything about this—though what could she possibly do or say?—Jack squeezed her hand and stopped, holding Ivy in place. Ivy looked down at her.
“I had a nice walk and a good lunch, but it’s time for me to go, now,” the little girl said. “Thank you for being so nice to me.”
The back of Ivy’s neck tingled, a cold sweep of nerves all the way up to the top of her scalp. “What do you mean, Jack?”
“When you’re ready, you can come and find me, Ivy,” Jack said. “You can come and find all of us, and we’ll play together.”
She smiled, missing a bottom tooth. Then the little girl shivered and shuddered and shrank down and down into the body of a small brown rabbit with small black eyes and low ears like pigtails, and leaped off the path and away before anyone—kids or counselors—could see it happen or say a single word.
Ivy stood dumbfounded. The line continued forward. She was the only one who saw the thirteenth camper. She was the only one who saw her leave.
When you’re ready, you can come and find me.
You can come and find all of us.
Numb, Ivy hurried to catch up with the line, her heart beating fast in her chest.
The lingering smell of birdmint from the wilting sprig behind her ear twisted around her like a vine in the golden afternoon, and she could still feel the warm touch of the little hand on hers, fading away.
Thank you for reading! 🐇
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Oh, so good! Actual chills when she counted the extra little!
I should NOT have decided to read this at 10:30 at night when it's dark outside. YIKES. O_O