Rabbit's Foot
Ivy On The Trail: Episode One
Ivy On The Trail is a supernatural adventure novella, serialized in ten projected parts. This is Episode One.
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In this episode, Ivy arrives at camp and gets settled in while things are still quiet…for now.
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“Clothing for all weather, check. Toiletries, check. Sunscreen, bug spray, flashlight, water bottle, hand sanitizer, check, check, check, check, check…”
Ivy lowered her phone—screen glowing bright with the official Fort Ferris Summer Camp packing list PDF—when she heard her dad chuckle beside her. He was driving, his worn ballcap pushed back away from his forehead, left arm resting on the open window frame as the tentative heat of July’s asphalt rose up and whipped past the old pickup truck.
Ivy frowned. “What? I want to make sure I got everything.”
“Little late now, isn’t it?” Pete said, glancing at her with gentle humor. “If you don’t have it, you probably don’t need it. Quit fretting.”
“What happens if I do need something?”
Pete shrugged. “You’re not hiking the backcountry, kiddo. You’re only half an hour from home at the most. Just call us.”
“Sure, great,” she muttered, “except I won’t be allowed to have my phone.”
Pete waited, squinting into the rearview mirror at nothing. Ivy noticed that he was doing that more often, these days, as she got older. Waiting. Taking a beat, instead of rising immediately to the challenge when she pushed against him. It used to be rare that she felt argumentative, but lately the snappish words came out before she had a chance to even think. Her brain seemed to trip over itself.
“Sorry,” she said, into the quiet. “You’re right. There’s a phone in the camp office.”
“Well now, there you go.” He smiled over at her. “And worst case scenario, you could always send a homing pigeon.”
She rolled her eyes, but smiled back. “Yeah, okay.”
“Or a bike messenger.”
“I get it, Dad.”
“Telegram?”
Ivy mimed choking herself and turned to look out the window as her dad laughed quietly.
“I hope you remember that this is supposed to be fun,” Pete added. “Just because you’re gonna be working, doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy yourself. Cut loose with your friends and have a blast. Right?”
“I know,” Ivy said. “I just really want to do a good job at this.”
But she didn’t say why. She couldn’t admit that out loud. Not to herself, not to anyone. Not yet.
Without warning, the heat in the truck plunged as Pete turned left off the highway and down the two-lane road leading into Fort Ferris State Park. It felt like diving into a frigid stream, the leaning trees stealing all the warmth from the air for themselves. The forest thickened around the truck, tall and dark, dappled sunlight filtering down on the road ahead of them.
Ivy’s heart was doing little complicated leaps and tumbles in her chest, excitement filling her limbs, knotting her stomach. She had been looking forward to this since early spring, when her friend Bailey dropped the most amazing news: Bailey’s older sister, Maia, had accepted the role of Camp Director at Fort Ferris after the previous director had retired last fall. It was the closest thing to knowing a celebrity that Ivy had experienced. But it was even better than knowing a celebrity, because Maia had given Bailey permission to stay with her at the camp over part of the summer, and said Ivy could come along, too, as long as the two of them did some work at the camp as staff-in-training. At sixteen they were too young to be counselors, but there was plenty of other stuff that they could do.
It also felt like the perfect way to spend an uncertain summer, since Ivy’s friend group was feeling especially splintered this year. The four of them were usually inseparable, but Ethan was on a cross-country road trip with his family for the next month, and Jake was training with the high school football team and tutoring on the side to earn some extra cash.
The thought of Jake made Ivy’s heart squeeze a little, though she didn’t really have a good reason why. She resolved to text him once she got settled in.
The truck followed the gently winding road. Ivy had been to the State Park many times for camping trips, day hikes, visiting the beach, and school field trips to the educational center at the old fort. She had even spent time at the summer camp as a camper. But this felt different.
This time, she was staff. Sure, in training. But still. Staff.
They passed the pay station and kept right at the forking road, leaving the tent-campground and public beach behind. Soon, they drove under the handcarved FORT FERRIS SUMMER CAMP sign, freshly painted for the new season, and climbed the hill. At its crest, the view looked out over the Salish Sea to the west, shimmering abalone-blue under the early July sunshine.
Following the directions Maia had given them, Pete turned immediately into a cul-de-sac tucked into the trees marked The Row. It was where the year-round and other long-term park staff lived, a neat line of five or six practical rambler-style houses. Old military housing, like a lot of the buildings on the State Park property. The small neighborhood stood guard on the main road into the camp, overlooking the sea.
Ivy’s heart leaped when she saw Bailey emerge from one of the houses and stand waiting on the lawn, arms wide like a sunning bird in welcome.
Pete pulled up and parked, calling, “Hey, Bailey.”
“Hi, Mr. Cole!” Bailey replied with a wave, jogging around to meet Ivy as she climbed out of the truck. She wrapped Ivy in a tight hug, squeezing. “Ah, I’m so glad you’re here! It’s been so boring with just me and Maia. Camp doesn’t officially start until Sunday and the other staff doesn’t get here until tomorrow so I’ve had nothing to do for a whole week except watch Maia work.”
Bailey made a gagging noise in her throat. Ivy laughed.
“Need help with your stuff, Ives?” Pete asked.
“Nope, we got it,” Ivy said. She and Bailey took turns pulling Ivy’s luggage out of the truck—sleeping bag, pillow, backpack, bag of clothes, extra shoes. When it was all unpacked, Ivy loped around to the driver’s side and hugged Pete quickly through the open window.
“Bye, Dad.”
“Bye, kiddo. Remember: we’re just a phone call away, and happy to airlift you out at any time for any reason. Okay?”
“Yep, okay,” she said, stepping away from the truck.
“Hey—”
She paused as he met her gaze and held it with his.
“Your mom and I are really proud of you,” he said. “I hope you know that.”
She nodded. She knew that, but it still meant everything to hear it. “I love you.”
“Love you, too. Have fun. You know what fun is, right?”
Ivy rolled her eyes again, smiling in spite of herself, and followed Bailey’s chattering voice up the path and into the little house, schlepping her stuff under her arms.
To prove how grown-up she felt, if only to herself, she refused to turn to the sound of the pickup truck’s engine rising and receding as her dad drove away.
*******
The little house was just as practical inside as it was outside, all clean lines and white walls and no-pile carpet that was easy to clean. That said, Maia had tried to include some personal touches around the place now that she would be living here year-round: a bright mandala tapestry pinned to one wall, wooden carvings and stone statuettes, a nice thick rug, hanging mobiles of shells and driftwood, potted plants, some old skin drums leaning against a bookshelf. Park maps, brochure mock-ups, and piles of official-looking paperwork piled up on the surfaces. It reminded Ivy a little bit of the Oddities Museum in the upper level of the General Store in Seavend where she and her friends bought snacks after school, with its shelves full of mysterious Ferris Island memorabilia.
Bailey showed Ivy around the house, though there wasn’t much to see: two bedrooms, a kitchen, a tiny front living room, a bathroom. They unloaded Ivy’s bags in the back bedroom, a small bunkhouse where Bailey had already claimed the top bunk. Ivy didn’t mind; she figured sleeping closer to the ground would be cooler, anyway, when the heat inevitably intensified over the following weeks.
The girls then headed down the road on foot to meet Maia at the camp’s main building. The hiss and click of grasshoppers in the tall nodding roadside weeds followed the girls as they went, down the hill through the thick green. They passed the fork in the road that led to the four boys’ cabins on the left and the four girls’ cabins to the right. The eight cabins were empty for now, but soon they would be full of giggling and gossip and ghost stories. Ivy felt the excitement of an impending camp week like a visceral thing, a taste of salt on the tongue.
Finally, the trees gave way and opened up to the hot, dusty expanse of gravel parking lot and the landscaped property surrounding the camp’s main building. It was a low-slung wide-roofed box, air-conditioned inside, and it held the camp’s office, cafeteria, cash-only canteen, and a small meeting space for events.
As Ivy and Bailey got closer, Maia emerged from the front door to meet them.
Ivy had only met Maia a few times before; she always reminded Ivy of the models on those flyers for REI or Patagonia that came in the mail: outdoorsy, adventurous, up for anything. She was always traveling, or backpacking, or volunteering for some cause. As the eldest sibling and ten years older than Bailey, Maia seemed untouchable, as detached as a deity. She was truly cool in a way that Ivy felt she could only aspire to.
And sure enough, Maia was still every bit as cool as she had ever been in her slim red flannel shirt, clean bootcut jeans, strappy heavy-duty hiking sandals, her long dark hair in two neat, thick braids down her shoulders. She had Bailey’s eyes—deep brown like good soil—and they both had skin that bronzed easily in the sun, a gift from their mom’s Makah heritage.
“Hey,” Maia said as she approached, hands on her hips, mock-serious, “no trespassing.”
“Whatever!” Bailey whooped. “Ivy’s here!”
Maia smiled graciously and extended her hand, a gesture that made Ivy feel very professional. “Hi, Ivy. It’s been a while. I’m so glad you could join us this summer.”
“Me, too,” Ivy said. She shook Maia’s hand. “It’s so weird being here when it’s so quiet.”
Maia nodded. “Won’t be quiet for long, so soak it up. The counselors and other camp staff will be here tomorrow afternoon for orientation, so this is the calm before the storm. Did Bailey get you set up in the house?”
Bailey saluted. “Aye aye.”
Something chimed an electronic purr. It was a big black walkie-talkie attached to Maia’s belt. A male voice said, “Hello, Colfax?”
Maia took the walkie-talkie from her belt, held the talk button, and said, “Colfax here, give me one second.”
Then, to the girls, “I’ve got a lot to do before everyone gets here and pretty much no time to get it done. Can you two entertain yourselves until dinner?”
Ivy blinked. The thought of having a free day running around an empty camp had not occurred to her. “You mean like…we can do whatever we want?”
Maia laughed. “Yeah, you get the run of the place today. But there are ground rules. This camp sits on about four hundred acres, and the whole State Park sits on over a thousand. That’s a lot of room for both fun and trouble, so I’m going to need the two of you to be as mindful as possible. Understood?”
Ivy and Bailey nodded.
Maia continued, listing the rules on her fingers, “Stay within the camp limits unless I give you permission. Use the buddy system. Check in with each other, and with me. Remember that you’re staff this year, not campers, which means you’re especially responsible for both good behavior and quality work. You report mainly to me, but you may also get drafted into helping the groundskeeping or kitchen staff depending on need. You might even assist counselors, so you gotta be flexible, too. Any questions?”
Ivy paused, then said, “Oh. Yeah, actually…in the paperwork you sent me, it says we can’t use our phones while camp is in session? I have mine with me for emergencies, but what should I do with it?”
“You can hang on to it for now,” Maia replied. “But when everyone gets here tomorrow we’ll be locking all the staff phones in our safe until the week is over. Good question. Anything else?”
The girls shook their heads, solemnly, though inside Ivy was nearly boiling over with excitement.
“Excellent,” Maia said, smiling. “Dinner’s here in the main building at six, so you’ve got the rest of the day to play.” She wagged a finger at them. “Be good. See you at dinner.”
Then she passed them, heading down the road that curved to the playfield entrance, pulling the big black walkie-talkie from her belt as she went. Her voice drifted faintly back to them before fading as she rounded the corner.
“So,” Ivy said. “What do we do now?”
Bailey waggled her eyebrows. “How about a swim?”
*******
While Bailey dove freely into the lake with a cry of joy and a bit of shock at the cold, Ivy sat on the creaking old dock next to their towels and dry clothes with her phone in her palms.
hey, thinking of u—she typed, then erased.
hey! hope summer is treatin—nope, erased.
“Ives! Get in here, it feels amazing!”
Ivy looked up. “I know, I know, just a sec.”
The lake behind the camp’s main building was small. Just a big pond, really, with a sludgy weed-woven bottom, cattails crowding all the way around it like dour spectators, and waterbugs skimming on the surface. It was no popular recreational spot like the slightly-bigger Tolliver Lake over in the tent-campground, but it was significantly less freezing to swim in than the sea only a stone’s throw away, and not nearly as deep.
hey Jake, I hope—ugh.
Ivy sighed, shook her head. Thought about it. Then, finally, she typed:
all settled in at camp with Bails. i won’t have my phone much because they lock it up ugh :( but i fully expect you to send the best memes you find so i can enjoy them when i get my phone back. it’s a big job but i believe in you.
She read it over once, twice. She added a winky face, then took it away. She finally decided it was good enough—just funny enough, all normal, nothing weird—and hit Send. Then she nestled her phone in her shoe to keep it dry, stood up, and sidled up to the dock’s edge.
“Finally.” Bailey splashed water at Ivy’s feet. “Are you going to be all sad and whiny without Jake this summer? Because I don’t think I can handle that.”
“I’m gonna be just fine,” Ivy said. Then she plugged her nose, tucked her knees, and jumped, hitting the water as close to Bailey as she could without landing on her. The girls’ shrieks echoed out over the surrounding trees, redwing blackbirds scattering from the reeds in alarm.
The water did feel good. After paddling around Bailey in circles Ivy slipped under the surface again, leaving the heady warmth of the afternoon behind and swimming forward through the freshwater current, gentle and languid.
For one wild moment she felt like a little kid again, suspended in time and the cold, dark water. Hovering in space, a tiny pinpoint in a vast void. She hadn’t realized how loud her inner voice had become—rising anxiety, so much pressure to see and be seen, a brain that felt clumsy with chaos—until it was stilled, silenced in the hush underwater.
She surfaced and shook her hair out of her face, looking around. She had swam nearly to the middle of the small lake and Bailey was on the dock, getting ready to jump in again.
Ivy dipped her head under the water, and just as she did so, something shivered through her mind, a tingling on the back of her scalp. It was a familiar sensation. Caroline up at the General Store called it a “knack”, a sense for things that other people couldn’t feel, a connection to this island—these trees, this water—and the older Ivy got the more it seemed to intensify. This knack had come in handy sometimes.
Other times, it only seemed to cause trouble.
Ivy raised her head and swiveled in the water. She wasn’t really sure what she was looking for, but her gaze caught on a dark patch under the trees, on the bank opposite the dock. The more she stared at the shape the more unclear it seemed to get. Just a shadow, probably. The woods around here were thick and changeable; they could play tricks with the mind.
“What are you looking at?” Bailey called from the dock.
Ivy turned to glance back at her. “Nothing, just—”
A scream sliced through the air. Ivy whirled in the water. The dark shape was gone.
“What was that?” Bailey said. “Did you hear that?”
But they didn’t need to wait. It happened again. An inarticulate scream, like a child’s cry, desperate and afraid, coming from the trees where Ivy had seen the shape.
Ivy swam fast back to the dock where Bailey was already throwing on her shirt and shorts and sliding into her sandals. Ivy climbed up the old ladder, the air around her suddenly feeling very cold and unwelcoming.
“We should tell Maia,” Bailey said.
Ivy held her phone in her hand as she slipped on her shoes and put on her clothes over her swimsuit. There was a text notification from Jake on her phone screen; no time to think about that, right now.
“We’re closer. Let’s check it out, first,” Ivy said. We’re staff now, not campers. That means we’re responsible. “And we’ll call her when we figure out what’s happening.”
*******
The thin trail around the lake was woolly with summer overgrowth, since the groundskeeper hadn’t been through yet to trim the blackberry canes back. So Ivy and Bailey, still soggy under their clothes, winced and cursed their way around clockwise from the dock, following the sound of the intermittent screams. It was a harsh and horrible sound, but the closer they got to it, the more Ivy thought it sounded a bit odd. Not unnatural, but not like a person, the way it had from a distance.
They finally pushed through the last thick screen of grabbing underbrush and found the screaming’s source.
It was a rabbit, a lithe wild thing with wide and frightened eyes, flailing helplessly against a coiled length of old rusty chicken-wire fencing hidden under the salal. The rabbit’s long left foot was caught between the layers of wire and the animal shrilled in pain, mouth agape in exhaustion.
“Ives, look at the leg,” Bailey said. “Should we call Maia?”
Ivy shook her head. “Not for this. You heard her; she’s got too much to do. This is something we can fix.”
Ivy eased forward, holding her towel in her hands. The rabbit screamed again, and Ivy flinched; it sounded so much like a human baby. Too much. She was no stranger to animals getting injured, and even dying. Her family kept chickens, and the woods surrounding their house in Seavend played host to coyotes, raccoons, and weasels. Loss was normal. But she had never been this close to a suffering creature before, and certainly not one that sounded so human when it cried.
She held out the towel and whispered soothing nonsense, hoping the rabbit would calm. And to her surprise, it did. The animal rested for a moment, ears flat against its spine, one big pale eye pinned on Ivy, tiny racing heart making the whole creature visibly shudder.
The prickle on Ivy’s scalp and neck fluttered through her, again, raising goosebumps on her arms and up her shoulders. A warning? But what else was she supposed to do?
She raised her towel up and laid it gently on the rabbit, the way her mom did sometimes when she needed to catch and calm their chickens to give them medicine. The rabbit sat unnaturally still. So still, in fact, that Ivy was able to gently pull the chicken wire up, prise apart the rusted layers, and untangle the rabbit’s foot without it fussing or moving. The rabbit’s fur was stained with blood from where the wire had cut into its flesh, but Ivy was too nervous to look closely. Behind her, she could practically feel Bailey holding her breath.
When she was sure the foot was fully freed she removed the towel. For a moment, the rabbit just sat and stared at her.
Like it was studying her.
“Go on,” she said. “Shoo.”
The rabbit’s ear twitched. Then, it made a tentative hop toward the thicket, its left leg clumsy. Finally, it limped away into the woods—slow, ungraceful—and disappeared.
“Good luck, little buddy,” Ivy called after it. Then she sat back on her haunches, feeling a flush of triumph and pride. Her hands were shaking.
But when she turned and looked up at Bailey, her friend’s dark eyes were hesitant and unsure, watching the spot where the rabbit vanished.
“Its leg looked pretty bad,” Bailey said. “I hope it’s okay in there like that.”
Ivy felt a flicker of annoyance. “What was I supposed to do? Leave it trapped?”
“No, but…” Bailey shrugged. “You did the right thing, I guess. I just feel bad for it, that’s all. I just hope it’s okay.”
Then Bailey turned and started off into the brush, back toward the camp building. “I’m freezing,” she said, over her shoulder. “We should get changed.”
Ivy stood up and paused for a moment longer, the initial high tide of her good deed ebbing away as she stared at the place where the rabbit had disappeared. Alone in the woods with an injured leg.
“The rabbit’s foot ain’t lucky for the rabbit,” her dad would say, sometimes, and it echoed in her mind, now, an uninvited thought.
The tingling in her scalp was gone. The woods leaned in. Her muscles still twitched from swimming.
Ivy sighed and pulled out her phone to check the text from Jake.
i accept this task, but only if you call me by my rightful title: lord of memes :) miss you ives
In the woods with no one to see except the watching trees, Ivy suddenly blushed sunburn-pink. Rabbit and responsibility moved aside for a moment to make way for the rush: I miss you too, Jake. I miss you too.
But she couldn’t bring herself to respond. Not yet.
Instead, smiling, she tucked her phone in her damp shorts pocket and followed Bailey back to camp.
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this is just my speed right now. Familiar--good to 'catch up' with Ivy again; but low intensity. Well, so far. Certified SE Reid Classic--looking forward to this series!
Eek! I’m all about the nostalgic summer camp vibes right now.