Bus to the Badlands Read online

  “What’s going on?” Mark asked.

  “I dunno. Something’s wrong with the bus.”

  The bus was stopped on the shoulder of the highway. Mr. Harmsen yelled, “Everybody out!” We all jumped up and tried to get to the front door at the same time. We tumbled out and stood in the field beside the road. Thick, black smoke billowed out from under the hood of the bus. Mr. Harmsen opened the hood, and more smoke spewed out. He swore again. Mrs. Cupcake looked very upset now—she didn’t like the smoke or the swearing. She tried to herd us into one spot on the field as if we were a flock of sheep, away from the highway and out of earshot of Mr. Harmsen. Mr. Jenkins was peering through the smoke, trying to determine a cause. Mr. Harmsen started kicking the bus’s front tire.

  “I was afraid this bus was too old! They should have known this could happen! I told them so!” he muttered. Mr. Jenkins tried to calm him down. We sat down among the tumbleweeds. I glanced along the highway. Not a house or a gas station in sight.

  “Maybe we can hitchhike the rest of the way?” Jesse suggested hopefully.

  Mrs. Cupcake was working hard on restoring her good mood and optimism. “I’m sure we’ll be on our way again soon!” she said brightly.

  Suddenly a police car appeared over the hill in the road. It pulled up right behind the bus and turned on its flashing lights. This was getting interesting.

  We crowded around the officer who unfolded herself from the cruiser. “Trouble?” she called to Mr. Harmsen, looking at the black smoke that still rose from the front of the bus.

  “No,” Mark whispered to me, “we’re having a picnic and roasting wieners under the hood!” I punched him.

  Mrs. Cupcake tried to usher us back into the tumbleweed. The police officer had a conversation with Mr. Jenkins and Mr. Harmsen and scratched her head. Then she went to the cruiser and talked on the radio for a while. “Help’s on the way, folks. Someone from Calgary is bringing a new hose.”

  We sat down in the dry grass again. I sure hoped it wasn’t poison ivy. We counted cars that came by. First all the red ones, then all the silver ones. We tried to spot Vipers and Lamborghinis. Suddenly Jesse screamed!

  I jumped. He pointed, speechless, at the farmer’s field behind us. A huge brown bull was sauntering toward us.

  “Oh, how cute!” Mark yelled. “Here, cowie, come here!”

  “It’s a bull, dumbo,” I said. “Bulls aren’t cute!” The bull came closer, his head lowered. His beady brown eyes took in the school bus and all of us. He stopped and snorted. Even Mrs. Cupcake yelped. The bull looked at her and scraped his front foot on the ground. Dust flew up. We all huddled closer together and edged back toward the bus. I surveyed the fence between the field and our group. It didn’t look like it would be much of an obstacle to the bull. The bull snorted and scraped again, sending up a cloud of dust.

  “Ha-ha-ha-tchoo!!!” Dudley sneezed so loudly we all jumped. So did the bull. In fact, he turned around and thundered back over the hill in the direction from which he had come.

  “Way to go, Dud!” someone said. We slapped his shoulder. Dudley had never before been complimented on his sneeze and looked quite pleased with himself.

  Finally the maintenance person from Calgary arrived, and he worked on the bus with Mr. Harmsen. They hammered and clonked under the hood for a long while. “All done,” they finally announced. By now we were all very hot and tired and starving and way behind schedule. We climbed back on the bus and had to keep going without even stopping for pizza. Jesse was super mad.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  By the time we finally made it to Drumheller, it was really late. At least Mr. Harmsen knew how to get to the campground we were staying at. Dino-Site, the sign by the entrance read. We stumbled out of the bus and stood sleepily in the middle of a circle of little wooden cabins. By the light of the moon we could tell that there were no trees around, just dusty ground and some cabins. Mark, Jesse, Dudley, Adam, Alex and I were assigned to one cabin. I got a top bunk. We didn’t bother brushing our teeth or anything. Just rolled into our bunks and tried to sleep in the unfamiliar cabin.

  As I tried to get used to the lumps in the hard mattress, I listened to the strange night sounds. The darkness hung over the cabin like a blanket. It was much warmer here than at home. It smelled different too. Suddenly I heard a mournful cry in the distance.

  Something scraped against the wooden wall of the cabin. I sat up straight, almost bumping my head on the ceiling. One of the other boys turned over. “Did you guys hear that?” Jesse whispered.

  “Yeah,” I replied.

  “That cry. It—it sounded awful. Like a ghost.”

  “That was no ghost,” Mark scoffed. “I think it was a coyote.” He didn’t sound very sure of himself though.

  “I know what that was,” Dudley whispered.

  “What?”

  “A dinosaur!”

  We all laughed out loud. “You dodo! There are no real dinosaurs here.”

  “Why don’t you ever hear it when pterodactyls go to the bathroom?”

  “I don’t know…why?”

  “Because the pee is silent!”

  Adam snickered. “Go to sleep, Dud!”

  We all tossed and turned a bit more. I tried to imagine dinosaurs roaming around outside. They’d be taking slow, heavy steps, leaving footprints in the dry dirt. And swinging their heads from side to side.

  A low snoring rose up from the bunk below me. Everyone else had fallen asleep, but I just lay there, listening to the hollow, distant crying that continued well into the night.

  When I woke up it was pouring rain. A steady, gray, warm rain. It turned the campground into a slippery field of mud. After breakfast in the camp cafeteria, we boarded the bus to the Royal Tyrrell Museum. Groups of tourists crowded in front of the museum, taking photos of everything. A museum interpreter met us at the entrance.

  “My name is Sandra, and I’ll be your guide. Now, I’d like you all to stay together, and if you have any questions, please let me know!” She led us through the museum and into the first exhibit hall. Enormous dinosaur skeletons towered throughout the hall, from the floor to the ceiling, gazing down at us. There were fake palm trees and rock formations. In the distance I heard muffled roars and spotted a display of dense rainforest. There were rumors that there was even a woolly mammoth lurking somewhere in the museum.

  Dudley asked about the sounds we’d heard in the night, and Sandra confirmed that there were lots of coyotes around Drumheller.

  As we toured, Sandra launched into a detailed description of how dinosaurs lived, what they ate, how and where their bones were found, how skeletons at the museum are being reconstructed and much more. I tried to see how the bones of a skeleton were actually held together, but I couldn’t see anything! It was pretty cool. After she talked more about the digestive systems of dinosaurs and theories of extinction, she asked if there were any questions.

  Angela put up her hand. “Where’s the bathroom?”

  We saw every possible kind of dinosaur that ever lived. It was really neat, especially the great big ones. They had enormous jaws. Some had horns. It was strange to think that these huge animals had really roamed this very spot once. There were dinosaur footprints, even fossilized dinosaur eggs. “I heard of some kids in Australia recently,” Dudley said to Sandra, “who found a real dinosaur egg!”

  “That’s right,” Sandra replied. “They found it while digging just outside their town. And the Museum of Natural History paid them good money for it.”

  “Cool,” I said. “I wouldn’t mind finding a dinosaur egg!”

  “What if you did?” Sandra smiled. “What would you do with it?”

  “I’d keep it!” Mary Jane yelled. “I’d keep it and hide it in the basement! I’d keep it warm in a pile of blankets and hatch it!”

  We all laughed at the thought of hatching a dinosaur egg and having a baby dinosaur living in your basement.

  When we got to the museum store, Sandra said goodbye and
told us to enjoy the rest of our field trip.

  We left the museum through the gift shop. Mark and I tried to decide what sort of souvenirs to bring home. There were bowls in the shape of dinosaur footprints. Mark wanted one of the balsa-wood model-building kits of a Tyrannosaurus rex. I liked the glow-in-the-dark T-shirts, but they were too expensive. I bought some chocolate-covered “dinosaur droppings” for my mom and a postcard to send to my grandma. We unrolled posters to see what they looked like until we discovered that there were sample posters hanging on the wall. I choose one of a Stegosaurus. Dudley bought a back scratcher in the shape of a dinosaur claw.

  When we finally came out of the store, Mrs. Cupcake and Mr. Jenkins were counting heads. Mr. Jenkins went back into the store and came out all agitated. “Where’s Jesse?” he asked.

  I hadn’t seen Jesse since the Brontosaurus display. Mrs. Cupcake sent Mark to check out the washrooms. No Jesse. We retraced our steps through the whole museum. No Jesse. Mr. Jenkins went through the store again. No Jesse. This was getting to be a real drag, since we wanted to go to the research fields.

  Where would I be if I were Jesse? I wondered. “Let’s check the cafeteria!” I suggested. Sure enough, Jesse was sitting in the cafeteria, a tray loaded with chocolate milk, a donut, an order of fries and a piece of apple pie in front of him. He was quite surprised when Mr. Jenkins started to yell at him.

  “I didn’t need to be in the store,” he protested. “I needed to eat.”

  We all ended up having fries and burgers. And then we finally went outside for a tour of the badlands.

  CHAPTER SIX

  By the time we left the museum the rain had stopped. But the sky was still heavy with gray clouds, and everything was dripping wet. We got on the bus and Mr. Harmsen drove us to our next destination. There we had to get on another bus because the site was restricted to the park’s own tour busses only. A guy named Jeff was our driver and tour guide.

  “Since it has been raining so badly,” Jeff warned us, “you will have to be very careful where you walk. It doesn’t rain often here. Rain turns these trails into slippery mud and can also cause flash floods.”

  I looked out the bus window. Huge stone mushrooms towered everywhere. “These are the hoodoos,” Jeff explained. “They are layers of sandstone that erode at different speeds. The tops are made of a harder kind of stone than the parts underneath that eroded away. That’s why they look like mushrooms.”

  Jeff pulled over near something that looked like a small house. It turned out to be a shelter with a roof, with two walls and glass windows underneath. Inside the shelter you could see dinosaur bones as they were found, still in the ground and partly covered.

  “Imagine walking here and finding them,” Mark said to me as we stood looking at the bones. The bones were brownish and big.

  “I don’t know how you’d know they were dinosaur bones,” I said. “You’d think they were just cow bones or something.”

  “Back on the bus, guys,” Jeff called. “Soon you’ll be able to go for a walk and get some exercise.” He had been talking to Mrs. Cupcake, and I think they’d decided we had been cooped up long enough and needed to burn off some of our energy. At the next stop we looked at more dinosaur bones in a display. There was also a large metal dinosaur that little kids liked to climb on and have their picture taken with. Little kids, but us too. Mary Jane and Angela wanted Mark to take a picture of them on the dinosaur.

  “Go farther back, Mark!” I yelled. He took a big step backward.

  “More,” Adam yelled.

  “No!” cried Angela, making Mark look behind him. One more step and he would have slid down the embankment. It wasn’t very steep, and it would have given us a good laugh to see Mark slide down.

  “All right, everyone,” Mrs. Cupcake said, “you can go for a hike among the hoodoos here. Follow the path and stay on it. I will expect you all back here in thirty minutes.” She looked at her watch.

  “It’s a round-trip trail,” Jeff added. “You can’t get lost, but there is a bit of a drop-off on one side as you go around the cliff, so make sure you stay on the trail.”

  We all took off in small groups. We had been herded around in a large group long enough. Mary Jane, Angela, Mark and I started off together. First we were almost jogging, but we soon slowed down because the trail started to climb steeply. It was still wet from the rain and pretty slippery. Mary Jane was looking at the wildflowers that grew here and there in clusters. Dudley stayed behind, howling for coyotes and looking for things to photograph.

  Mark kept stopping to bend down and scrape the dirt. I’m sure he hoped to make an earth-shattering discovery at any moment. “Maybe we’ll find a kind of dinosaur that wasn’t known until now,” he said hopefully. “There ought to be bones here!”

  “Yeah, and they’ll call it the Markosaurus!” I laughed.

  I walked on, trying to catch up to Mary Jane on the curving, narrow trail. Suddenly I heard a blood-curdling scream. I jumped and looked to where Mark and Angela had been behind us just a few moments earlier. There was no one to be seen.

  Mary Jane and I ran back down the trail and around the bend. Mark and Angela were on a ledge halfway up the steep cliff face above the trail, clinging to the wall of dirt and rocks. Angela had her hand clamped over her mouth, and Mark was screaming bloody murder.

  “What? What happened?” I cried.

  They looked at us, relief showing on their faces when they saw us. “Heeelp!” Angela cried softly, pointing down to the ground near her feet.

  “What?” I called.

  “A sssnake!” Mark managed to croak. I could make out the faint, dark outline of what looked like a branch lying on the trail. I guessed it wasn’t a branch. And I guessed they were both terrified of snakes.

  “How’d you get up there?” Mary Jane asked.

  “We climbed,” Angela said. “Now what do we do?”

  I didn’t really know. “Maybe snakes can’t climb,” I said hopefully. “Start going across.”

  They tried to scramble across the side of the cliff toward us. Rocks and dirt slid down under their feet. The snake didn’t move.

  As Angela grabbed hold of larger rocks and dug her shoes in, she managed to get closer to us and farther away from the snake. Mark climbed sideways and scrambled toward us too. Suddenly a large rock gave way under his feet and rolled down the cliff. It just about hit the snake head on. The snake slithered away with amazing speed. Mark started to slide down the cliff face on his rear end, hollering as he went. He was dangerously close to the edge of the drop-off Jeff had warned us about.

  “Mark!” Mary Jane hollered. “Come this way, not to the right!”

  Mark clung to the side of the hoodoo. “I can’t move,” he called. “Come get me!”

  I looked at him in disbelief. “You’re kidding, right? I’m not coming up there! You come down here!” But I could see by the look on his face that Mark was not okay. So I carefully stepped off the trail. I slid down the ditch on the side of the trail and then clambered up the muddy side of the hoodoo. I reached Angela first. I clutched her shorts and urged her to let go and slide down. She finally did, and I held her hand and helped her down to the trail.

  Then I looked back up at Mark. He hadn’t budged. He looked pale. So I took a deep breath and started to clamber slowly up the side of the hoodoo. “What’s wrong?” I asked when I got closer to him.

  Mark swallowed. “I’m scared of heights,” he whispered.

  I followed his glance down to the drop-off on the other side and felt sorry for him. “Don’t look down there,” I told him firmly. “Here, I’ve got you.” Which wasn’t really true, but I grabbed his ankle and talked him into moving his hands down.

  “Look at this rock—it feels like a handle,” Mark said.

  It didn’t look like a rock to me. I took one more step higher to get a closer look. I scraped Mark’s handhold with my nail. “Dude,” I whispered, “that’s not a rock—that’s a bone!”

  M
ark wasn’t too interested. He tried to find another hold. Slowly, step by step, I talked him down. Once we got closer to the trail, Mark could breathe again. We slid the last few meters on our bottoms. Mary Jane and Angela hauled us back onto the trail.

  “Guys,” I said, “I think Mark was holding on to a bone up there! A large bone!” The others looked at me blankly. “As in dinosaur-big bone!” I added. “I think we should tell Jeff about it.”

  “We can’t tell him that we left the trail!” Mark said.

  Angela looked at us all and started to laugh. “Don’t you think they can tell that we didn’t stay on the trail?” We looked at ourselves and realized we were covered in mud.

  Just then Adam and Alex and Dudley came around the bend, and Mary Jane told them about my heroic rescues. But she didn’t mention the bone. Adam and Alex looked impressed. Dudley just kept searching for the snake. He was crawling around calling, “Here ssssnakie, sssnake!”

  I looked at Mark and shook my head. Neither one of us said a word about our discovery.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  By the time we got back to the trailhead and the bus, Mrs. Cupcake and Mr. Jenkins were just about to start searching for us. Mrs. Cupcake took one look at us and screeched, “What have you been doing? Where have you been?”

  Jeff frowned. We were caked in mud. Our shoes, pants and hands were an orangey brown.

  Angela started to explain. “They saved us!” she said, pointing at Mary Jane and me. “We got attacked by a snake!”

  Mrs. Cupcake let out a gasp. “Did you get bitten?” she asked.

  “No,” said Angela, “but it came really close. I was so scared. It chased us, so we had to get off the trail. Then we were stuck on this steep cliff, and Josh rescued us!”