Someone shoved Galen, rudely waking him from a deep sleep. He didn’t know how long he had slept, but Felix’s den was filled with a chilling mist. An eerie whistling echoed down the den’s tunnel: the wind was up.
“Open your eyes! You must go.” El Garro jabbed him again.
“What’s wrong?” Galen tried to focus on the speaker.
“A storm!” El Garro disappeared.
Galen punched Felix and whispered El Garro’s news. Then Galen struggled up the dark tunnel and paused in the opening to stare. The forest was alive with flapping branches and shrieking wind. A lightning bolt rippled across the sky in crazy zigzags. The woods were dark; its trees and paths, when clothed in sheets of rain and puddles jumping with raindrops and the storm’s loud complaints, were unrecognizable. Galen suddenly thought of his mother during a similar storm: she had danced about while her sons watched, entranced. Finally, Galen had asked, “Mother, come in. Do you want to be hit by lightning?”
“Oh, yes!” Shaking her gray armor, she had splattered her sons with warm raindrops, and then gently shoved them out of the den into the rain.
And Galen and Felix and Garcia and Rafael had understood her delight in the power of the storm and the joy of abandoning herself to the rain. His mother had been a poetic soul. On another day, Galen might have danced in this rain, too, might have reminded Felix of that other storm. But today, his dreams of trekking were turning into responsibility. And the storm wasn’t a good way to start a trek.
El Garro was waiting. “Hurry!”
“It’s mid-afternoon!” Galen cried. “Can’t we wait till the storm passes?”
“No.” El Garro’s voice was firm. “If the river floods, you won’t cross for days. You must go.”
“No,” Galen said. “It’s all wrong! We aren’t ready. We need to study the maps, talk to the owls— ”
Felix scurried behind Galen, pushing him toward the Great Clearing. “El Garro is right. If you delay, you’ll never trek. The North Fork floods badly and goes down slowly.”
“The Sisters?” Galen said. His voice quivered with sorrow: it was time to leave them.
“Nalda will bring the girls.”
Galen let himself be led to the Great Clearing, for in the storm, he hardly knew where he was. It was finally his time to trek. He wished his instinct would let him snuggle inside his fox’s den with the Four Sisters and come out only when the rain had stopped, or else teach them to dance in the spring storms. But he was the fourth son of a fourth son for ten generations back. He had already resisted the curse’s northward pull for too long. The fourth-born had no home: he was a trekker.
Rain—cold and insistent—dripped from his pointed nose, and every step splashed mud onto his armor.
Huddled under the oaks on the fringe of the Great Clearing stood Corrie. She was soon joined by the Four Sisters, Nalda, and a smattering of other armadillos.
Victor emerged from El Garro’s den. He cleared his throat. “OK, it’s not the start Ah wanted, but we have to be off. Where’s Blaze?”
“She’ll find you tonight or tomorrow after the rain slacks off,” El Garro said. “For now, you have to get past the river.”
“That owl gets to sleep through the storm?” Corrie protested.
“She can fly across the river; you can’t,” El Garro said. “You know that.”
YOU ARE READING
VAGABONDS: An American Fantasy
Teen Fiction“Watership Down” with armadillos An Immigrant Tale For decades, the southern states have witnessed the relentless migration of vagabonds from Mexico. They are now found as far north as the Ozarks of southern Missouri. No one knows why they keep trav...
