Speak of the Tiger Read online

  Speak of the Tiger

  A Novella by

  Martha Deeringer

  Published by

  Fire and Ice

  A Young Adult Imprint of Melange Books, LLC

  White Bear Lake, MN 55110

  www.fireandiceya.com

  Speak of the Tiger, Copyright 2015 Martha Deeringer

  ISBN: 978-1-68046-054-4

  Names, characters, and incidents depicted in this book are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and beyond the intent of the author or the publisher. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

  Published in the United States of America.

  Cover Design by Lynsee Lauritsen

  For Justin

  SPEAK OF THE TIGER

  by Martha Deeringer

  Justin MacArthur hopes to impress his ninth grade classmates with his outdoor skills on a long-anticipated school field trip to the famous YO Ranch in south Texas. Reserved and self-conscious at school, Justin’s expert horsemanship and knowledge of the outdoors—skills he learned from his father, a Texas Parks and Wildlife game warden—provide an opportunity to improve his status as a fringe member of the cool group. But a secretive Korean boy with a chip on his shoulder and a terrifying thunderstorm during a trail ride undermine Justin’s well-laid plans and change his life in ways he never imagined.

  Table of Contents

  "Speak of the Tiger"

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  About the Author

  Previews

  Where there are no tigers, a wildcat is very self-important.

  (Korean Proverb)

  Chapter One

  Justin glanced out the window of the bus and saw black smoke rolling along the side. He leaned over for a better look, and he could see that the smoke streamed out from beneath the front wheels. At about the same moment, the grinding noise the engine made as it climbed the hill got louder. He glanced at the driver, Coach Cox, who had his foot pressed to the floor and was leaning forward in his seat as if urging an undersized horse to climb a steep hill.

  “We’re smokin’,” Justin yelled to Coach Cox.

  The bus continued to climb, and the black smoke thickened. The surly boy in the seat next to Justin looked out the window, mumbled “Jeez,” and turned away in disgust.

  “Mrs. Farr,” Justin said, leaning over the seat and touching his teacher on the shoulder. “The bus is smokin’.” He pointed at the black smoke blowing past the window.

  “Oh, my gosh,” Mrs. Farr said.

  Grabbing the handrail on the end of the seat, she stood up and leaned over Coach Cox’s shoulder. “What’s wrong with the bus, Jimmy?” she asked.

  By now the smoke was boiling up from under the hood. Coach Cox was looking anxiously at the gauges and steering for the shoulder of the road. Cars passing in the fast lane honked their horns as he guided the bus onto the grass. Justin looked ahead at the other two buses from his school. As he watched, they disappeared around a distant curve, oblivious to the fact that his bus was now stranded on the side of the road.

  “What a bunch of idiots,” the boy in the next seat muttered under his breath.

  Justin sighed with irritation. If the guy sitting next to him hadn’t cheated on the bus sign-ups, Justin would be sitting with his friends. So far, it had been a miserable trip, and things were looking worse all the time.

  “Sign up for any bus you want,” Mrs. Farr had told her classes. “But you may only sign your own name. If you want to sit with your friends, get them to come with you to sign up. No erasing names so you can get a seat on the same bus as your friends. If I find that someone hasn’t followed these simple rules, I’ll assign the seats.”

  The trip had gone perfectly until the kid sitting next to Justin erased the name at the top of the list on Bus Three and wrote in his own. A moron could tell he had done it. Now they all had assigned seats. And Justin had been unlucky enough to get assigned to sit next to the creep. Even though the boy was in his history class, Justin didn’t know his name.

  Outdoor adventures like this ninth-grade field trip to the YO Ranch were Justin’s thing. When he wasn’t doing homework or chores, he was outside hiking, riding one of the horses, or fishing in the creek behind his house. Justin hoped that on the trip some of the other kids in his class would notice he was a cool and competent outdoorsman. When he looked into the mirror during private moments, he was proud of the fact that, like his dad, he had the tall, lanky body of a sportsman. But in spite of that, he had never quite broken in to the “cool” group, a circumstance he blamed on living in the country where he wasn’t always available to hang out at the mall or go to the movies.

  Coach Cox killed the engine and opened the door.

  “Stay in your seats,” he ordered as he hopped down and raised the hood. Clouds of acrid, black smoke billowed out, and the reek of burning oil and rubber filtered down the aisle of the bus. Coach Cox bounded up the steps in seconds and wrenched the fire extinguisher loose from its moorings. Smoke swirled in through the open door.

  A hush settled over the kids as they waited to see what would happen. Coach Cox sprayed the fire extinguisher under the hood, and the smoke turned from black to white.

  “Fire!” someone yelled halfheartedly.

  Eighteen-wheelers roared by inches from the side of the bus, and soon some of the kids were sticking their arms out the windows and pumping wildly in hopes of getting the truck drivers to blow their air horns. Mrs. Farr got out and peered under the hood, keeping one eye on the speeding traffic as it zoomed by. She did not look optimistic.

  “Get your appendages inside the bus!” Coach Cox yelled. He and Mrs. Farr climbed back up the steps, and the kids pulled their arms in and watched them expectantly.

  “A little oil fire is all,” Coach Cox said. “Hose ruptured. Nothing to worry about. We’re still about an hour from the YO Ranch. With any luck, the other buses will notice we’re not behind them soon and come back to check on us. Then, I guess we’ll have to squeeze everybody on the other buses. This one sure won’t be going anywhere for a while.”

  “So far, all the luck around here has been bad luck,” Justin muttered to himself.

  “What if they don’t come back?” Charlotte asked anxiously. “It’s going to get dark soon.” The whiney tone of her voice grated on Justin’s ears. Charlotte was just as ditsy as that long-dead writer she kept telling everybody she was named after.

  “Then I guess we’ll get to practice our camping skills in the ditch beside the Interstate,” Coach Cox said. “Now, listen up. You can stay right here in your seat, or get off the bus and stand way over there by the fence on the other side of the ditch. Mrs. Farr and I are going to try to contact the other buses on the radio. Anyone who misbehaves is going to run the rest of the way to the YO Ranch.”

  “I need to go to the bathroom,” Charlotte said, but her plea was drowned out by the scramble for the bus door. After five hours of riding, everyone was sick of sitting still, and the smell of smoke was pretty strong in spite of the open windows.

  Justin stood up and waited for a break in the stampede.

  “You coming?” he as
ked the boy in the seat next to him.

  “No,” the kid snapped, moving his knees slightly so Justin could squeeze past him. He kept his eyes fixed on the front window of the bus.

  Half an hour passed before the other buses returned, passing them on the opposite side of the Interstate. They disappeared in the other direction before they found an exit ramp that led them under the highway so they could turn back. Coach Cox got his guitar from the compartment under the bus and sat on the steps strumming songs that no one knew well enough to sing. The setting sun painted pink and orange streaks across the horizon by the time they loaded their backpacks and bedrolls onto the other buses. Most of the kids from Justin’s bus had to sit on the floor in the aisle. The last person to get on was the boy who sat next to Justin. He threw his backpack on the floor as far from the other kids as possible and sat on it. L. Boyd was lettered in black marker on the backpack.

  “What’s the L for?” Justin asked.

  “Loser,” the boy said, turning away to put an end to further conversation.

  * * * *

  The gate to the YO Ranch finally loomed before them in the headlights, and a cheer broke out, loudest from the kids sitting on the floor. Justin’s back hurt from having nothing to lean against, and his legs had gone to sleep. The bus turned in the gate and lumbered slowly down a gravel road until it came to a small, rustic cabin with lights shining in the windows. As the bus braked to a stop, a man came out, pausing on the front porch to pull on a pair of boots.

  “Stay in your seats,” Coach Cox ordered again. He opened the door, and the man climbed up the steps, adjusting his cowboy hat.

  “You must be the ninth graders from Travis High School,” he said. “We almost gave up on you. Did you get lost or something?”

  “Our bus caught on fire,” someone said.

  “It was just a little oil fire,” Coach Cox corrected. “The engine overheated and a hose ruptured. It sure did smoke,” he added. “We had to load all the kids from that bus onto these two buses. For a while we were afraid we might not get here at all.”

  “Well, we’re glad you made it,” the man in the cowboy hat said. “It’s still about five miles to the campground. Just follow me.”

  He climbed off the bus and got into a white pickup with the letters YO painted on the doors. The buses followed as the gravel road changed to dirt and descended gradually to a wide, shallow river. The truck turned and started driving down the riverbed through several inches of water. The kids in the bus gasped as the awkward vehicle rocked into the riverbed and followed the truck.

  “This is the Guadalupe River,” Coach Cox said. “This part of the riverbed is solid rock, so there’s almost no chance we’ll sink.”

  “Awww!” someone moaned from the back.

  Kids stood up and leaned across others to get a look at the dark river. In a few minutes, they followed the pickup out of the river and down a dirt road. Strange deer appeared in the headlights. Some of them were all white, and others had spots like a newborn fawn, although they sported a full set of antlers.

  “Those are Axis Deer and Fallow Deer,” Mrs. Farr said, pointing them out. They’re exotics, which means they aren’t native to Texas. The YO Ranch raises them.”

  The road wound around through thickets of brush, its lights reflecting red in the eyes of animals. Giant clusters of prickly pear sprouted beside the road next to limestone boulders as big as the pickup they were following. Lights ahead turned out to be the campground, where a long, low, wooden building crouched next to a pavilion made of cedar posts with a plank floor and metal roof. Picnic tables filled the pavilion, and a man with a clipboard waited in front of it for the new arrivals to disembark.

  Coach Cox turned to face the students and raised his hand for quiet.

  “Take a seat at one of the tables,” he said. “We’ll unload the stuff in a little while.”

  Justin was thankful for the opportunity to stand up. His legs and feet tingled like crazy, and he wasn’t sure he’d be able to walk. A charging tide of kids bore him toward the door. L. Boyd took his time getting down the steps and out of the way, and Justin bumped against him at the bottom of the steps, carried forward by the momentum of the crowd of kids behind him.

  “Sorry,” Justin muttered.

  L. Boyd staggered and turned around, mouthing words Justin was glad he couldn’t hear. His face was distorted by rage, and spit flew from his mouth. Justin angled up the steps into the pavilion, trying not to notice the angry tirade that continued behind him.

  “What’s he slobbering about?” the boy behind Justin asked.

  “I guess because I bumped into him,” Justin said, “but he’s been mad about something the whole trip. He says the L on his backpack stands for loser, and I guess he’s right.”

  The man with the clipboard herded the last of the students into the pavilion and counted them quickly.

  “I get ninety-six students and six adults. Does that match with your count?” he asked Coach Cox.

  “Yep. That’s us,” Coach Cox agreed.

  “Okay. I’m just going to give you a quick orientation since you arrived so late,” the man with the clipboard said. “My name’s Dave and I’m the activity coordinator at the YO. We usually have time for some introductory stuff, but tonight I’ll go over a few basic rules and then assign you to cabins. You’ll have a few minutes to get your stuff set up in the cabins and use the bathroom. I understand from Coach Cox that you’ve been on the road for quite a while. Since you missed dinner, our mess hall is fixing some boxed suppers. We’ll meet back here at nine o’clock to eat and talk about tomorrow’s activities.”

  Justin noticed that Dave was a big guy with a bulging chest and arms and a narrow waist. His worn jeans and boots testified to the fact that he was no drugstore cowboy. Justin figured Dave wasn’t going to get much flack out of the ninth graders. Dave did a quick run-through of the rules that Justin and his classmates had agreed to when they signed up for the trip. Then he pointed to maps of the campgrounds that were stacked on every table and asked Mrs. Farr to give out the cabin assignments. As she began to read through the list, Justin was overcome by a sense of foreboding. The girls’ names were called first, six to a cabin. Then the boys, whose cabins were on the opposite side of the campground.

  “Coyotes’ Den,” Mrs. Farr read from her list. “James Anderson, Lee Boyd, J.R. Smith, Justin MacArthur, and Joel Hamilton.”

  Justin didn’t hear the rest of the assignments. He stopped listening when he heard that he and Joel were assigned to the same cabin. Joel had been his best friend since kindergarten, and they gave each other a thumbs-up sign when their names were read. Worried that he might be put in a cabin with boys he didn’t know very well, Justin rejoiced that something about this trip had finally gone right. He knew James and J.R., too, so dealing with L. Boyd shouldn’t be that difficult.

  * * * *

  Dave stood up after the cabin assignments were made.

  “Boys’ cabins are to my right,” he said, pointing. “Girls’ cabins to the left. Cabin names are above the doors. Since the cabins have no electricity, you’ll need to get your gear and find your flashlights before you go prowling around in the dark to look for your cabins. We consider it a hanging offense for a boy to be seen on the girls’ side of the campground, and vice versa. Everybody got that?”

  There was a general nodding of heads.

  “Okay, then. Get your gear off the bus and get your cabin set up. We’ll meet back here at nine o’clock. That gives you fifteen minutes. Any questions?”

  Without waiting for a response, Dave turned to Coach Cox and Mrs. Farr. He sat down at a table with them and spread out some sheets of paper from his clipboard. The other four adults who had come along as chaperones joined them, and the campers made a dash for the bus.

  “Here’s your ugly black gym bag,” Joel said, tossing the bag to Justin and pulling his own from the heaps of luggage strewn on the ground beside the bus. Justin dug through the pile of sleep
ing bags until he found his own and Joel’s.

  Chapter Two

  A gravel path led toward the cabins, past a large dark building that proved to be the bathrooms. Away from the lights of the pavilion, the dark settled over them. Their flashlight beams illuminated flickering images of small rock buildings with tin roofs. The path forked, and Justin and Joel took the left fork. Laughter came from the direction of the cabins on the right. The boys passed Porcupine Place, still dark and empty. The rock walls of the cabin ended at the level of Justin’s chest. The top third of the walls stood open, revealing the square posts in each corner that held up the roof. Canvas rolls were suspended under the tin roof on all four walls.

  “I guess we unroll the canvas if it rains,” Joel said.

  “I guess,” Justin answered. He had just seen the red glow of eyes beyond the next cabin. The eyes stared for a moment and then disappeared.

  The third cabin on the path was Coyotes’ Den. The wooden door, held shut by a metal bar that fit into a U-shaped holder, ended at the same height as the rock walls. Justin opened it and shined his light inside. Three sets of metal bunk beds were the only furniture in the cabin. Each bed sported a thin mattress encased in plastic.

  “I claim the top bunk,” Joel said.

  “You can have it,” Justin answered. “When the bats fly in at night, they’ll be flying around your head.”

  “And when the snakes crawl in, they’ll get in bed with you first,” Joel responded.

  They heard voices approaching and threw their bedrolls on the bunk beds nearest the door. James and J.R. shone their lights inside.

  “See any critters in there?” James asked.