All sense of time slipped away. We might have been inching along for hours. I was starting to wonder if we were moving at all when Mark shouted in alarm and the truck stopped with a jolt.
“What the—?” said Abby, but looking ahead I could see exactly what. My mom had hit the brakes only just in time. The truck’s front bumper was inches from a wall of rubble right across our path.
“Darn it!” said my mom. “There must have been a landslide.” She hit the steering wheel in frustration, catching the horn with her fist. The tinny beep sounded small and forlorn in the shrouded landscape.
“Here there be margins,” Abby said under her breath. I managed a weak smile.
“Can’t we turn and follow alongside the slide?” asked Matt.
“We can try,” said Mark, his head bent over the map. “But which way? The slide’s right across our path, and there’s no way of knowing if taking a left or right will get us around it faster.”
My mom turned off the engine.
“Why stopped?” asked Uncle Joe sleepily. “Are we there?”
“No, Joe,” said Abby. “Not yet. We’re just taking a quick break.”
Uncle Joe mumbled something unintelligible and closed his eyes.
“What do we do now?” asked Kelly in a small voice.
Nobody answered. I could feel Matt shivering beside me. The seconds ticked by. What were we going to do? We could always wait for day and hope the sun would burn away the fog, but how far off would that be? And what sort of condition would Uncle Joe—or any of us—be in when it came?
“Shame,” mumbled Uncle Joe.
“What, Joe?” asked my mom.
Uncle Joe shook the walkie-talkie. “Out of batteries.”
“Oh.”
Silence fell over the group again. The silence grew. I could almost hear everybody thinking.
Finally, my mom spoke.
“Okay, what if we—”
“Shh!” hissed Abby. “What’s that?”
We froze, listening, and I heard it: a steady crunching. The crunching of footsteps over the rocks. Something large, something . . . heavy . . . was moving out in the fog.
I sat up straight, my eyes wide and my ears trained on whatever was out there as it came nearer and nearer, circling, closing in on us. Stalking, said an unhelpful voice in my head. I shivered. It suddenly occurred to me how very exposed we were, sitting there in the open back of the truck, ready to be picked off one by one. . . .
There was a sharp crack of rock breaking, then a grumbling snort. What animal snapped rocks just by walking? Maybe it was a woolly mammoth. Maybe it was the last woolly mammoth in the world, and it had been lost in the arctic, forced to become carnivorous to survive. Maybe it was sniffing us out, trying to decide which of us to yank into the air with its trunk and devour first.
Maybe it had settled on me. Maybe I was about to see the inside of a woolly mammoth’s belly again, only this time without the pillows. I hoped I at least got a look at it first.
“There!” hissed Mark, pointing, and everyone gasped as an enormous shape appeared barely ten feet away, then vanished again into the mist.
“On the count of three,” said my mom in a loud whisper, “I’m going to blow the horn. Maybe it’ll go away.” We all nodded. “One . . .” The crunching came closer. “Two . . .” There was a huffling, muffled snort. “Thr—”
“Wait!” said Matt. “Look!”
And it emerged out of the fog like a ship on the sea: dark eyes, a huge furry body, four massive legs, jaws that could crush us like grapes, and antlers, enormous antlers parting the mist before them. It came right up to the back of the truck and stopped.
It was a moose. A gargantuan moose of mammoth proportions. I’d always pictured moose as being kind of funny; but now, with one standing over me, its huffing nostrils adding to the fog and its antlers scraping the sky, the only word I could think of was RUN.
“Everyone,” my mom said out of the side of her mouth, “keep very, very still.”
We did. The moose stared down at us and blinked.
“Hey, Joe,” breathed Abby. “What do we do?”
Uncle Joe gave a little snore. He was fast asleep.
“That thing could flip over the truck just by shaking its head, Ms. H.,” whispered Mark. “We have to get out of here.”
“I agree,” my mom whispered back. “But how? I can’t drive over this wall of rocks, and I can’t back up with that thing standing there. We have to make it move somehow.”
“Let’s try and scare it,” said Mark. “You honk the horn, and we’ll hit it with something. What do we have that we can throw?”
“No, don’t,” I said. What were they all talking about? The moose wasn’t hurting anybody—it was just standing there. As far as we knew, it could even be here to help us find our way out of the fog, like the ghost moose in those stories Abby brought home from Camp . . . Cantaloupe. . . .
I looked back up at our new friend, my heart thudding. But not from fear anymore.
“There’s a toolbox in the back here,” Matt said, fumbling under the blankets. He pulled out a solid-looking wrench and passed it through the window to Mark, then grabbed a hammer for himself.
“Okay, on three, you honk the horn, Ms. H., and we’ll throw.” He shared a grim nod with his brother. “Aim for between the eyes.”
“Wait!” I said, horrified. “You can’t! Abby, tell them.”
Abby looked around, startled. “Huh? Tell them what?”
“That it’s here to rescue us! It’s obviously the ghost moose from Camp Cantaloupe.” The moose coughed. “See?” I said. “It knows the name.”
What I could see of Abby’s forehead wrinkled. Her eyes traveled up to the moose, then back to me. “Mags, you know that was just a story, right?”
“But—you
