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mily was playing in her yard with
Beatrice, her friend and cousin from next door. The two girls couldn’t have
been more different in appearance: Beatrice tall and fair with long blond hair
struck through by an unusual dark brown streak; and Emily short, tan and
stocky. Although very different physically, both girls shared a zest for life
and adventure.
They sat in a large pile of sand that Emily’s
father had a big dump truck deliver last year for the girls to play in. During
the year, the sand pile had spread out as the rain beat down on it, and small
creatures had burrowed into it to set up housekeeping.
“Ouch!” said Beatrice. “Something
just bit me.”
The girls looked at a red welt
rising on Beatrice’s ankle.
“Yikes,” said Emily. “There are
bugs hopping all over this sand.” The sand seemed alive with sand fleas hopping
every which way.
“Let’s move over to the other
side of the pile, Bee. Maybe the bugs won’t follow us there.” Emily and
Beatrice took their shovels and pails and moved about ten feet to a clear spot.
They began digging in the sand and filling their buckets. Each time they had a
full pail, they dumped the sand into a pile. As their pile grew higher, they
began to shape it into a castle.
“How many towers should our magic
castle have?” asked Beatrice.
“Four—one for the north, one for
the south, one for the east and one for the west,” said Emily.
The castle began to take shape as
the two girls patted the sand to make it hold together. The sand was fine and
moist, and it held its shape well. They built a rectangular wall with a round
tower at each corner. The tops of the wall and towers had square notches like
they had seen in Beatrice’s book about castles—their inspiration for this,
their latest project.
Emily dug down into the sand
outside the castle wall to begin forming the moat. As she dug, her hand touched
a strange lump. She initially drew back her hand, but then her curiosity led
her to uncover the lump. She picked it up.
“What in the world is this?” she
asked.
“What did you find?” said
Beatrice.
“Here, take a look,” said Emily
as she handed Beatrice a brown, leathery sack about as big as a softball.
Beatrice examined the object
carefully. It was not leather exactly—more like stiff paper. It seemed quite
heavy for its size, and it was a bit wrinkly but more or less egg-shaped. She
held it up to the light in the sky and she thought she could see a faint
outline of something inside. “Emily, I think this is an egg.”
“What kind of egg, Bee? It
doesn’t look like anything I’ve seen before.”
“Maybe it’s a turtle egg,”
suggested Beatrice. “We should keep it and see what hatches out.”
“That’s a great idea, but we’ll
need to put it back where you found it, and if we do that, someone might step
on it and ruin it,” said Emily. She thought for a moment, considering what else
they could do with the egg. “I know, let’s put it in the barn. Dad has a brood
hen in there. She’s sitting on a bunch of her own eggs; she won’t notice one
more.”
Emily and Beatrice raced to the
barn at the far end of the yard. Emily needed Beatrice’s help to slide the long
board that latched the barn door. The board was only a few inches wide, but it
was twelve-feet long and pivoted on a bolt about ten feet up. Once they swung
the board to the left a few feet, the top end disengaged from the wooden block
that formed the latch. Then the two girls pulled hard to open the door enough
to squeeze through. The door was huge and the hinges squeaked as it opened with
some difficulty.
When they went inside, it was
cool and dark and smelled of tobacco—a sort of pungent spicy aroma that
lingered after many years of tobacco curing in the old barn. Now the barn was
mostly empty. Emily’s father stored his yard equipment there along with old
paint cans, tires and other stuff he didn’t want to throw away. When Emily’s
mother, Leslie, would tell him, “Brian, take that to the dump,” more often than
not, it would end up in the barn. A battered old easy chair was the most recent
arrival. There it sat in the corner with spider webs already attached, and in
the middle of the seat was a pile of straw, and the brood hen perched on top.
As Emily’s and Beatrice’s eyes
adjusted to the gloom, they walked towards the hen. Emily held the strange egg
tenderly in her hand. As they neared the hen, she began to cluck loudly and
ruffled her feathers, trying to scare the girls off. But one old smelly chicken
didn’t frighten these girls.