Don’t forget to catch up on last week’s story here.
I danced up the mountain, spending just as much time with my paws toward the sun as my back. Behind me, Mom tromped like each step was a revenge.
“Huff,” she said. And “Ack!” And “Grarf!” And “Hover sucker!” It wasn’t until she shouted “GET OFF OF ME!” and I heard another snap that I thought to check on her.
Mom was still stomping through white dirt half way to her knees, arms waving like she was conducting the world’s most exuberant orchestra. “Leave me the cluck alone!” she howled.
It finally hit me what she was doing. The invisible moose was back! “Get him, Mom! Don’t let that overgrown coat rack push you around!”
Mom’s hand swung in a wide arc and came around to savagely slap her other arm. She checked her slapping-hand and made a triumphant clucking noise. “Got hi—GAH!”
“Good girl! That knucklehorn will think twice about messing with you again.”
But Mom was already back to being a tornado. Do meese hunt in flocks?
“They can’t catch us if we outrun them,” Mom said, leaning forward and falling uphill in something that looked like the sprint of someone who just grew legs for the first time. “Run, Oscar! Run!”
“Hey, Bullstinkle!” I yelled over my shoulder to where the moose might be watching Mom, wondering how she got away. “Yeah, I’m talking to you, Hoofy McDufus. Catch me if you can!”
I took off up the mountain to give Mom something to follow so she could keep moose wrestling without having to look where she was going. Whenever I stopped to let Mom catch up, she ran right past me shouting, “Go, go, go!” as she went. Half the time, she would tell me to go-go-go then stop herself the moment I ran by. Whenever I go-go-goed without her ordering me to, she hollered for me to slow down and “Stay close!”
“If you want me to keep go-go-going, you should keep up,” I told her.
“Give me a break!” she gasped. “I’m running uphill through knee-deep snow.” She took a step and the white dirt held her up just long enough to trick her into thinking it would hold all of her weight. Then the trap sprung and her foot dropped through the earth. Her arms flew up as she got shorter, like she was trying to make herself look bigger to frighten off a charging moose.
“Then why don’t you pace yourself?” I coached. “If you walk, I’ll have more time to leave a trail of snow angels so we don’t get lost.”
“But... huff... if I... puff... walk...gasp... they’ll eat me... wheeze... alive.” Mom slowed to a walk, perhaps to show what it looked like to be eaten alive. A moment later, she was waving her arms like someone with a bat stuck in their hair again. “We’ve got... GAH! ... to outrun them... ARGH! Aren’t they coming after you, too?”
“Them?” So it was a whole flock of meese.
Not to be left out of the excitement, the Witch butted in, “You have arrived.”
“Finally!” Mom calmed the tornado of her arms just enough to peer into the trees. She looked at the Witch in one paw while the other paw traveled around her body, slapping her thigh, her shoulder, the back of her neck. “Looks like no one’s been up here since the last snow, but you can kind of see where the trail’s supposed to be by that trough.” I followed her eyes to a hollow line in the white dirt where it looked like someone might have dragged a canoe into the woods.
Mom must have finally shaken the moose from her tail, because she was less and less twitchy as we got deeper into the forest and the white dirt got deeper around our legs. Her tornado arms transformed to the wavy teeter-totter that she uses to keep her balance. From time to time, she still had to wave a moose away, or slap a forearm or thigh to show him she meant business, but more of her GAHs and ACKs came with the scraping and thumping of a Mom losing her balance.
Unlike Mom, I didn’t mind when the white dirt pulled on my leg to bring me a little closer. I loved everything about it. How it smelled. How it tasted. How its cool grains felt in my fur and the swooshing sound it made under my paws. Best of all was how it made everything on the trail easier to see, like that big log up ahead.
It was more than a log. It must have been a whole tree, based on the big root-shaped heap on one side and the cage of branches blocking our way on the other. It lay across the channel where the trail should be, too high for me to jump over it and too low for Mom to crawl under it.
“Now what?” I asked. “Should we build an igloo and wait for potato season?”
“We’ve been traipsing through deep snow like Nanook for miles. We can handle a little thing like this.” Mom put her front paws on top of the log and looked it up and down, planning her next move. When she pushed down on the log to lift herself up, her elbows went higher than her ears, but her feet barely left the ground.
After a few unhelpful hops, Mom hugged the log instead. She twisted her hips so it looked more like a headlock than a hug and lifted a knee as if she were going to pee. She rested her knee on the log and shifted to lift her last leg off the ground.
For a moment, she lay on top of the log like Wile E Coyote riding a rocket to a dinner date. Then she sat up like a cowboy on his horse and worked her way limb-by-limb through the broken-off branches to the other side. I commando crawled underneath to meet her.
“See?” Mom said when I joined her. “You can overcome more than you think if you just look for a way. I’ve been giving up too easily.” She stomped triumphantly away from the log with her chin high and the heavy steps of someone who knows she’s finally figured it all out. The first step looked cool. On the second step, the white dirt faked her out again, pretending to be solid ground before caving in to snatch her foot in its icy trap.
Mom made an ugly noise as she fell. The white dirt swallowed half a leg and took her arm up to the elbow for dessert. She landed on her butt and sat pouting for a second before gathering all of her legs, groaning, and working her way back to standing.
“Damned snow,” she grumbled as she staggered away, less confidently than before.
“You aren’t very good at snow angels,” I coached. “Do you want me to teach you?”
“Why is there still so much snow anyway?” she sulked. “It should all be melted by now. It's May f’r cryssakes.”
“Because the Potato Kingdom is a land of miracles where anything is possible!” I said. Why, in Idaho I’d rolled in white dirt, met a whole pack of celebrities, and I was going to go potato picking just as soon as we finished moose hunting.
I went ahead to scout for a new moose—one I could see this time. With Mom moving so slow, there was no chance of her getting away while my back was turned. Plus, all that honking and squawking whenever she lost her balance was like a bear bell, telling me where she was at all times.
I was investigating where a deer had peed a tunnel into the white dirt when suddenly Mom’s clamor changed. She didn’t get quieter so much as her voice slowed down and got deeper, like the voices in a slow motion clip on TV.
“Oscar? Come here,” she said in the voice she might use if she’d just finished construction on a house of cards.
I dashed back to see what she’d discovered. When I found her, she was staring at a mark in the white ground.
“WHAT IS IT?” I screeched, too excited for suspense.
Mom jumped at the sound of my voice and gave me a liberrian’s scowl. “Stay close,” she didn’t-quite-whisper. She waved a hand beside her butt where she wanted me to stand.
I hurried to heel. “What did you find?”
At the bottom of a shallow hole was a kind of stamp in the white dirt. I stared at the shape, trying to decide if it looked more like a lobster’s claw or a pair of angel wings. “Do you think they have mountain lobsters in Idaho?” I whispered.
“No, you chowderhead. It’s a hoofprint.”
“From what? A woozle?”
“How the heck should I know? It’s too big to be a deer, that’s for sure. But I have no idea what. An elk? Maybe a moo—”
“Moo-cow!” I blurted, too excited to let her finish.
“I was gonna say moose.”
“Dangit! I thought you were gonna say something cool. Meese aren't as exciting as I thought they’d be.”
Mom shrugged and went back to staggering. “I’ve never seen a wild moose in real life. I’d like to, but not here. Not now.”
“I wanted to see one, too, until I realized it was something you made up just to mess with me,” I said.
“Moose are real,” she said in a huffy voice. “I just don't know what they’re like when you surprise them on their own turf. I'd rather not meet one somewhere where I can’t run away.”
“You can stop now. I know you’re pretending just to scare me.”
“What makes you say that?” She was getting better at acting.
“I know you weren’t actually fighting off a moose in the Wagon last night. And I know you weren't running away from anything this morning.”
“Running away?” She looked confused, like she hadn’t told me to run for our lives a short time before. “Oh! You mean the mosquitoes. Those are just bugs. A moose is as big as a refrigerator. Same spindly legs, though.”
“Then what does a moose—”
Before I could finish, there was a rustling sound in the trees. Something was crashing at top speed through the branches. It was close. And getting closer.
“RUUUUUUUUN!” Mom shouted. She didn’t even wait for me before staggering back up the trail like someone in a horror movie in that moment between when they get away and when they get got for good.
The last thing I saw over my shoulder before I took off after Mom was a wet, white blob plopping from a tree branch onto the ground.
When we reached to log blocking the trail, Mom had the super-strength of panic. She vaulted up onto the log, managing on the first try to get a shoe on top. She scrambled into a sit with her legs hanging over the far side and dropped.
Mom landed with her butt crack smirking back at me. The undies inside her shorts were stuck on a broken branch. They stretched from trunk to tush like a loaded slingshot.
Mom didn’t even reach back to try to get herself unhooked. She just kept running like she was trying to rip her shorts so she could say she had the pants scared off of her. Instead, the stick let go and the underpants snapped back into place with the cracking sound of a whip as she stumbled away up the trail.
Finally, Mom’s breathing got as uneven as her running and she slowed to a walk.
“What was that all about?” I asked.
“I thought I heard a charging moose,” Mom panted.
“I already told you. I’m not falling for it. Were you just punking me again?”
“No, I heard something running through the trees. I swear!”
I cocked my head and studied her blotchy, sweaty face. Her wide eyes looked like she meant it, but with Mom you never can tell. She can make a ball disappear just by throwing it, then pull it out of empty air behind her back. “Do meese drop out of trees when they pounce?” I asked carefully.
“Holy dog doo! you don’t think it was a mountain lion, do you?” She really looked like she was asking, not fooling.
“Nah. It was just a clump of snow. I just thought that since meese are invisible and all...”
Mom’s face fell from nervous to disappointed. “Moose aren’t invisible. They’re just rare. I probably just heard the sound of the snow falling through the branches.” Her fidgety fingers picked wood chips off the front of her shirt, perhaps realizing that she’d spoiled the fun by taking herself too seriously. “Oh well. I was just feeling so vulnerable and exposed. The more I see of this place, the more I appreciate what an achievement it was for Lewis and Clark to bring everyone to the Pacific and back alive.”
We trudged less urgently back toward the road. Mom moved less and less like a crazy person as the white dirt backed down closer to the road. On the road, where there were no shadows to block the lunchtime sun, the white dirt was more wishy-washy, and we outran the meese more easily.