Track of a legend - страница 3

“Missed by at least a kilometer,” Timothy said, scowling.

Undaunted I tried another, missed the pipe, but struck the house, which resounded with a metallic thud. I’d closed one of the house’s eyes with a white patch of snow. Timothy grinned at me, his mind tracking with mine. She’d have to come out to get the snow off the sensors. Soon we had pasted a wavy line of white spots about midway up the silver wall.

“One more on the right,” commanded Timothy. But he stopped midswing when we heard a loud whirring noise. Around the hill came a grass cutter, furiously churning snow with its blades.

“Retreat!” shouted Attila the Hun. Timothy grabbed the frozen cardboard sled.

We leaped aboard and the elephant sank to its knees. I didn’t need Timothy to tell me to run.

At the fence we threw ourselves over the frozen pickets, miraculously not getting our clothes hung up in the wires. The grass cutter whirred along the fenced perimeter, frustrated, thank goodness, by the limits of its oxide-on-sand mind.

“Ever seen what, one of those things does to a rabbit?” he asked me.

“No.”

“Cuts them up into bits of fur and guts,” Timothy said solemnly.

“Your aunt’s weird,” I said, grateful to be on the right side of the fence.

“Uh oh. You lost a glove,” Timothy said.

I nodded unhappily and turned to look over at the wrong side of the fence. Shreds of felt and wire and red nylon lay in the grass cutter’s swath.

We walked on, feeling like two dejected warriors in the Alpine woods without our elephant and minus one almost-new battery-operated glove until we spied Bigfoot’s tracks in the snow — big, round splots leading up the side of the wash. Heartened by our discovery, we armed ourselves properly with snowballs and told each other this was the genuine article.

The snowfall was heavier now, really Bigfoot weather, and we knew how much Bigfoot liked storms, or we’d find tracks all the time.

We followed the footprints all the way to the Wigginses’ house, only to find little Bobby Wiggles in them, hand-me-down boots overheating and making great puddles with each step.

Bobby stood looked at us, cheeks flushed from heat or stinging wind.

Then he or she — I couldn’t tell if Bobby Wiggles was a boy or a girl — giggled and went running into the house.

Timothy and I stayed out in the snow searching for Bigfoot tracks but found only rabbit tracks, which we followed in hopes that Bigfoot might do likewise, since aside from children there was nothing else for it to eat in our neighborhood, and no children had ever been reported eaten. Bigfoot may not have been hungry, but we had had only a few gingerbread cookies since noon; so when the rabbit tracks zagged near my house, we didn’t turn again. We forgot the rabbit and Bigfoot and walked the rest of the way through the ghost-white woods to my front door, where we kicked off our boots and threw down our jackets and gloves. Mom and Dad were in the media room in front of the kitchen monitor, checking the Christmas menu.

“Go back and plug your gloves into the recharger,” Dad said without glancing up.

But Mom must have looked up because she said right away, “Both of them.”

“I lost one,” I said.

“Go back and find it.”

Timothy and I looked at each other.

Mom was still watching me. “It won’t do any good,” I said finally. “We were up on the hill, and Timothy’s aunt sicced the grass cutter on us.”

“Why would she do a thing like that?”

Timothy and I shrugged.

“Well, I’ll call her and ask her to let you get your glove,” Dad said, rolling his chair to the comm console.

“The grass cutter got it,” I said, more willing to face punishment for losing a glove than what might happen if Dad found out the day before Christmas that we’d closed her house’s eyes.

“I told you she was getting crazier by the minute,” Dad said.

“She isn’t dangerous.”

“How do you know that? The grass cutter, of all things.”

“She has too much dread to be deliberately mean. I don’t doubt for a second that she knew a couple of kids could outrun the grass cutter, and what else could she do? Go outside and ask them to go away?” Mom shook her head. “Her heart would stop from the anxiety of leaving her little sanctuary.”