The phone rang. Maddy answered. “Do you know where Zach is?” Mrs. Andress, his mom, sobbed over the phone. 

“Why? What’s wrong?” 

“It’s 5:30 and he isn’t home and he hasn’t answered his cell phone and he always checks in with me every two or three hours and I haven’t heard a thing since he left on his bike after breakfast.” 

“I’m sure he’s all right.” 

“Do you know where he is? Is he with you or your grandfather?” she almost pleaded. 

“No, he’s not here anymore. He was with us this morning but he left after lunch.” 

“Oh dear. I called his father. Next I’m calling the police.” 

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Andress. Let us know if we can help.” Maddy put the phone down and turned to her grandfather, Pete.

“What was that all about?” Pete asked. 

“Zach’s mom is freaking out because he hasn’t been home all day. Do you think he's still upset about what happened with the outhouse?”  

Pete thought for a moment. “When I get upset, I like going to my cabin…” 

“Do you think Zach could have gone there?” 

“Could be,” Pete said. “Maybe he needed to get away. Be alone. Mull over things. Well, if he did head out that way, he can’t get hurt. Maybe get a little mosquito bit but it won’t kill him. Let's go see if we can track him down." 

A squadron of mosquitoes dive-bombed Zach’s head and ears, peppering red welts over bare shoulders and legs. 

“Get out of here!” Zach shouted, arms flailing and swatting. “Leave me alone.” 

If only he could get his leg loose, he could get in the cabin. Or even just build a smoky fire. But no, he had to get trapped. 

Zach replayed the last three hours. He had ridden his bike all the way out M-43 then cut down a county road to the drive that led to Pete’s cabin. Hiking in, he noticed the big boulder with the little rock on top. Except there was no little rock on top. It lay on the ground. Blown off or knocked off by a squirrel or chipmunk.  

Zach started down the leaf covered slope to pick up the small rock and put it back in just the right spot when his uphill foot slipped on the leaves and he slid feet first into the cairn. The boulder landed on his right leg halfway up his shin. He had screamed and yelled till his throat was raw. After a while his leg stopped hurting. It felt numb like when his foot falls asleep. 

“Okay. Okay. Don’t panic,” he said out loud. Try to get calm, relax... he thought. Okay. There’s nobody out here. Not now. And my cell phone won’t work – must be in a dead spot. And nobody knows where I am. Is that how the early mountain men felt – all on their own, no one to call for help? If you broke a leg or got lost or got trapped like me – it was all over. Period.  

I wonder if they’ll ever find me. Maybe Pete will find my bones the next time he comes out. What if he never comes again? Maybe I’ll have to do like a wolf that bites off its paw when it’s caught in a trap. Or like that mountain-climbing guy who hacked off his hand to get free. That would make a great movie. Only the rock couldn’t be from an old pile of stones…   

Maybe the hero is at Mt. Rushmore and George Washington’s nose breaks off and lands on his leg. But I need to make sure my hero has a knife on him. Not like me. Guess I won’t be amputating any time soon. 

“Get out of here, mosquitoes! Okay, okay, let’s make a deal. I stop swatting. You suck my blood till you’re so full you can’t hardly fly. But then you leave me alone. Deal?” 

Zach lay back, curled into as small a ball as possible and wrapped his arms over his ears. A while later he heard far away voices. A man and a girl’s. 

“ZACH! HEY, ZACH!’ 

“ZACH, ARE YOU HERE?”

Zach sat on an army cot wrapping an elastic bandage around his swollen and scraped leg. He tried to ignore the pain. He had a reenactment to get through.

BOOM! 

A cannon blasted. The ground shook. A cloud of smoke that smelled like a match when it first lights, only stronger, much stronger, drifted over the crowd of spectators gathered on the ridge to watch the mock battle.  

“C’mon Zach,” someone called from outside the tent. 

BOOM! 

A mortar answered from across the field. The artillery from both sides shot blank loads before the Yankee and Confederate soldiers settled into combat.

* * * 

Maddy held Pete’s elbow to hurry him up the hill from the parking lot. “It was your idea to drag me here,” she scolded, “we might as well see what’s going on.” 

A fife-and-drums beat out a steady marching beat. Bud-a bum. Bud-a-bum. Bud-a-bum-bum-bum. 

When the fog of bitter smelling smoke lifted, Maddy recognized Zach along with another drummer, a fife player and a flag bearer. 

Pete and Maddy watched the soldiers form battle lines, fire rifles, charge and fall back. First one side then the other. After an hour of pitched battle, the troops formed up to march back to camp where six rows of white canvas tents, lined up side by side, faced each other across three grassy streets. More smoke, campfire smoke, floated up toward Maddy and Pete. 

 “C’mon, Gramps,” Maddy said. “Let’s grab something cold and check this place out.” 

On the way to the refreshment stand, Maddy spotted a woman in an ankle-length, old-fashioned dress making candles. She tied the candles by their wicks to a long stick. 

“Hey, Gramps. Look. Cool, huh? See that’s how people really did things in the old days. Right?” 

“How should I know?” Pete grumped, sipping on his lemonade. “The Civil War was a little before my time, miss smarty-pants historian.” 

“Now that’s cool. That’s what I call history.” 

“‘History.’ Ha!” Pete remarked. “Don’t romanticize the ‘good old days.’ The good old days weren’t all that good. They were just old.”  

Maddy paused to watch a woman making yarn on a spinning wheel. Another scrubbed clothes in a tub. A baby crawled nearby. 

Pete continued. “If you had to spend all day chopping wood to make a fire to boil a tub of water to put dirty clothes in and then had to scrub your knuckles raw pounding and rubbing steaming pants and shirts and towels and diapers, you’d pretty soon hate your brothers for changing their clothes before they absolutely had to.” 

The music from a hammered dulcimer, somewhere unseen, played “Marching to Pretoria.” A golden brown turkey roasted over a fire pit in front of one of the tents. 

“Ummm, that smells good,” Maddy said. “Too bad I’m a vegetarian.”  

“In the good old days the husband would have thrown a dead turkey at your feet and said, ‘Here’s supper.’ And it would have been up to you to pluck the feathers and pull out the innards. Nah, If you could live one day like it really was back then, you wouldn’t be getting all teary-eyed for the good old days.” 

“But I thought you liked historical things. Liked going to your cabin and hunting for arrowheads.” 

“Oh, I like going to my cabin – once in a while. You bet. But that’s more about getting away from television and cars and frozen food than living in the past. Like I say, it’s a change of pace.” 

Maddy and Pete sat on a log watching the soldiers mill around their tents, brushing off their uniforms, cleaning their guns. Maddy munched on a Dove bar. 

When she finished, she crunched up the shiny wrapper from the ice cream bar and tossed it at a trash barrel. The foil ball bounced off the rim and landed on the ground. 

Pete bent to get it. “What people wore and how they cooked and how they washed their clothes, yeah that’s history. And so are battles and discoveries. All of that’s interesting. But by itself, That kind of history doesn’t tell us any more than this balled-up ice cream wrapper tells about you, about how your grandfather bought it for you on a beautiful sunny day while you watched a young boy you kind of liked…” 

“Ha!” Maddy blustered, “I didn’t come here to see Zach. You’re the one who wanted to see a reenactment. I don’t even like Zach. No way.”  

“May I continue?” Pete asked. 

Maddy didn’t reply as they wandered along the neat rows of tents. “All I’m trying to say,” Pete threw in, “is that history books tell us what people did. Take Columbus. Fact. In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue. If you want to imagine why he did that, how he missed his family, how he felt the day before he saw land, you should read a novel or listen to a good story.” 

“Stories.” Maddy shook her head. “I don’t get it. How can both you and Zach make up totally ‘once-upon-a-time’ make-believe stories? How do you do that?” 

Ambling along, Pete thought for a moment and then continued. “Storytellers are like kids in the attic trying on old clothes. They dress their characters with anything they can remember from books, from movies, from the way their Aunt Josie talks to the way they felt when they got lost in the mall when they were four year-olds. And then they weave all those true things into a story. Now, that’s fun to do.” 

“Not for me,” Maddy moaned. “I’m no good at it.” 

Grandfather and granddaughter paused next to the huge turkey roasting on a spit over an open fire. Zach was there. It was his tent. His back was to Maddy. 

Maddy began humming the melody to the Little Drummer Boy song. Zach spun around. Blushed. Then smiled. 

“Hi, Pete! Hey, Maddy.” 

A full-chested man in an officer’s uniform squatted next to the turkey. The man removed his navy blue hat with gold braids around the crown and dragged his sleeve across a forehead plastered with curly red hair. 

“This has got to be your father,” Pete said, extending his hand. 

Jeremy rose to meet Zach’s friends. “Hi. I’m Jeremy Andress. And you must be the Pete and Maddy that Zach told me about. Sounds like you saved his bacon earlier this week. Thanks.” 

Zach blushed. “Dad.” 

“Look, how about you join us for supper?” Jeremy said, pointing to the roasting turkey. “We always have a good time sitting around the fire afterwards.” 

Pete looked at Maddy. She pursed her lips and squinted her eyes – no way. Doesn’t he know I don’t eat turkey? she fumed.  

“Sure,” Pete replied. “We’d love to.” 

Zach caught Maddy’s reaction. Geez, Dad, he thought, now you got two of us kids playing this game and neither one of us wants to be here.  

“Dinner won’t be for another hour or so. Maybe Zach can show you around.”