Camping out

Camping Out

My name is Sophie. I am 6 years old. I live in a big house with my sister Jane who is 11 and my Dad. My mom lives in another state. We get to visit her for a month in the summer, Christmas and sometimes a long weekend or spring break.

I like to play outside. Sometimes I pretend I am an explorer. I follow tracks on the ground. Animal tracks are my favorite. Usually those tracks turn out to be my cat or my dog. Sometimes I find bird footprints. Once I found deer tracks. I know it was deer because my dad looked too. Then he showed me some deer poop, which kind of looks like bigger rabbit poop. Kind of yucky but my dad says that’s what real trackers do. They look for poop and broken branches and all kinds of things not just tracks. I keep hoping I will find something exciting like lion, tiger or elephant tracks.

Yesterday my friend Marissa came over to play. Marissa lives in the next house on our road, so her mom lets her walk over to our house as long as my dad is home. We tracked animals for awhile. We went way out to the end of the yard. There is a forest there. My dad says it is just a woods, but I think if you can’t see the end of a woods, then it is really a forest. So while we were tracking we found some strange foot prints. They weren’t big enough to be elephants. Marissa thought they might be elephant prints. We looked around for elephant poop but of course there wasn’t any. I told Marissa that if it was elephant prints, it was a darn small elephant. I could only fit one foot in the print and it wasn’t all that big. Then Marissa told me not to swear. I wasn’t really sure if darn was a swear word, but I didn’t think so because I heard my Daddy say darn when he was talking to the preacher and I was pretty sure he wouldn’t cuss then.

Well, we walked all over, we even went a little way in the forest but I was afraid we might get lost, even though Marissa did have her compass that she got in a cereal box. She says it is as good as the one that boy scouts use, but if that is so, then why are they giving it away in cereal. You usually don’t get anything good for free. Besides she doesn’t always know how to use that compass. Once it said we were going east and I knew we weren’t, because we were walking right toward the setting sun and everyone knows that the sun sets in the west. Plus if that wasn’t enough we were walking on west main street. I mean how much more direction does she need.

We walked most of the afternoon and didn’t find any more tracks. I started getting hungry and headed back toward the house, tracking as we went. We got almost up to the house then we saw another print of the same kind. Marissa decided she wanted to take a picture of the print. So we went in the house to get the camera. I have a little digital camera that I got for my birthday. We took a picture just as Marissa’s mother pulled up. She got out of her car. It is a little car. It is real cute. It is bright red and the roof opens up. She says it is a moon roof, but how can it be a moon roof in the day time. So it must be a sun/moon roof. “Do you girls want to go to town with me?” she asked. We said yes, because a ride to town with her always means that we get to stop for ice cream. Because it was summer we hoped we would go to the Dairy Dip which has picnic tables and you can sit outside.

When we got back Marissa had to go home and I had some chores to do. I forgot all about the prints until the next day. When Marissa came over I was just finishing breakfast. Jane yelled at me not to forget to put my dishes in the sink. I was way ahead of her and was headed for the sink with my bowl and cup. Big sisters are usually bossy. They think it is their duty to tell you what to do.

Marissa and I peaked in my daddy’s office. He was busy working already. We told him we were going outside and he said it was fine as long as we didn’t leave the yard without telling him.

When we got outside Marissa wanted to start looking for prints again. She was sure she had heard an elephant under her bed room window last night after she went to sleep. She said she was going to put shredded wheat under her window tonight if we didn’t find it. I wasn’t real sure that elephants eat shredded wheat. Marissa said she didn’t see why that wouldn’t work since shredded wheat kind of looks like a hay bale only smaller and our elephant was probably a small one so it should work.

So we tracked and tracked, but no new prints. Marissa said maybe it is a kind of elephant that only comes out at night and that is why we couldn’t find it. I said I had never heard of such a thing. Marissa said, I didn’t know everything. She is 6 months older than I am so sometimes she does hear things that I don’t. Then she said that maybe this tiny elephant was so smart that it knew people go in their houses after dark, so that is the only time that he would come out.

Well, that sort of made sense. So we tried to come up with a plan that would let us see that elephant or whatever else was making those prints. We took the picture of those prints and compared it to my dog’s feet, but it didn’t even match. We even took a picture of my dog’s feet and his prints in the dirt but they didn’t match.

We tried to figure out if we could put lights all around the yard, where we saw the prints. But Marissa said if the elephant was smart enough to wait until night to come out, then he was smart enough to hide if he saw lights. So we decided to ask our parents if we could camp outside in a tent. My dad thought it was pretty funny that we wanted to sleep outside. We didn’t tell him that we wanted to catch an elephant because we were pretty sure if he thought there was an elephant he would make us stay inside.

Marissa’s mother said we could camp out with Marissa’s brother’s tent if it was ok with my dad.

We helped daddy put the tent up in the backyard. We packed a box of food. We put lots to eat, graham crackers with chocolate, pretzels, carrots and even shredded wheat. Then we decided that we should have flashlights, so daddy got two of them for us. We each had a sleeping bag. Marissa had brought her pillow. I got my pillow. My favorite pillow has a little mermaid pillowcase but I didn’t want to take that one outside in case it would get ruined so I took the one that has a plain pink pillowcase. We took my camera too in case we got to see the elephant and couldn’t catch it we wanted to have proof. Then Marissa wanted to take a butterfly net to catch it. I said I thought that was just the craziest thing I had ever heard of. Who could believe that an elephant could fit in a butterfly net? So we got some old volleyball net out of the garage and a sheet. I thought if there was a real elephant that that would never hold it but maybe it would slow it down enough to get a picture.

Well, night came and Marissa and I went outside. We ate our snacks. We put some of the shredded wheat out to lure the creature. Then we told ghost stories. We sat with the flashlights under our chins to look scarier. Then we decided to go to sleep. We got in our sleeping bags. I looked out the tent. The lights were still on in the house so I felt pretty safe. I hoped if it was a mountain lion or a tiger that we would hear it before it found our tent. I was pretty sure that daddy would be listening too, to make sure we were safe, especially since he usually slept with his window open. Our tent was right under his window, so I was pretty sure he would hear he would hear us if we called out. I was just getting to sleep, when I heard a rustling sound in the woods. Then I heard something walking around the tent. At first I thought it was my sister trying to scare us. Then we heard a strange sound like a grunting noise that I was pretty sure my sister couldn’t make. I poked Marissa. She woke up all grouchy like. But when she heard the noise, her eyes got really big. I whispered to her to point the camera at the tent flap. I went over and unzipped the flap. The grunting came closer. Marissa started taking pictures. I screamed. The thing started coming closer to me. An ugly face with a big nose poked inside the tent. It looked like it was going to eat me until it saw the flash from the camera then it ran the other way lickety split. I heard daddy coming outside yelling girls, Sophie, are you ok. He got outside just as Marissa and I were climbing out of the tent.

We were really scared. Marissa was crying. I was holding my sleeping bag in front of me like a shield.

Daddy took us and our sleeping bags inside. He was going back outside for our pillows when I started to get scared that the thing would get him and eat him. I grabbed onto his leg and begged him not to go out.

He got out a big blanket and put it over the dining room table to make a tent for us. He put our sleeping bags inside and we crawled in. We settled down inside. Then daddy went back outside to get our pillows. I couldn’t rest until he came back in. As soon as he came back in, I gave a big yawn and grabbed my pillow and went right to sleep.

In the morning when we eating breakfast and telling daddy all about how the creature almost ate us I remembered that we had pictures of the thing. I went to get the camera. Marissa went to look out the window. The tent was all messed up, so she went outside to look. Our snack box was on the ground outside the tent and the left over snacks were gone. All the shredded wheat was gone. All around the ground were prints from the thing. She ran back in to tell my daddy that there really had been something not just our imaginations. Daddy went out with her and said, well it wasn’t dog tracks; that is for sure. He walked around the tent then around the yard. He said the prints lead to the woods. We were starting to believe that maybe there was a whole herd of elephants and that we were lucky not to have been trampled alive in our sleeping bags.

I remembered I had the camera in my hand, so I said that daddy should take a look at our pictures and see what it was. Most of the pictures were of the tent flaps or the tent ceiling. But there it was in one picture just as plain as day, the creatures face. He looked really scary to me. Daddy began to laugh. I couldn’t see anything funny about a monster that was planning on eating me in my sleep or at least trampling me to death. Then daddy pointed out that that was the neighbor’s pet pig. He said they had been looking for that pig for a week and couldn’t find it. He said the pig’s favorite snacks were graham crackers and shredded wheat. Well, whoever heard of a pet pig or feeding a pig shredded wheat.

Well at least we knew it wasn’t an elephant so I guess I was right about that. I think though I will wait until I am at least a year older before I camp out without my dad again.