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    Richard and the Vratch
    Richard and the Vratch
    Richard and the Vratch
    Ebook120 pages1 hour

    Richard and the Vratch

    By Beatrice Gormley

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    About this ebook

    Exploring the hills near his house, Richard sees an odd drawing and hears eerie sounds: "vratch, vratch." Is a strange animal hiding in the sagebrush, or is it Richard’s imagination? What’s the matter with Richard’s new dog? And why is that creepy scientist Dr. MacNary so interested in him? By the time Richard learns the answers, only he can save his beloved hills—and the vratches.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBeatrice Gormley
    Release dateFeb 26, 2010
    ISBN9781452313085
    Richard and the Vratch
    Author

    Beatrice Gormley

    Beatrice Gormley has written a number of books for young readers, including several titles in the History’s All-Stars series, as well as biographies of Barack Obama, George W. Bush, Laura Bush, and John McCain. She lives in Westport, Massachusetts.

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      Book preview

      Richard and the Vratch - Beatrice Gormley

      Richard and the Vratch

      by Beatrice Gormley

      Smashwords Edition

      Copyright 1987 by Beatrice Gormley

      All rights reserved.

      The cover design uses the photos 7223322 © Jacek Chabraszewski and 14895540 © Ralf Kraft under Fotolia license.

      Smashwords Edition, License Notes

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      Discover other titles by Beatrice Gormley at Smashwords.com:

      Fifth Grade Magic

      http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/9776

      Also by Beatrice Gormley:

      Mail-Order Wings

      The Ghastly Glasses

      More Fifth Grade Magic

      Richard and the Vratch

      Paul’s Volcano

      Best Friend Insurance

      The Magic Mean Machine

      Wanted: UFO

      Sky Guys to White Cat

      Ellie’s Birthstone Ring

      Back to the Titanic!

      Back to Paul Revere!

      Back to the Day Lincoln Was Shot!

      To Lois and David,

      who grew up with me in vratch country

      Contents

      1. The Call of the Wild

      2. A Boy Needs a Dog

      3. Buck

      4. Hidden Animals

      5. Spies

      6. Lessons from a Dog

      7. Buck Is Missing

      8. Puppy Suits

      9. The Surprise Exhibit

      10. Looking for Dr. Mounce

      11. Going to the Offense

      12. Some Friend

      1. The Call of the Wild

      Dropping his many-bladed Swiss army knife into his jeans pocket, Richard hurried toward the back door. He thought he turned the doorknob quietly, but his mother called to him from the laundry room.

      Richard? If you’re going hiking, I’d like you to get someone to go with you. All right?

      Richard hesitated. He’d gotten into trouble yesterday when he came back from a long hike and his mother realized he had been exploring the hills above their house by himself. Okay, he called back. Okay didn’t necessarily mean, Okay, I’ll do what you said. Okay could just as well mean Okay, I understand—you want me to get someone to go hiking with me. But be reasonable, Mom, Who could I get?

      As if she had heard his thought, Mrs. Hayes called, Tony Heckman might like to go for a climb.

      Before he could hear any more helpful suggestions that were supposed to be taken as instructions, Richard stepped outside and closed the door. He glanced across the street to see if Tony Heckman was around, but the Heckmans’ cement driveway was blank. He looked up to the end of the street, from which Tony often swooped down on his bike at what seemed like seventy miles an hour. The street was empty. Good. In case his mother asked, Richard had looked for Tony Heckman.

      Lifting his head, Richard gazed at the hills rearing into the sky. The Lagarto Grande hills, people called them, but Richard thought of them as mountains. When he had first caught sight of them, just before they moved here from Pleasant Acres, his scalp tingled. A phrase from a song came to him: purple mountains’ majesty.

      Click.

      The sound of a pebble hitting the end of his driveway made Richard turn. Across the street a boy Richard’s age, with dark shaggy hair and low-slung jeans, picked another pebble from his handful. He tossed it a little farther up Richard’s driveway. Click—rattle.

      So far, Richard had avoided Tony because he reminded Richard of a boy in Pleasant Acres who had tried to pick fights with him. Mom didn’t seem to realize what kind of boy Tony was, though. She just wanted them to be friends because she was friendly with Mrs. Heckman, because Tony’s little sister went to the nursery school where Mom taught.

      Click—rattle. Richard could see that Tony was trying to get his attention, but he pretended not to notice. Instead of walking up the short street to the end, as he has planned, and hiking up the dry creek bed in the canyon, Richard turned. Crossing his backyard, he walked along the ivy-covered chain-link fence to the side of the hill. It seemed more interesting to climb the fence, anyway, as if he were escaping. Digging the toes of his sneakers into the holes where the ivy, was thinnest, he vaulted the fence without even scratching his wrist.

      As he scrambled up the bank of the crumbly, rusty-colored rock, Richard grasped a sage bush to pull himself up. The pungent sage smell came off on his hands, and he breathed it deeply into his lungs. Ahh. The adventure started here.

      Back in Pleasant Acres, adventures did not happen. Pleasant Acres was nothing but rows and rows of new houses on tiny lots, each with its bright green doormat of a lawn and its skinny new tree tied to a stake. Richard rode his bike down flat street after flat street, looking for adventure, but the best thing he had found was a new park with more scrawny, braced trees. Nothing hidden, nothing wild.

      Part of Richard’s ideas about adventure came from his favorite book, The Call of the Wild. With his Swiss Army knife in his pocket, Richard felt like the outdoorsman of the Klondike, John Thornton. With a handful of salt and a rifle he could plunge into the wilderness and fare wherever he pleased. Inside his head, as if it were a tape deck, Richard played parts of the book.

      His legs pumping steadily up the steep path, Richard brushed through dry, scrubby bushes. No one used this path, he was sure—no human beings, anyway. Last week, on this very spot, he had raised his head, panting from the climb, to see a deer.

      The deer stood perfectly still for a moment, staring at Richard. Is he dangerous? The animal seemed to be asking itself. The deer’s dusty brown coat blended into the sun-scorched grass and brush—if it had stopped a little farther away, Richard might not have seen it at all. Only its soft eyes moved. Then it bounded off the trail with a crackling of twigs, and it was gone.

      A deer, a wild deer, living right here in the hills above his house! Not in a zoo, not even in a national park like Yosemite. No one had planned for the deer to be there so Richard could see it—it was just part of life here in Lagarto Grande. Who knew what might happen this afternoon?

      At the top of the first rise Richard glanced back. From this height he could see that the houses on his street, Vista Drive, were set on terraced lots, rising like steps along both sides of the road. A purple car crawled up the street and into the driveway of the house below Richard’s. That must be Mrs. VanNest, coming home from the newspaper, the Lagarto Grande Grande View, where she worked. The white snout of her overweight dog, Snowball, poked out of the car’s back window.

      Last week someone had stuck a cardboard sign, PRIZE PIG, on Snowball’s doghouse. Pinned to the sign was a red ribbon: Second Prize, Pomona County Fair. Richard had heard Mrs. VanNest complaining to his mother about it. Of course I know it wasn’t Richard—it was that Heckman boy. Second prize!

      Richard turned back to the trail. Plunge into the wilderness, he muttered. He knew, of course, that these sparsely covered hills, here at the edge of the desert in Southern California, didn’t look anything like the country in Alaska where John Thornton roamed with his fierce dog, Buck.

      The Boy Scout camp Richard had gone to last summer, in fir woods and meadows, had actually looked like John Thornton country. At summer camp, though, Richard could never go off by himself. That was the important thing—once he was up in these hills, he could do exactly what he wanted.

      His eager-sharp eyes missed nothing, thought Richard as he noted the large, reddish bush tucked into a fold of the hill. Out of sight under the bush—a low tree, really—he could rest. He could also eat the provisions in his back pockets: peanut butter and crackers and an apple. He would cut the apple with one of the blades on his Swiss Army knife.

      Panting and a little dizzy from the steep climb, Richard turned again to look down. Now he could see the whole valley: the spread of housing developments with their blue dots of swimming pools, the cluster of stories and gas stations along the main street of Lagarto Grande, and the green rectangles of the high school football field and the park. On the other side of town the freeway was hidden under a dirty fuzz of smog, like a long dust curl.

      The Hayeses’ house and the VanNests’ house were hidden by the shoulder of the hill, but he could see the Heckmans’ and a figure slouching on their driveway. Oh, no. That was Tony Heckman. If Richard could see him, Tony could see Richard, and he might follow him.

      Richard scowled. Even though Tony’s family had lived on Vista Drive before the Hayeses, Richard felt that the hills were his, not Tony’s. Well, let Tony try to follow him—he wouldn’t catch a seasoned dweller in the wild like Richard.

      John Thornton, outdoorsman and explorer, watched expressionless as the foolish greenhorn plunged into the desert wastes with only a day’s supple of water. Later Thornton would come across Heckman’s bleached bones and shrug. Such was the law of the wild.

      Richard climbed on up the bare, rocky spine of the hill. He would find shelter farther on, someplace that Tony

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