Raven's Mountain by Orr Wendy Read Free Book Online Page A

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    Coyote Girl will be Jess’s best play ever when she works out the ending. Coyote Girl crawled away from a picnic when she was a baby and got adopted by a coyote family.
    I’m Coyote Girl. Amelia’s Mama Coyote; Jess is the director and the real mother, but later on she’s the hunter. She wants the hunter to accidentally shoot himself so Coyote Girl lives happily ever after, wild and free with her coyote family.
    Amelia wants Mama Coyote to chase the hunter away in a ferocious but beautiful jazz ballet dance.
    I want Coyote Girl to track the hunter, but he turns out to be her father and they all go home and live in one big happy coyote and people family.
    The raven’s gone, and I’m alone again. Alone on a mountain is different from other kinds of alone. Alone in your room is good sometimes, not when you’ve been sent there but just when you feel like it, because your bedroom is safe, and it’s your own place.
    Alone out here means that no one on earth can hear me scream. I could wave, jump up and down, spell out HELP! with emergency flares . . . and nobody would see me.
    Which should be good in one way, because right now I really need to pee. The funny thing is that even though I know there’s no one anywhere around, I still wish there were some trees I could hide behind.
    Because I know I’m alone from people, but I’m not so sure about bears. Or wolves or cougars. Wild animals are different from people; just because I can’t see them doesn’t mean they can’t see me.
    I really don’t want to get eaten by a bear while I’m halfway through peeing with my jeans around my ankles.
    It’s the opposite scariness from last night, because then there were lots of trees that the animals might be hiding behind, and here there are none for me to hide behind. Last night, before Lily and I went off together, Scott shone his torch into the woods and shouted, ‘Hey, bears! Lily and Raven want some privacy here!’
    That was something I never knew I wanted a dad for: to scare off grizzly bears so I could pee.
    Anyway, I can’t hold on till I get past the tree line. I   should have gone in the cemetery field. It had enough big rocks for a hundred kids to find their own places to pee.
    Though I like the way the mountain is starting to look almost normal, without so many newly broken rocks thrown around.
    Why do you want it to look normal? Amelia asks in my head. It doesn’t make it any easier for Lily and Scott.
    Because somehow it doesn’t see I   haven’t wrecked the whole mountain. Because half of me knows that Lily’s right, there’s no way my Top-of-the-World Dance could have knocked a huge cliff off the side of a mountain   – Of course you couldn’t! Jess agrees   – and half of me knows I did. Knows that Scott being hurt, Lily being scared, and both of them being trapped is all my fault.
    So just keep on going; that’s all you can do, Jess soothes.
    But pee first, or you’ll wet your pants, Amelia teases.
    I do what Amelia says.
    That feels better. Not just because I’ve stopped feeling like I’m going to burst, but because I’ve never peed outside before without Lily or Mum watching out for me. I   automatically feel braver now I have.
    Maybe that’s why the other voice, the Dad one, suddenly pipes up: If you can move chunks of rock the size of a car . . . you can do anything. Even get out of here alive and rescue Lily and Scott.
    It’s still too high for any bushes or normal plants to grow, but the mountain’s starting to get that softer look, as if the rocks are more settled into the ground. Sometimes little tiny plants are tucked in beside them.
    And up ahead there’s a sticking-out rock that just about says Raven is on the right trail . It’s the hail-shelter rock.
    â€˜You could camp here if it was bigger,’ I said when we were squatting under it this