Excerpt: Brittney and the Treasure Scouts: A Brittney Birch Adventure

Prologue
They got to the top of the second hill, and the valley spread out before them. It was grassy brown of autumn, and beautiful. Their trail curved around in an arc to the left, along an ancient fence-line, and continued to the right, through a grove of Ponderosa pine. They stopped to check their clue, and take an azimuth reading. “We should almost be there,” Brittney announced. They had been on the trail for two hours. It was a complex clue, but they knew that they were on the right track. Maggie played in the grove while the three kids shared a sip from a canteen and looked for the next marker.
They continued down the trail for another quarter mile, and there it was: The Boulder with Richard Widmark’s Chin. They had no idea of who Richard Widmark was, but they could figure out the facial profile of the boulder, and the chin-like outcropping. They hurried to the outcropping, and searched behind, where the box was supposed to be hidden. In less than ten minutes Pup had found the small pile of rocks, concealing the hole where the old peanut-butter jar was buried with its treasures.
They pulled it out and carefully opened it – it was all there: the stamp and the logbook. They spread their equipment out on the surface of the big rock: their three personal logbooks, and their three handcrafted rubber stamps. The old peanut butter jar contained a stamp carved with an image of a baying wolf and a robust full moon behind it and a log book for the letterbox. Brittney placed her stamp in the box’s log book while Pepper put the letterbox’s stamp in her own. Pup, whose name was actually Billy, the smallest and youngest of the siblings, looked for the beetle that had run under a log upon their arrival with the assistance of Maggie, their small and tenacious Doxle hound.
“This is a really nice one,” observed Brittney, as she carefully placed the big stamp in her book. It nearly filled the page. Underneath she wrote the date and “We missed the box and went four miles out of our way! Stumbled on ‘the shady grove with the saddest tree’ on the way back home.”
She then placed her stamp with her eldest brother’s interpretation of their family crest in the logbook of the letterbox. Her stamp had been of a cartoonish grinning Scout with a box of cookies for sale up until three months ago. She, however, felt that was a bit immature for a sixteen-year-old, and she no longer took the pride in being the best cookie sales-scout in her troop that she once had. Pepper was still in some awe of Brittney’s Scouting accomplishments, but Brittney felt that she was growing out of Scouting. She was not, however, growing out of the outdoors or its beauty. Her parents were both accomplished Scouts in their time and her eldest brother had his Condor badge, as did her dad and mom, and they all had high hopes for Brit. Pup was a Wolf Scout now, which was a huge source of pride for him. His new stamp was that of a wolf print, and he was outraged when his sisters called him a Puppy Scout.
They finished up with the letterbox and Brittney carefully packed the contents away, and she and Pepper carefully hid it in the small cranny between the boulders where they had found it, piling the smaller rocks in front, again as they had found it. “Take nothing but memories, leave nothing but footprints,” their dad often quoted, and it was the way they lived when they were in the wilderness, with the small exception of the hidden treasures in the letter boxes. The Birches, both the children and parents, discovered the game of letterboxing through Scouting, but it became a passion unto itself. The whole family loved the wilderness, and letterboxing provided one more excuse for a hike in the country whenever they felt that they needed one.
They started on the long trail back to their cabin. The autumn afternoon was cool and beautiful. The evergreens smelled like Christmas, and the deciduous trees still had their leaves, ablaze with fiery fall colors. The children looked like part of the landscape, with their brilliant red hair and their freckled faces. Pup was in the lead, with his excess of childish energy, and Brittney and Pepper set a steady pace behind. Brittney wore her elder brother Robert’s beat-up old Montana Peak slung by its chin cord on her back, and Pepper wore a floppy-brimmed palm straw that her mom had bought her at the beginning of the summer to protect her pale complexion. Pup covered his curly orange mop with his ever-present Wolf Scout ball-cap. Brittney suspected that he took it off to bathe, but little else. The hike in the country air was invigorating, and it brought a sense of serenity to Brittney’s mind. The air smelled good, and it made all her teen-aged troubles seem distant. She loved the outdoors, and that is where she wanted to stay.
 
Chapter 1: The Shortened Vacation
“You kids are running late! Wash up for dinner!” Mrs. Birch was invariably happy, and she loved vacations at the cabin because it gave her the opportunity to cook for her family and to have dinners at the table. Dinner was not always fancy, but tonight it was Mom’s interpretation of one of Gramma’s recipes: Fricassee de Lapin et l’Écrevisses. Dad, it seemed, had a busy morning hunting for jackrabbits and putting out the crawfish traps. It was delicious with the wild rice that Mom made with it. Dinners like this one were celebrations sometimes, but other times they were to soften the blow of bad news. Brittney suspected the worst.
After grace and the initial passing of dishes they ate with relish. Conversations included Dad’s hunting trip and setting the crawfish traps, and the long trek to the letterbox and the opossums and the squirrels. When the banana fritters came, dad stopped the festivities with an announcement: “We have some bad news, kids. We are going to have to cut vacation a little short – we got some sad news.”
All three of the Birch children stopped in mid-chew, wondering what the horrible news could be.
“My uncle Bartholomew has passed on.”
Their faces remained blank. You see, they had no idea that they even had a great-uncle Bartholomew. Their faces showed a depth of understanding that was a dead giveaway to their parents. They had no clue.
“Uncle Bartholomew was a friend of your grandpa’s, I think his best friend. In any case, he named your grandpa in his will as his executor, and there is a lot of work to be done, so Grandpa has asked me to help.
“The bad news for you is that we need to cut our vacation short. The good news is that Uncle Bart lives in Maine, where none of you have been, and which is absolutely lovely this time of the year. We are going to his home for the reading of the will, and it will be a beautiful and educational experience. You will love it!”
“But what about Hallowe’en?” Pup’s concern was obviously deeply felt. It was only once a year that he could get pounds of free candy, all sweetened with refined white sugars, all but banned in his mother’s kitchen. “Where will we trikertreat?” He felt a moral outrage at missing the one event per year where he could go to total strangers’ homes and demand sweets. It was his right, and he felt he was being stripped of it.
“Letterboxing started on the east coast. In this country, at least,” Brittney observed. The idea registered with the other two at that moment – there would be some interesting new adventures to be had in Maine.
“When do we leave?” Pepper asked.
“Well, we are flying out of San Francisco Airport on Friday, so we will need to pack up and clean the cabin in a hurry tomorrow morning. We will dash home, empty our suitcases and re-pack tomorrow afternoon, get up early on Friday morn, and dash off to the airport. We are going to need a lot of teamwork and Scout-like cooperation!” Dad could lend a sense of excitement and enthusiasm to cleaning the garage, somehow. This was actually an adventure, of sorts.
They cleaned their plates of fritters and ice cream, and the kids cleaned off the table and started on the dishes immediately. They had a great deal to do to prepare the cabin for the off season in the few hours that remained. They would sleep tomorrow on the trip home and on the flight east, tonight they would be busy as a troop of Beaver Scouts.
Despite the rush of cleaning, laundry and packing, Brittney and Pepper managed to make ten minutes with the Internet connection and printed a wealth of potential letterboxing adventures to be had in Penobscot County, Maine. They were sure that they would have time for at least ten of them, and the clues were all so very enticing. They would have to be sure to pack their warm coats and Brittney wanted to be sure to take her favorite persimmon staff with her – she would be walking miles in this wilderness.
 
Chapter 2: The Voyage East
By the time they got on the 747 airplane, the kids were far too exhausted to be excited. They were too exhausted to do about anything but sleep. Robert Birch, Jr., the kids’ dad, whispered to Marion, “Maybe we should drive them like day laborers more often! This will be the easiest trip ever.” They guided the well bathed and groomed children to their seats and got them settled in with seatbelts. They nudged them to stay awake through the stewardess’s evacuation instructions, and then all three fell dead asleep.
Somewhere over the mid-west Brittney woke with a start, and realized that she had left her old persimmon staff at home. Her father had made that staff when he was a boy, and her elder brother had used it well over the years. Originally it had a piece of copper pipe for a tip, and later her elder brother Robby added a convertible spike tip that could be a rubber tip when you were hiking developed trails. It had a collection of plaques on it from all the major parks and monuments that her dad and Robby had hiked, as well as a couple of her own. She had just added her favorite, McArthur-Burney Falls State Park, over the past summer. The staff was like a Native American totem stick, with memories of two active generations of hikers vested in it. She loved to have it with her on new adventures so that the memories would be part of the staff, and it saddened her not to have it with her. Nonetheless, she would press on.