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solemnly. Stevie grinned to herself and winked at Amy. This was Stevie’s kind of story. In her opinion the very best camp-fire stories always began with some kind of creepy monster loose nearby and known to be attracted to fire. She and Amy obviously agreed on that. It didn’t matter that they hadn’t even had the radio on in the car yesterday, and it didn’t matter that everybody sitting around the camp fire that night knew they were making it all up. Stevie would have bet almost anything that the hairs on the backs of a few necks around the camp fire were standing straight on end. Number one on her list was Amy’s brother, Seth.
    “And every time they catch it, they put more bars on its cage,” Amy continued. “But nothing is strong enoughto hold it captive for long. It has this compulsion to stalk its prey by firelight.”
    Nearby something startled one of the horses, and it whinnied loudly.
    “What was that?” Seth blurted out.
    Stevie stifled a giggle.
    “Oh, probably nothing,” Amy said.
    “Don’t worry, Seth, it’s just a story,” Lisa told him. He seemed to calm down, but she noticed that later, when Eli suggested that a couple of them check on the horses before they got into their sleeping bags, Seth didn’t offer to go.
    Lisa understood. Seth had had a very rough time with his parents’ divorce. He felt a lot of responsibility for his sister. What he really seemed to need the most was somebody to take care of him. It was a good thing she was there.

S TEVIE SHIFTED IN her saddle. It was still early morning, and the pack trippers were already on their way, in spite of the fog and the chill morning air. Stevie hadn’t slept very well. Neither had anyone else in the girls’ tent. The problem was that the tent had lots of openings that let in the chilly breezes. All night long the girls had grumbled about the way the tent had been set up. Amy insisted that it wasn’t their fault. It was just that the tent hadn’t been properly made. It was
supposed
to have all those air holes in it, to let in breezes on hot nights. Nobody, including Stevie, believed that story any more than they had the one about the monster. Stevie had kept hermouth shut. Nobody would have heard what she said anyway, since she was curled inside her sleeping bag.
    Now they were back on the trail. Stevie was still chilled, and she couldn’t wait for the morning sun to dry up the fog and bake them warm again.
    The trail followed the long rolling valley, rising and dipping with the foothills of the mountains that surrounded the area. There were surprises with every rise. They were crossing an open prairie, which was covered with short grass and crossed here and there with rivulets that fed larger streams. Soon, Stevie could see, they would be entering another forest area and on the other side of that—well, she’d just have to wait and see.
    The most astonishing aspect of Victoria Pass, however, was the constant presence of the mountains that surrounded it. To either side the prairie gave way to steep hills, then to thick evergreen forests above, and then, reaching to the sky, craggy mountainsides finally became snowcapped. The mountains were omnipresent, yet so distant that they seemed almost mystical.
    “I’m afraid that if I blink, they’ll disappear,” Stevie said to Christine, who was riding next to her.
    Christine smiled. “Sometimes I think that mountains are nature’s way of reminding us that the earth has been around a lot longer than we have.”
    “They do have that effect, definitely,” Stevie agreed.
    “And the wind, too—the
cold
wind,” Christine added. Stevie didn’t say anything. “Like the wind that came into our poorly assembled tent last night.”
    “Really? I didn’t notice anything,” Stevie said finally. She had the funny feeling that Christine didn’t believe her.
    C AROLE COULDN ’ T DECIDE which she liked best: the meadow part of the trail or the wooded part. She loved the vast view from