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her.
    “And she helps in class and she can ride whenever she wants to and she told me that she’d take me on the Rocky Road Trail one of these days,” Dinah said.
    I could tell even then that Dinah and Betsy were similar in a lot of ways and agreed about most things. The big exception was Betsy’s sister, Jodi. Having several siblings myself, I could sort of see where Betsy was coming from. Maybe to her having an older sister seemed just as unnecessary to a full and satisfactory life as having three annoying brothers did to me.
    I didn’t think too much about that just then, though, because I heard a wonderful sound floating toward us at that moment. It was a sound I had only heard once before—on the Starlight Ride at Pine Hollow on Christmas Eve, when Max rode through the fields in a horse-drawn sleigh. It was the sound of sleigh bells!
    I turned and saw a sleigh coming toward us on the packedsnow of the wooded road. A large workhorse was pulling it, and the bells on the reins chimed merrily every time the girl who was driving moved her hands.
    All of a sudden I had the weird but wonderful feeling that I hadn’t just traveled up the East Coast from Virginia to Vermont. No, I had also traveled backward in time a century or two. It was a magical moment, and the only thing that could have made it even more perfect was if Carole and Lisa had been there to share it with me.
    The older girl pulled the sleigh to a stop in front of us, then hopped down and tossed the long reins to Dinah, making the bells ring crazily all at once. “Here, you take the reins,” she said.
    “Me?” Dinah said.
    “Yeah.” That was all the older girl said in reply. Without so much as glancing at Betsy or me, she walked back the way she had come.
    “That was Jodi,” Betsy told me, rolling her eyes a little. “My older sister.”
    “She’s usually friendlier,” Dinah said quickly. “I guess she wasn’t crazy about having to hitch up the sleigh for us. That must be why she hurried off. Anyway, you’ll meet her again while you’re here. I’m sure you’ll like her.”
    “I’m sure I will,” I agreed. But I only said it to be polite. I wasn’t too sure at all—not after the way Jodi had acted.
    But I didn’t think about her for long. We were all eager to get started. Dinah and Betsy started talking about their favorite horses at the stable—the ones they would get toride all summer long if we won. Dinah’s was named Goldie, and Betsy’s was Mister.
    We went into the Sugar Hut and collected all the equipment we would need—two large hand drills, a bunch of spiles, and an equal number of buckets. The rules of the contest stated that we had to set out every bucket we took with us. For each one we brought back empty, we would have to forfeit a bucket of sap to the other teams. So we were careful to take only as many buckets as we thought we could use. We loaded everything into the sleigh, then climbed aboard.
    Then, finally, we were on our way!
    Betsy drove first. She was sitting between Dinah and me on the long wooden bench-type seat. Actually, she wasn’t sitting so much as standing, with her feet braced against a board at the front edge of the sleigh.
    Driving a sleigh is a very interesting process, full of educational details. For instance, I noticed that Betsy was holding one rein in each hand. When we were ready to start, she flicked the reins so that they slapped the horse’s rump lightly, and at the same time she made a sort of clicking sound with her tongue. At first I could feel every lumbering step the big horse took, because it tugged at the sleigh with each one. But once the horse picked up its pace and the runners started sliding smoothly over the snow, all I felt was an easy, gliding forward motion.
    “Wow,” I said. “Now I really feel like I’ve traveled back in time a few hundred years.”
    “Wait until we get to work,” Betsy said. “You’re going to wish for the twentieth century again!”
    I wasn’t