Story Twelve - Part Two

Continued from Monkey June and the Shimmering Stone - Part One

Since the huge log over the rushing river was dry that day, it was easy for June and her father to walk right over it to the far side of the river.

“Where do we go from here?” her father asked.

“This way,” June said, starting off into the forest like she had lived there all her life.

“How do you know?” her father asked, rushing to keep up with her.

“Intuition,” June said confidently, using a new word she had learned recently. “Monkey intuition.”

(If you don’t already know, ‘intuition’ is when you know something instinctively, without having to think about it. If you don’t know what ‘instinctively’ means, ask me to tell you a joke about two little skunk brothers sometime.)

Before long, they realized that even though the forest looked wild and natural all around them, they were actually walking on a barely visible path.

“Someone has walked through this forest before,” June’s father said as they walked.

“Monkeys, I hope!” said June.

“Monkeys might prefer to swing through the trees,” her father said. “Look here…is this a boot print?”

“I don’t think so,” June said. “It does look like the grass was smooshed, though.”

“A bit more smooshed than a monkey foot would do,” her father pointed out. “I think people have walked through here. A lot of people…or maybe a few people have walked through here many times.”

“Maybe Mango Monkey and his family were following those people to see what they were doing,” June said. “Maybe they were curious.”

“Well now I’m curious,” her father said. “But let’s go slowly…and cautiously. If we do run into people out here, they might be friendly hikers, and they might be—”

“Pirates!” June said. “I’ve always wanted to meet a real pirate!”

“That’s not at all what I was thinking,” her father said, shaking his head. “Let’s just be careful.”

Ten or fifteen minutes later, June and her father stepped out of the forest and found themselves on a sandy beach! They were at the ocean!

June ran out onto the sand and started doing happy cartwheels as she ran back and forth along the beach.

“June!” her father called out. “Come back here!”

June gave him a grumpy look and ran back to where he was.

“Cool beach!” she said.

“Yes,” her father said, “but it might have been a good idea for us to take a close look at the footprints I saw in the sand right where the forest meets the beach.”

“Okay,” June said. “Good idea. Let’s do that. Where are they, though? I don’t see any footprints.”

“I think an excited little girl kicked up a lot of sand when she ran through here to do cartwheels on the beach.”

“Oh,” June said. “Was the girl’s name ‘June’? And was she actually a big girl of nearly five?”

“That’s my best guess, yes.”

“Sorry,” June said. “Ooh! What about that, though! We should investigate those logs!”

June pointed to some huge logs lying on the beach and sticking out into the water. The two of them walked over (no cartwheels this time) to get a closer look.

“It’s a raft,” June’s father said.

“Why would someone leave a raft here?” June asked. “Do you think it’s for sailing or for playing?”

“There’s no sail, so I’m going to guess it’s not for sailing.”

“It’s for playing, then!” June said, jumping up onto the raft and running around on it.

“It looks very old,” June’s father said as he stepped up onto the raft. “Be careful not to fall in the water. The waves are making this thing bob up and down like—”

“Whoah!” June shouted as the raft took an extra big ‘bob’ and then made a scraping noise as it was dragged away from the sandy shore.

“Hold on to something,” her father said. “The raft is moving.”

“There’s nothing to hold on to!” June said.

“Hold on to me, then. Wait…maybe I should try to jump back onto the shore and see if I can keep this thing from floating away.”

“Don’t leave me alone!” June said, suddenly feeling a bit frightened.

“I won’t…it’s too late to jump now anyway,” her father pointed out. “We’re too far from the shore. I could swim back to the beach, but I’m not leaving you alone on a raft headed who-knows-where.”

“Someone knows where,” June said. “Look!”

June’s father went to the front of the raft to see what she was pointing at. At first he saw nothing but ocean waves splashing against the front edge of the raft. Then he saw what was under the waves.

“Is that a wire?” June asked. “A fishing line? A grey rope?”

“It’s a cable,” her father said. “It’s pulling this raft. I think when we jumped on it some control mechanism was triggered and that cable started to pull us.”

“Pull us to where?” June asked.

“We don’t have any choice now but to wait and find out.”

After a while, June and her father saw a small island in the distance. the raft was headed straight for it.

“Hope there’s food on that island,” June said. “I’m hungry. Searching for missing monkey friends is hard work.”

“I’ll keep an eye out for your favorite fruit,” her father said, “but we also need to keep an eye out for people. Someone had to build this raft-and-cable system, and we have no way of knowing if the ‘someones’ are good people or bad people.”

“Maybe when we get there we should just run ashore, grab some bananas, then jump on the raft really hard to make it start up again and ‘whoosh!'— it’ll pull us back to Mango Beach Island,” June suggested.

“I like that plan,” her father agreed. “You’re a smart girl. No cartwheels on the beach this time, though.”

When the raft reached the island it scraped its way up onto the shore a little bit. June took one look at the beach and decided that no one would ever want to do a cartwheel there. The beach had no sand. It seemed to be made of nothing but dark mud and rocks. The whole place smelled really strange.

Even the trees were weird. They didn’t look like any of the trees back on Mango Beach Island. Many of the trees on this island had pointy spikes instead of leaves, and some of them seemed to be oozing some kind of sticky, oily goo.

“This looks like a terrible place,” June’s father said.

“Why would anyone build a cable-raft that goes to a nasty place like this?” June asked.

“Shh!” her father said. “Someone’s coming. Quick! To the trees!”

June and her father jumped down from the raft and crouched as they ran as quietly as possible to the nearby trees. They made it just in time, but June had to put a hand over her mouth to keep from making a ‘Yelp!’ as the tree next to them scratched her with one of its spikes.

“What’s that raft doing here again?” a gruff man’s voice sounded out across the beach.

“I keep telling the Maintenance guy that thing is too sensitive!” a second man said angrily. “It should only start up if someone big gives it a really good jump or a shove. Lately it’s been coming over here even if some dumb monkey steps on it.”

“Someone’s going to find this island if we don’t get that fixed,” the first man said. Now June and her father could see both men standing near the raft. “And it won’t just be monkeys.”

From the rough sound of their voices, June had expected the men to look like pirates, but they looked more like ordinary guys who worked in a factory.

“Speaking of monkeys,” the second man said, “What are we going to do with that latest bunch that came over on this thing?”

“Send them back to the big island, I suppose,” the first man asked.

“No. We can’t keep doing that. Monkeys remember things. They’ll think our raft is something fun to jump around on and ride. If we send them back we’ll just see them again and again.”

“What should we do with them, then?”

“We’ll let the boss decide. Right now we need to wake up that lazy Maintenance guy and get him to fix the raft. Let’s go.”

As the two men walked back up the beach, June’s father whispered to her, “You stay here. I’m going to follow them long enough to see where they’re going. They must have some kind of camp or something on this island.”

June nodded, and her father moved quietly up the beach, staying a good distance behind the other two men. The island was not very big, so in no time at all, the men arrived at their camp. It was just a round clearing in the middle of the island, with normal looking trees all around it and a few wooden buildings in the center. They looked like summer camp cabins that had been built by kids.

“Those cabins look like they were built by kids,” June whispered.

“What are you doing here?” her father whispered back. “I told you to stay put! You nodded!”

“The nod meant ‘yes we should follow those guys’,” June explained quietly.

June’s father gave her a look that meant ‘we’ll talk about this later, young lady’ and then they went back to watching the men in the clearing.

The two men knocked on the door of one of the rickety cabins. No one answered. Then they banged on the door and shouted ‘Wake up, slacker!'—along with a few other things that a nearly five-year-old girl didn’t need to hear, and that you don’t need to hear or read, either.

“I’m awake! I’m awake!” a man grumbled from within the cabin. The rickety door creaked open and a scruffy looking older man with wrinkled clothes came out. “Whaddaya want?”

“The raft is back again. You were supposed to fix it to not be so sensitive.”

“I did,” the older man said, sounding extra grumpy since they had awakened him to tell him to do something he had already done. “If it came back over, then something bigger than a monkey jumped on it. Did you search the beach?”

The first two men looked at each other and then back at the older man. They didn’t say anything.

“I guess that means you didn’t search the beach,” the older man said. “Get back there now and find whoever rode that raft over!”

“You’re not the boss of us!” one of the other men said.

“But I am,” a fourth man said as he walked up to join the others. “What’s all this about?”

The other three men all talked over one another trying to explain how nothing was their fault but everything was the fault of the other two.

“Enough!” the boss man yelled. He pointed at the older man. “You, get to that raft and make sure it’s been fixed properly. And you two get out there and search the beach. If you see so much as a single footprint, you’d better be back here telling me about it in ten seconds. And while you’re out there, pour some more gunk on the beach and trees. We need this place to look as ugly and uninviting as possible at all times. No one can find out what we’re doing here.”

“Yes, boss,” all three men said. Then they rushed off to obey their orders.

“They make the beach look like that on purpose?” June whispered. “Eww. Why?”

“Shh,” her father said, not by making a ‘shh’ sound, but by putting a finger to his lips and giving her a very serious look.

The two of them crouched down among the trees until they were practically hugging the ground. The three men didn’t notice them as they walked by on their way back to the beach.

When June and her father peeked up again, there was no one in the clearing. The boss must have gone back into whichever cabin was his.

They did see something in the clearing, though. They hadn’t noticed it when the men had been arguing. On the far side of the clearing, partially hidden from view by one of the rickety cabins, there was smaller cabin. Or maybe it was some kind of a box. Or maybe it was a…chicken coop?

June and her father carefully moved a little closer to the clearing and over to the other side of the path so they could get a better look at it.

It wasn’t a chicken coop. It wasn’t a cabin. It was a cage. It was a cage with three monkeys in it.

To be continued…