Under Emily's Sky by Ann Alma

Author:Ann Alma
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: JUV000000
Publisher: Dundurn
Published: 1997-08-31T16:00:00+00:00

A trail of blood led along the grass to the end of the log. The woman sat there holding her leg.

“Ma, you shouldn’t have moved,” Clare said. She checked her mother’s leg. “It’s bleeding more.”

“You need stitches,” Lee said. “We’ll get Uncle Brooke and….” She stopped, then asked, “Do you know where our parents are?”

“Are there more of you?” The woman asked. She grimaced as Clare tightened the tourniquet again. “That painter and all her animals, are you with her?”

“No. Our parents were camped at the beach, but now they’re gone,” Alex said. “Do you know where they are?”

The twins shook their heads.

Willard turned to Alex. “Let’s cut poles to put under the mattress. That way we can carry Ma back to the cabin.”

Lee nodded. She didn’t understand why the twins weren’t trying harder to get help. They hadn’t even bandaged the cut. Perhaps they didn’t have bandages. The flies that crawled on the woman’s leg might infect the wound.

“Do you have any bug spray?” she asked, scratching her neck.

Clare shrugged. “Never heard of it,” she mumbled. Looking up at Lee, she said, “Oh, you mean fly tox? No, we don’t use it.”

“My uncle knows a lot about first aid. If you know where the campers are….” Lee tried again.

Clare was bent over her mother. She shrugged.

“Campers,” Lee continued. “One’s a big, new, white motorhome with a blue awning. The other, my mom’s, is a really old Volkswagen van. And there’s a canoe. But everything is gone. Even the tubes.” Suddenly Lee realized just how scary her situation was. She sat down on the ground, feeling shaky.

“You’ve all that?” Clare looked at Lee’s T-shirt, her shorts and runners. Then her eyes rested on Lee’s watch. “You must be rich.”

“No, we’re not.” Lee stopped. They were all gone! She looked around the clearing, almost expecting Uncle Brooke or Mom to come walking from behind a shrub, as they had done when they played hide and seek up here.

Clare checked her mother’s leg and wiped her forehead. “The droughts, weren’t you hit by them?”

“The droughts?” Lee wasn’t sure just what a drought was.

“The dust storms, the droughts?” Clare sounded amazed.

Lee shrugged. “What’s that?”

Clare’s mother must have been listening. She opened her eyes. “You don’t know about the droughts?” she asked.

“It didn’t rain for several years,” Clare said. “We’d no water. The wells dried up. All the plants died. We couldn’t even wash. Then the wind blew ’nd blew. It made big dust storms. There was sand in my eyes ’nd my ears. In our food. In my bed. And piles of sand by the doors ’nd windows. Pa, he used a shovel ’nd wheelbarrow to dump the sand back outside.” She swatted at the flies on her mother’s leg.

Lee wondered if Clare was telling the truth. “A wheelbarrow?” she grinned.

“Really,” Clare said. Her mother nodded.

Clare continued. “The dust clouds, they were so big, it was dark even during the day. I guess you never lived on the prairies.”

Lee shook her head.

“Then grasshoppers came,” Clare went on.

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