Geogirl. Kelly Rysten

I like it. I really like it. Thank you for bringing me here.”

      “Even after you got dunked in the creek?”

      “Yeah.”

      “I didn’t bring you here. The cache did. Look, there it is.”

      We walked the log closer to where the tin was floating. We had to use a long stick to get the tin around a snag, but we eventually plucked it from the creek.

      “You open it,” he said. “The first few caches are always more fun to open. Let’s see what’s in it.”

      I pried and pulled, but the lid was really tight. I guess that was good. Had it been loose it might have leaked and sunk. Twiggy pried the lid off and handed it to me. I opened the mysterious box and looked inside. It was damp. Moisture clung to the bag the logbook was in, but the log was dry inside its baggie. The rest of the contents were a different story.

      “I think we better take this to the river bank where we can spread things out and let them dry.”

      We sat on a little grassy spot and dumped out the contents, then sorted and dried them as much as we could. We had to throw away a card and some stickers that were too wet and worn out to be any good. I found a little purple bendy rabbit, a squished penny, a kid’s meal toy of a colorful parrot, and a bottle opener. There was also an odd tag attached to a jointed metal moose.

      “What’s this?” I asked as I held it up for Twiggy’s inspection.

      “Oh cool! That’s a Travel Bug… or one of its cousins. Let me see.” I handed him the tag. “We’re going on the road so we should take it.”

      “Why?”

      “Because it wants to travel.”

      “How do you know? Did you ask it?”

      “We can ask it when we get online again. If it wants to stay in the area we can always drop it off locally.”

      “You make it sound like the Travel Bug has an opinion about this,” I pointed out.

      “It does! Though we need to read the site and see what it wants to do. If it is trying to go east we should drop it off in another cache. But if it wants to go west we should take it and log it at the caches we find.”

      I was deciding I knew absolutely nothing about geocaching when he said, “Good find!” That kind of made up for my confusion about what a Travel Bug might be. How could a bug be a moose?

      “Do I get to trade?” I asked.

      “Sure, if you see something you like. What did you bring to put in?”

      “I… uh, rats. I don’t have anything.”

      “Is there something you’d like?” he asked.

      “Well… I was thinking the bendy rabbit matched that green monster van we are using. Maybe he wants to go along.”

      “Okay, here,” he said and pulled a keychain from our university out of his pocket.

      “But that’s yours!” I said. “I don’t want you to give up something of yours.”

      “I worked at the bookstore when the semester started. I got them cheap. I bought them to put in caches. So… add it and take the rabbit.”

      “It’s probably been here since Easter. It needs rescuing.”

      “Now you’re talking like inanimate objects have an opinion about what happens to them.”

      We signed the log Team Twiggy, since it was Twiggy who was determined to win the trip.

      “I’m hungry. I say we rehide this thing and go back to town,” he said.

      “But we’re soaking wet. We have no place to change. We… we don’t have a shower! Or a bathroom! What are we going to do?”

      “First things first. The cache needs rehiding at ground zero, where the sun don’t shine. Where did you find it?”

      “I don’t know. I was poking through the hole with a stick and I knocked it loose. So I really found it floating in the river.”

      “Gabby, this is not a river. This is a creek.”

      “Okay, well, I found it floating in the creek.”

      He turned the cracker tin this way and that.

      “We know the mirror is meant to catch the light of a flashlight from below the bridge, so I say we find a spot at ground zero where the cache will be somewhat out of view, but where a flashlight beam might hit the mirror and when we log the cache we tell the CO what we did.”

      “CO?”

      “Cache owner.”

      “Oh. Okay.”

      “If he wants to check on it he can.”

      We put all the contents back into the cracker tin, making sure the log book was securely wrapped in the little Ziploc bag. If it was going to take regular dunkings in the creek it needed that baggie. Twiggy gave me a hand up and stood there for a moment as if he wasn’t quite ready to go back.

      “Was that worth a favorite point?” he asked.

      “I don’t know. I think it would be better if the creek was lower and we had a working flashlight.”

      “But did you have fun?”

      I kind of got the impression he was asking a bigger question. So I kept him waiting a moment.

      “Yeah, that was fun.”

      “Even with the soaking wet search and the steep hill and falling and dancing away from catfish?”

      “There wasn’t really a catfish, was there?”

      “No, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

      “It was fun even after all that,” I said. “And I even got a bendy rabbit.”

      “I’m glad,” he said with a firm shoulder hug.

       Chapter 5

      “Morrison the Moving Moose,” Twiggy read from the website at lunch. “It wants to travel overseas.”

      “Well, if you win that trip you’ll be going overseas,” I pointed out.

      He hesitated before he said, “We shouldn’t hang onto it that long. It should be dropped off in a week or two unless we’re nearly finished traveling. It shouldn’t stay in one place very long.”

      “Why?”

      “Because Travel Bugs are sent out into the geocaching world to travel. It’s not nice to keep them a long time.”

      “Do you think we should drop it off at the airport or the train station?”

      “Nah, Morrison can travel with us for a little while. Oh, and surprisingly, he likes blue M&Ms.”

      “Let me see that,” I said.

      I read the web page and, sure enough, it said he liked to eat blue M&Ms.

      “I get the brown ones,” I said.

      “To match your eyes,” he said.

      “Uh, I guess, though I just like the brown ones. You can have the other colors. If we have to buy M&Ms and he gets the blue ones and I take the brown ones that ought to leave enough for you.”

      “Maybe.”

      “Too bad there are no purple ones for the rabbit.”

      After lunch we went to the nearest convenience store and bought a package of M&Ms. We took a picture of Morrison sitting on the dash of the van with his blue M&Ms. Then we shared the rest of the package.

      “Whatcha