Sample Chapter
From the blustery heights of the cold, steep, craggy slopes deep in the heart of Rocky Mountain National Park, Joe, a furry little yellow-bellied marmot, lay his yellow belly down on a broad slab of silver plume granite as the last few rays of summer sun danced over the snow-capped peaks. The glacial waterfall flowing below Joe’s rocky perch rumbled and bumbled and roared and tumbled down, down, down, every so often spraying Joe’s fur with ice cold spaaalosh. Tyndall Gorge, midway between majestic Hallet Peak and spirey Flattop Mountain, emptied into the crystalline ripples of Emerald Lake: Joe’s favorite lake in the whole park. The rocky gorge was the only home Joe had ever known, and he loved every square inch of its rocky tunnels and soft dewy tundra. He loved playing hide and seek in the burrows with his brothers and sisters and their dozens of pika cousins; he loved searching for arrowheads in the Kawuneeche Valley with the long-tailed pine martens. He loved learning the distinct bugles of the new elk every spring. He loved helping the beavers build their lodges on Tonahutu Creek and playing king-of-the mountain on them when the work was all done. He loved competing with the blue grouse and grey jays to see who could find the biggest fairy slipper or best red columbine of the season along the East Inlet Trail. Joe loved it all. And yet, as Joe surveyed the beautiful peaks and valleys below him, somewhere deep, deep inside, Joe felt that something was missing.
Ever since Joe was a wee little marmot, Mama Marmot read all of her marmot pups stories about places far, far away, about parks like Joe’s where creatures who were more different in size and color and shape than Joe could ever imagine lived and roamed and played just like him, about places with mountains taller than Joe’s home, taller, even, than Long’s peak which was the highest mountain Joe could fathom; places where there were no mountains or rocks at all, but where grass grew tall as a mountain lion and waved like water when the wind blew; places where park visitors hiked not up first, but down, down, down, deep into grand and mysterious cracks in the earth; places where people had lived long ago and left their homes high on the cliff walls behind for others to explore; places where people had carved large faces into rocks; places where natural rocks formed funny, special shapes called arches; and places where trees and plants of all sorts grew right up out of the water and the moss hung down from above instead of growing up from below. Joe felt a funny excitement in his belly every time he read about one of these places. He wanted to see them all, but the place that Joe visited most in his day-dreamy imagination was a place where the ground was covered not with jagged boulders, but rather with tiny, shiny, light-colored rocks called sand, places where blue water, not green, rolled and splashed as far as any creature could see, a place where humans wore not layers and layers of badly matched fuzzy clothing, but small clothes as tight as skin while they jumped and laughed and played in the wild and wonderful waves. More than anything else a marmot could want, Joe wanted to visit a beach. And as he watched the hill tops below turn pink as a watermelon, Joe rested his furry white chin atop his coal-black paws and sighed and dreamed, and dreamed and sighed.
“Is there really a great big world out there?” Joe wondered. “What would it be like to be that warm and to swim in water that big and wild?” And then, the question that always followed Joe’s dreaming… “How could I get there?”
Joe knew that deep inside, he was a marmot made for adventure.
“Joe-Joe!” came the unmistakable dinner call from Mama Mary Marmot, startling Joe so much that he scrambled to his pounce-pose, angling one ear like an antenna toward the sound. At Mama Mary’s second call, Joe popped up on his hind legs, sighed one last dreamy sigh, and scampered toward home.
