Susan was awakened by joyous birdsong ringing through chilly morning air. Sleepily, she opened one eye, yawned, then snuggled down into her sleeping bag. After a delightful experience sleeping outdoors at day camp, she slept outside often.

She loved the way the dew-filled air smelled, the way Dawn traced her rosy fingers over everything, erasing Night, illuminating the deck where Susan lay, staining her blankets, pillows and stuffed animals bright pink. She hugged Dolly closer as she listened to the birds call to each other, singing their delight in myriad voices: loud, high, and clear.

She dreamed about her teepee, nearly complete, imagining it standing in a forest glen, each of its fourteen tent poles straight and smooth, a thread of smoke trailing up and out through the smoke flap. The teepee itself would be decorated with colorful lightning patterns, red hands, and dancing horses.

She remembered trying to find straight poles in the woods. She and Marty dragged candidates back for inspection, but her dad rejected every one.

“This one’s rotten. This one’s too short. This one’s curved. You’ll need to cut alder saplings. I’ll help you do that but you’ll have to trim the branches.”

“Daddy, will you do that for me, please?”

“No, this is your project, Susan. Nobody said building a teepee was easy.”

One good thing: her Camp Fire leader was reinforcing the teepee’s edge on her sewing machine, but first Susan had to patiently turn the edge of the material over and baste it by hand, which had taken quite a while.

Her grandmother taught her to sew, gifting her granddaughter with a strawberry-shaped pin cushion studded with colorful silk pins. Susan worked on the hem, cozy in her favorite chair: folding, pinning, then sewing with a tiny needle, while telling Dolly fairy tales.

Lying on the deck in her sleeping bag, a naughty sunbeam shafted into her eyes. Her stomach began to rumble. She grabbed Dolly by the hand and fled to the kitchen, where she was surrounded by the delicious smell of Phineas’s coffee brewing. Her dad sat at the kitchen table, reading a newspaper.

“Marty called. He wants you to come over.”

Susan felt sad. Marty was her best friend. She knew he didn’t want to go to military school, so she’d tried to cheer him up by drilling around the front yard with toy rifles, shouting “‘Ten’ shun! Forward march!” but it hadn’t helped much.

Marty was miserable. He’d even run away to show his parents how much he didn’t want to buckle down, but they explained military school would be good for him. Marty was unconvinced.

“I’d rather be an Indian than a soldier,” he complained. Hot and tired from marching, they moved into the shade behind the stable to visit Marty’s pet rabbit, ruminating in a hutch.

“What’ll I do with my rabbit? Who’ll take care of him while I’m away at stupid military school?”

“Can we let him out?”

“No, he’ll get away. Can you take care of him for me, Susan, please?”

Susan looked into Marty’s pleading green eyes.

“I’ll have to ask my dad, but prob’ly. What’s his name?”

“I dunno, just the White Rabbit so far.

Susan imagined the pet in a frock coat, staring distractedly at his watch, muttering “I’m late, I’m late.”

“Do you want to go fishing with us? We’re going to some river in eastern Washington.”

“No thanks. I have to pack.”

* * *

When Susan got home, Phineas was busy in the kitchen.

“Susan, I have a present for you. Look in your bug bottle.”

She raced to her bedroom to snag the clear plastic container from a bookshelf. Inside was a baby garter snake with a bright blue tummy and a sharp eye.

“Take him outside, please,” Phineas said as he spread a map across the table.

“Right away, Sir!”

Susan saluted, chin up, shoulders back, clicking her heels together as Marty had taught her.

“By the way, Sir! Can we have a rabbit, Sir?”

Phineas did not reply.

“Please, daddy, can I have Marty’s white rabbit? It has no one, and will be an orphan. Please, daddy, please? I’ll take care of him. He’s so soft and cuddly.”

Phineas looked up from his map into his daughter’s brown eyes.

“Yes, you can have a rabbit, if you promise to feed him and keep his cage clean and protect him from eagles and owls and coyotes and dogs and cats, my darling little, then yes, you may.”

Susan was relieved.

“He lives in his own cage, dad, so he’ll be safe. I’ll feed him carrots.”

“Okay. Now look at this map.”

Phineas stirred peanut butter and honey in a small bowl as they perused the map.

“Is this that Nacheese place you told me about?” Susan asked.

“That’s right. It’s on the other side of the mountains so it’ll be hot there.”

“Hooray! I love hot,” she crowed.

The climate on the west side of the Cascades was mild and damp, opposite of the arid east.

“Get your stuff together and don’t forget your fishing gear, and don’t forget to liberate your snake!”

“Oh, my gosh!”

Susan had already forgotten about the tiny creature. She ducked out the front door to release him into the shrubs. Back inside, she scooped a finger full of honeyed peanut butter from Phineas’ bowl, then bent over the map. He traced the route with a sticky finger.

“We’ll take our old friend Highway 410 to Mount Rainier, then go left over Naches Pass at about forty nine hundred feet, then down to my favorite campground on the Naches River. We have to be careful though, Susan. There are rattlesnakes there.”

“Will we catch ’em?”

“No, we will catch fish!”

“What should I do if I find a rattlesnake, Daddy?”

“Stop right away. Don’t move. If you stay still, it’ll go away. Rattlesnakes are fairly shy. You don’t want to startle or hurt a snake, because then it might bite.”

“I wouldn’t want to hurt it, Daddy. I like snakes,” Susan said.

“But you might step on it by accident, then the snake would react. That’s why we always use our walking sticks to stir up the brush ahead of us, and . . .?”

Phineas prompted his daughter with a rolling hand, urging her to provide an answer.

“No wait, I know this: Never put your hands where you can’t see. Or your foot.”

“Exactly.”

“If I find a snake, can I catch it?”

“That depends on what kind of snake you find. If it’s a poisonous snake, no, because we’d need special equipment like snake irons, cages, gloves, unsplit bullhide boots, and I’d rather catch trout.”

But Susan wasn’t listening anymore. She was dreaming about charming poisonous snakes with an oboe. In her imagination, she wore a hot pink turban. Her snake’s eyes looked like pinwheels, spiraling in.

* * *

Early the next morning, the Lulu van headed south. The broken volcano called Rainier loomed like a giant ice cream cone. If Susan looked over her shoulder, she’d see another pure white peak: Mount Baker, in the north.

“I’ve been reading up on rattlesnakes, Susan,” Phineas said. “They’re called pit vipers after the pit near their mouths that sense heat. The pits are so sensitive, a snake can feel a warm-blooded animal near it, even on a hot day.

“Even if you blindfold a rattlesnake, he’ll turn toward a warm object several feet away. When the prey gets close, the rattlesnake will strike, and he hits his target every time.”

“Wow, dad. Interesting. Can I go to sleep in back now?”

“Yeah, yeah. Sure, sure.”

They drove for a long time, into the foothills of the mountains, through old growth forests of spruce and fir. Jagged granite peaks defined the highways, offering breathtaking vistas as they motored through the Cascades.

It started to become a lot warmer. Phineas had had enough of clouds. The heat felt good to him.

The trees began to thin as they descended. Susan woke as they drove along the Naches River. She was enchanted when they arrived at the campground. The river meandered through a grove of huge cottonwoods shading campsites equipped with picnic tables and fire pits.

It was hot now. Campers were cooling off in inner tubes, cannon-balling, swimming, and wading. When the Lulus had their campsite ready, Susan begged to go swimming.

“Sure, if you’ll walk upstream with me after a while so I can fish.”

Susan jumped for joy. She ripped off her shorts to reveal bathing togs, then grabbed her inflatable dinosaur raft. She hit the water running, and skimmed into its coolness, floating happily on the dinosaur’s shiny plastic back.

Phineas was right behind her. After several minutes of splashing and swimming around, they settled down to floating and relaxing after their long drive.

Susan drifted about, gazing through slitted eyelids past her dinosaur float’s head, ignoring the people and vehicles on the riverbank, focusing on the barren, rocky hills far away from the lush riverbank, a perfect spot for a hidden valley. She spotted a small alligator lizard, motionless on a rock.

In her imagination, T Rex and the alligator lizard were locked in mortal combat. Susan, dressed as Sir Lancelot, galloped in on her magic inflatable dinosaur, stabbing T Rex in his kneecap with her sword, rescuing the frightened lizard.

“Susan!”

She scanned the crowded riverbank for her dad. He had all his fishing gear and was waving at her.

“Let’s go!”

She paddled over and toweled off back at the campsite, slipping into jeans and her frog boots. When she was dressed, she lit off up the trail along the riverbank, but Phineas caught up with her quickly.

“Susan! Hold on there. I sure hope you’re not forgetting the buddy system.”

Susan looked stricken.

“Oh, no, I’m not, daddy. I’ll never forget that again.”

“So, wait up for me then. This is snake country. We walk carefully along these trails. Get yourself a stick.”

He paused to select a hefty branch, snapping off excess twigs, demonstrating how to disturb the bushes on either side of the trail to scare away dozing reptiles.

“But, Dad! I want to catch a snake.”

“Well, I want to catch fish. Let’s try to avoid snakes.”

Susan dejectedly followed her dad, hitting the bushes with her stick, pretending to be an explorer. She startled a long-eared jack rabbit, who dashed under some sagebrush. Soon they were away from the noisy, happy campers. Phineas found a deep pool to try out his telescoping pole.

Susan was looking for magic pebbles, playing happily along the edge of the river. The fish weren’t biting, but her dad was patiently casting anyway. The sun baked his shoulders. A cool breeze from the water cooled his face.

Suddenly, Phineas realized he couldn’t see Susan. Only a moment before she’d been building pebble castles. He looked around.

“Susan?” he inquired loudly. No reply.

“Grrrrrrrrrrr!”

An angry growl formed in Phineas Lulu’s throat.

Unobserved by her father, Susan was nearby, crouching amid boulders at the edge of the water, playing “Lost World” with her dinosaur float.

She could hear her dad calling her. She’d just turned around to answer when she spotted the rattlesnake, curled on a rock, sunbathing. Instantly, its warning rattle sounded, sending a primal jolt of fear through Susan’s body.

She remembered to hold still, but she could hear furious Phineas stomping up the trail.

“Dad! Stop! Look out!”

But it was too late. Phineas’s boot came down on top of the reptile. The snake struck, its fangs sunk in below Phineas’s knee. The snake dropped to the ground, slithering away.

Susan ran to her father. The bite on his leg was red and swollen. He slumped into the dust of the trail.

“Don’t worry, dad. I’ll get help right away. Can you walk? We studied this in school. We can try to suck the venom out but we’re not supposed to cut.”

“No! Don’t try to suck it out, and no cutting. Just get the ranger fast.”

Susan bolted down the path, yelling for help. Campers dropped what they were doing and began to run toward Phineas, who was bravely walking, stiff-legged, to the campsite.

“I need help! My dad’s been bit by a rattlesnake and I have to get him to a hospital right away.”

The ranger had been alerted by a heads-up camper and she came running.

“Let’s get him into the Jeep.”

Phineas gratefully accepted the ranger’s assistance. He was feeling strange: his throat was dry, his skin clammy, his vision blurry. The clinic was far away.

Every minute seemed like an hour to Susan, who knelt by her dad during the trip. Phineas tried to comfort her.

“Honey, you did great. I saw that you were holding still. It’s my fault. I should have been more careful. I startled both you and the snake.”

When they got to the clinic, the ranger helped Phineas into a wheelchair. He was hustled right in and within minutes he’d received the antivenom.

By the time they got home, Susan was bursting to tell Marty all about the rattlesnake adventure. Her dad was resting when Susan made plans to meet Marty at the swinging rope in half an hour.

She fixed Phineas and herself a peanut butter and blackberry jam sandwich, made sure he knew where she was going, grabbed her backpack and headed out. Marty was already at the Root Cave when Susan arrived. He had an odd expression on his face.

“What’s wrong?”

Marty gestured silently toward the giant Doug fir at the edge of the cliff. The swinging rope was cut off about two feet from the branch.

“The swinging rope is gone!”

Susan noticed just how high and precarious the branch was.

“I wonder how they got up there to cut it, if someone did cut it.”

“But Susan, what if it wasn’t cut? What if it broke?”

Susan and Marty looked at each other in horror, then turned together to look into the ravine towards Skookum Creek, far below. They didn’t see any body lying broken among the devils club and nettles.

“That was the funnest swing I ever swung on,” Marty mourned. “We’d need a fire truck to get up there to tie it up again.”

* * *

When she got home, Susan went into Phineas’s room to see how he was feeling. She was pleased to find him sitting up in bed, reading and drinking tea.

“How’s your leg?”

Susan pulled up a chair to her dad’s bedside.

“It’s almost healed. Those guys at the clinic really know what they’re doing. I talked to the doctor. He said that since it was a defense bite, the snake would not be as apt to pump in a lot of venom like it would if I were prey. He said it could have even been a dry bite. Twenty five percent are dry bites.”

“Yeah. Uh huh. Dad, I have to talk to you about something else. I never told you about it, but Marty and I found a great rope swing up by the Root Cave. It was so much fun! And now somebody’s cut it off, or else maybe it broke. What if somebody’s down there, dead, or hurt?”

“Call 9-1-1!”

Phineas had to laugh at the funny expression on his daughter’s face.

“No, honey. I’m just kidding. I talked to Marty’s dad and we decided to cut it down. I know it was great fun, but it was way too dangerous. I’m sorry, honey.”

Susan was furious.

“You cut down the best swing in the history of the world ’cause it was dangerous? Everything that’s fun is dangerous. Even stuff that’s not fun, like rattlesnakes, is dangerous.

“Now I think you should just go get your ladder, or your fire truck, or your sky hook, or however you got up there and tie us up a new rope. Now, dad. Get up. Get out of bed.”

Phineas was laughing as she grabbed his hands and started pulling.

“No, Susan. Please don’t make me get up. But I’ll tell you what I’ll do to make it up to you. I will take you with me to Florida when I go to visit my old buddy Dave the Herp.

“But you’ll have to promise to listen to me and do what I say, because we’ll be out in the Everglades where they have some real mean snakes.”

“Is it also where they have white sand beaches?”

“Yes, honey, it’s paradise.”

“In that case, maybe I’ll forgive you. I’ll let you know.”