Chapter One
Tory squeezed her legs against the pony’s sides. Lucky flicked his ears, but he kept walking. He refused to trot, especially on a scorching day like this.
“You’re a lazy pony,” said Tory, but she didn’t mean it. Lucky was the best thing in her life.
She gave him a gentle kick this time and he trotted for about six steps. Then he settled back to a walk.
It was so hot and so still that Tory thought she could hear the leaves curling up. The grass was withered and brown and the wildflowers had shriveled.
Everybody was worrying about forest fires. Tory’s foster father, Oliver, had taken Lucky’s iron shoes off in case they struck a rock and made sparks in the dry grass. He said going barefoot wouldn’t hurt the pony.
Tory’s foster mother was called Cathy. Tory lived with Oliver and Cathy as part of their family, but she could be moved somewhere else at any time. Her homes and her moves were arranged by Linda, the social worker who was responsible for her.
Tory knew that Oliver and Cathy didn’t like her very much. She had heard Cathy say to Linda on the phone, “It’s not working out very well. But I told you we would keep her for the summer, and we’ll stick to that.”
This morning Tory had checked the calendar. She had a little more than three weeks of summer left, before she went to a new foster home. Her stomach churned at the thought. Where would she go? What if her new family didn’t like her either? And that meant she had only three more weeks to ride Lucky. She reached forward and patted his thick, snowy mane.
Julia, Oliver and Cathy’s daughter, said his mane looked dumb the way it stood up on end, but Tory loved it. Her own long brown hair was just as messy as Lucky’s. Sometimes, like today, she tied it back in a ponytail, but usually she let it fly all over the place.
Julia was eleven, two years older than Tory, and her straight blonde hair was always neatly brushed. Julia rode one of the fancy show horses called Barnabas. She was always braiding his silky mane, fastening each braid with a little black elastic band. Tory thought that looked dumb but she knew better than to say so.
Oliver was a trainer. He had seven show horses in the barn right now. Some of them belonged to him and Cathy, and some belonged to other people. He worked with the horses every day, getting them ready to compete in horse shows. Tory liked watching him ride the horses in the ring, but she didn’t like getting too near. The show horses were much taller than Lucky, and they jumped around a lot and scared her.
Now Tory rode Lucky out of the trees into a wide meadow. This was as far as she was allowed to go. The meadow was called the wetlands, but Tory could see only a little ribbon of sluggish water, far out in a sea of brown grass. Between the grass and the water was a strip of hard, dried-up mud.
Two weeks ago the ground had been alive with hundreds of tiny black frogs, the size of Tory’s thumbnail. There were so many that the ground looked as if it were moving, and Tory had been terrified that Lucky would step on them. Cathy said the frogs came every year, and she wasn’t sure but she thought they crawled up out of the creek and through the grass.
But today they were gone. Had they dried up in all this heat?
Tory turned Lucky around. He nickered and walked a bit faster.
When they came around the last bend in the trail, Tory cried out loud, “Holy cow!”
In the distance, a huge billow of white cloud sat on top of the hillside. It was smoke from a forest fire and it had been there for a week. But it had grown so much bigger while she was out riding. Staring at the enormous cloud she shivered, and patted Lucky’s neck as she rode past the corrals toward the barn.
Oliver said the smoke was farther away than it appeared. Miles and miles away, he said. But every day he and Cathy pored over a giant map spread out on the dining-room table. The radio was on all the time, day and night, with news about the fire.
How fast was it moving? Was it coming toward them? Not even Oliver knew for sure.
