Billy and the Birdfrogs by B.B. Wurge Page A

that I can explain what I did better. Then I took the other end of my long rope and hooked the iron hook over rod A. Then I lowered myself down the rope, hand over hand, for about twenty feet. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but it is. It seemed to go on and on. The shaft was pretty smooth as I went down. I figured that this section of it, near the opening, had been worked over a lot, and most of the sharp points had been smoothed out. I didn’t see any animal bones, but they may have all been taken out.

    When I was about twenty feet down, I held onto the rope with one hand and braced my feet against the side of the shaft to keep myself steady. Then with my other hand I wedged rod B across the shaft, pushing it firmly into some cracks in the rocky wall. I stood on the rod to make sure that it could hold my weight. It would have to catch me if I fell.
    I climbed back up to the top of the shaft, unhooked my rope from rod A and hooked it to my backpack. I also slipped rod A into my backpack. It stuck out on top, but it didn’t get in the way. Then, with no rope to hang onto, I climbed back down. In some places I had to press my back against the wall and press my feet against the opposite wall. In other places I could find hand holds in the rock, and could climb pretty easily. But I wasn’t too worried, because if I slipped and fell, I wouldn’t fall very far. I would come up against rod B, and that would stop me.
    When I had climbed back down to rod B, I hooked the end of the rope to it, and then repeated the whole sequence. I went hand-over-hand down the rope for about twenty feet and then wedged rod A across the tunnel.
    And so on.
    This way, link by link, I was able to climb down and carry my ladder with me. As long as the rods were securely wedged across the shaft, I would be okay. But it took a long time to go anywhere, because for every twenty feet of progress, I had to climb down, then back up, and then down again.
    Pretty soon I was drenched in sweat. My shirt was sticking to me, and I had to rub sweaty dirt out of my eyes. I took a rest by wedging both rods across the shaft in an x pattern and sitting in the middle of the x with my legs dangling down. I took a drink of water from my bottle, but I didn’t drink very much because I wanted to save it in case I needed it later.
    I didn’t hear anything that might have been a birdfrog. Sometimes I knocked loose a pebble and it would fall and bounce against the walls of the shaft, echoing, until the sound faded below me.
    After a while, the opening above me shrank down to a pale blob that I could hardly see. I didn’t like to look up at it, because little bits of dust kept filtering down and getting in my eyes. The light from my hat lit up the area of tunnel just around me, and after a while I started to see pits and holes in the tunnel wall as if something had been gouged out. I wondered if these holes were the spaces where the skeletons had been.
    I must have been about seventy feet down when I saw writing on the wall of the tunnel. I almost didn’t believe it. Who would be writing on the wall of the tunnel? Was it a secret message? I couldn’t read it very well at first, because I was swinging a little bit on the rope and the light was swinging with me. But I put a foot against the wall to steady myself, and saw clear, thick, black magic marker on a smooth part of the stone. It said:
    “H12B. Head (and spine?) Remove Frontal Bone First.”
    I looked around and saw a big hollow in the wall, about two feet across and three feet deep, next to the writing.
    I couldn’t help breaking into a huge smile. I felt really happy, because everything was true, all of it, and I might even be looking at my mother’s handwriting. I wondered what sort of creature H12B was. It was too small to be a camel, and too big to be a mouse or a three-inch-tall gorilla. Maybe it was a fossilized baboon.
    About forty feet later, I found two long, curving teeth sticking up out of the side