Will it be another boring summer? Would the grind of school give way to a two month overdose of television? It won’t for Craig Moore and his friends. They have already been laboring for weeks to build a clubhouse. It’s a risky venture because their material primarily comes from other kids’ forts. The boys work harder than they ever have before. When they finish, they are an unbeatable team without a mission.
Craig sees this as an opportunity to propose a new project. He has always wanted to treasure hunt. That calls to mind desert islands and pirate booty, but he is aiming at something more modern. He wants a metal detector to search for gold coins. The machines are expensive, and he needs his friends’ help to buy one. Their ingenious ideas allow them to raise the money in record time. The fort soon becomes a home base for the Treasure Hunters’ Club.
Over the summer, the boys hone their talents with the machine. There are many interesting finds, but no gold. Craig stumbles onto information that might lead them to it. In the last century, wealthy New Englanders flocked to grand hotels in the wild and mountainous north of New Hampshire. The hotels were wooden and all of them burned. They were never rebuilt and that area became national forest. Craig proposes a secret and daring trip to find one lost site and detect it. That means traveling a hundred miles to a place that they’ve never been to find something that exists only in old picture books.
The deep New Hampshire woods are no place to get lost. After some initial success, things go horribly wrong. The boys’ high expectations are soon reduced to hoping that they get out alive!
Scott slithered over the edge of the cliff and sent a few loose stones on a forty foot drop. He clung to the slick rock face. His fingers sought out any crack or lump that offered a hold. On the edge above, Steve and I watched in wide-eyed amazement. It was a beautiful day, warm but not yet hot. The surrounding trees moved casually in a light breeze. We had commented on what a good spot it was, but that was the furthest thing from our minds now. The sounds of water and forest were thunderous, yet any noise we made knifed through the din attracting unwanted attention. That wasn't good, because we sure weren't supposed to be where we were. Worse than that was what we were doing. That was two big strikes against us if we were caught. If Scott fell, that would be a very big number three! Suddenly, the adventure wasn't much fun. It was frightening. As I lay on the edge of the cliff looking at Scott, I started to panic. What would we do if Scott fell? How could we ever explain that to his parents?
"This probably wasn't a good idea," Steve said. That reeked of understatement. He was usually a cool customer, but even he was sweating a little then. I looked at him in disbelief.
"No kidding? You just figure that out?" I croaked. The lump in my throat strangled my voice. "This could be a freaking disaster," I said angrily. I was starting to come unglued. At that moment, Scott slipped a yard or two. He caught himself, but just barely.
"Relax," Steve pleaded. His voice was still annoyingly calm. "The boy knows what he's doing. Have a some faith. How many times has he been on the wall?"
That was true, sort of. Scott did a lot of climbing at the YMCA, but that was with a safety harness. This was no wall and he had always talked a better game than he played. He was the type to dive right into something without thinking. Steve and I were a restraining influence on his enthusiasm. Today, we had let him down. We hadn’t really thought things through. Now all we could do was watch and hope for the best.
I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. It helped. Maybe things weren’t really so bad, I told myself. After all, Scott said he could do it. I needed him to do it because when he got to the bottom he would be standing on a hundred years’ worth of gold coins. At least that was my theory and the reason Scott was hanging forty feet in the air.
Greed gave me hope. When I opened my eyes I was sure he would make it. At that moment Scott raised his face to us. Instead of his usual quirky smile there was fear. It was terror actually, the kind that comes from deep inside. Scott was trapped in a situation that he couldn’t control or escape. That look confirmed my worst fears.
"It's my fault, all my fault," I whispered.
"This is bad," Steve mumbled. As the words left his mouth, Scott fell with a mighty shriek. I screamed too, but as usual, that’s when I woke up.
Guilt plays tricks on the mind, but that isn’t why I have that dream over and over. I relive it because I want to. It was a piece of the biggest adventure that I’ve ever had. What most fourteen year olds think of as excitement doesn’t come close to what my friends and I did last summer. We went on a treasure hunting expedition to the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Treasure hunting is something that most teens haven’t even heard of. Fewer have actually tried it. That makes it especially unlikely that three regular guys, living average teen lives, would sneak off to do just that. We did! What’s more amazing is that we traveled hundreds of miles to the wild and dangerous White Mountains to do it. I was the driving force behind the expedition. My name is Craig Moore.
