Connie Goes to Camp

Connie Kendall sits down to write her mother a letter from Camp What-A-Nut, where she has spent the past week as a girls' cabin counselor. It has been a strange summer. She has lost her job at Whit's End over a computer program, and the hurt of it has followed her all week. Her mother told her that helping out at camp would be good for her, and Connie admits that she has already learned a few things. To explain, she starts at the beginning.

Her first clue that this camp will be different comes on opening day, when she reads the rules aloud to the campers. No sports in the cabins, no beds used as trampolines, no food left lying around to attract raccoons, possums and bears. Most important of all is the rule at the top of the page: no camper is to be outside a cabin after lights out. Break that one, Connie warns, and a camper might get a warning or might get sent straight home. The only question comes from Allison, who wants to know whether the ban on televisions is a real rule or merely a suggestion. It is a real rule, Connie tells her - campers are here to try new things, not to stare at a screen.

Minutes later Connie helps Allison haul her mountain of luggage up to the cabin and discovers why one suitcase weighs so much. Allison has smuggled in a television. Connie has it locked in the camp office for the week, and Allison mourns it like a lost relative.

The oddities keep coming. The boys spend crafts hour producing great works of art that all somehow turn out looking like butter dishes, while Mrs. Thelma Thud puts the girls through a crash course in good homemaking, complete with floor scrubbing. Donna Barclay ruins the knees of her new jeans, Robyn Jacobs decides the arrangement is unfair, and Lucy Cunningham-Schultz gets praised for her posture. Donna and Robyn agree to take their complaint to the camp director. Meanwhile Lucy meets Jill, whose uncle is the camp caretaker and who claims to know every secret path and hideout on the mountain. Stick with me, Jill promises, and you will have a camp experience you will never forget.

Out at the archery range, recreation counselor Fred Zachary discovers that Jimmy Barclay, Jack Davis and Oscar Peterson can hit almost anything except the targets, and he quietly trades the archery contest for water balloons. Later he tries to teach the boys canoeing in the swimming pool, where they paddle furiously and go nowhere until he points out that the wide end of the oar belongs in the water.

The girls set off on an overnight hike led by the nature expert Mrs. Wilma Neidlebark, who urges them to pack light and keep their eyes open, because some of God's most marvelous creations slip past unnoticed. She shows them a woodcreeper and a caterpillar bound to become a white admiral butterfly. While everyone crowds around the leaf, Jill pulls a reluctant Lucy off the trail toward her shortcut, and the two of them disappear.

That night, thunder rolls over the mountain. Connie brings the tent good news - the director has agreed that the girls may compete against the boys tomorrow in archery, canoeing and a relay race - and worrying news too, since Lucy and Jill are still missing and counselors are searching the woods in the rain. After Connie leaves, the girls hear something outside that is not thunder. Allison repeats a story Jill told her about the Goatman, a creature with the head of a goat and the body of a man said to roam these woods. Shadows swell against the canvas, something pushes through the tent door, and the campers scream.