Luke was eight years old, and he had dreamed about camping all summer long. At last, one fall Friday, Dad loaded the big backpack into the car. “We're heading to the mountains, explorer,” he said with a wink.
They hiked up a pine trail to a meadow next to a little stream. Luke helped pitch the tent and push in the stakes. They ate sandwiches while the sky turned orange, and then purple.
From the meadow, they could see more stars than in the whole city. Then they snuggled into their sleeping bags, warm and close together. Dad fell asleep right away, snoring softly.
But Luke's eyes were wide open. Outside, the forest wasn't quiet at all, like he'd expected. Something crunched in the leaves. Something whistled in the branches.
And every now and then came a long, mysterious “hoo, hoo.” Luke pulled the sleeping bag up to his nose. “What if I can't sleep all night?” he thought.
Then he remembered his notebook and his headlamp. “Real explorers don't hide from sounds,” he thought. “They write them down.” He turned the headlamp on low and opened his notebook.
He stayed very still and listened carefully. The crunching was close: crunch, crunch, in the dry leaves.
Luke peeked out of the tent, very slowly. It was a little hedgehog, sniffing the ground next to the backpack. Luke smiled and wrote, “Sound number one: a hedgehog looking for dinner.”
The whistling was the wind, combing the tops of the pines. “Sound number two: the wind singing softly,” he wrote. And there it was again, that “hoo, hoo,” from the branch of a tall pine.
Luke carefully tilted his light upward. Two round golden eyes looked back at him, calm and still. It was an owl. “Hello, neighbor,” Luke whispered. “So it was you.”
“Sound number three: an owl saying goodnight,” he wrote. Farther off, the stream went gurgle, gurgle over the stones, on and on. He wrote that down too; now it sounded like a lullaby.
He switched off the light, put away his notebook and snuggled up next to Dad.
From his sleeping bag, he could hear the hedgehog, the wind, the owl and the stream. Every sound was a friend now, with a name in his notebook. He took a deep breath of pine and damp earth.
And Luke fell asleep, listening to the forest's lullaby. Goodnight, Luke…
