Red dust whispered under Raymond’s bright red sneakers, and the desert smelled warm and peppery after sunset. Above the scrub, the moon was a thin silver smile.
“Moonlight Camera Test Number One!” Raymond announced. His homemade camera sat on a small tripod, with a cardboard shade around its lens and a timer made from an old kitchen clock. “No flash, no noise, no bothering anybody.”
Jody crouched beside him, her binoculars bumping against her coral shirt. “And then we get the first nighttime-animal picture for our Land Animal Walk!” She opened the battered field journal and drew the camera with three extra rocket boosters. “It needs to look heroic.”
Alma checked the path behind them. “Stay on the marked track, keep your voices low, and leave the animals to their jobs.” Her ranger hat made a dark circle against the fading sky. “This patch of desert scrub is busy after dark.”
Raymond aimed his camera at a clump of spinifex grass where scattered seeds glittered like tiny brown beads. Earlier, Alma had found the seeds beneath a shrub, but nobody knew who had dropped them there.
“Clue one,” Jody said, sketching the seed patch. “A midnight snack.”
They walked back to camp while the camera clicked quietly every few minutes. Raymond could barely sit still through dinner. At last, he hurried to collect it.
The pictures were terrible.
Every single one showed fuzzy grass, purple shadows, and one enormous gray smudge.
“Maybe the animal is a ghostly lawn mower,” Jody suggested.
Raymond pushed up his amber glasses. “There are no lawn mowers in the desert.”
“Ghostly lawn mower, then.”
At the seed patch, a new surprise waited. Tiny holes dotted the red soil. They were narrow, deep, and freshly crumbly around the edges.
Jody’s excitement fizzed. “Something dug these!”
Raymond knelt without touching a hole.
