Free Bait This! (A 300 Moons Book) by Tasha Black Page A

filled the parking lot with their station wagons, and then had to move on to park in the gravel lot, and then the dirt lot. And when those lots were filled, they pulled onto the grass by the orchard and parked there, too.
    It was an exciting time. Derek and the other kids got to help Mom set up the Halloween decorations, and put all the signs on the pumpkins so the visitors knew what they were: Fairytale pumpkins, Heritage pumpkins, Rock Stars, Wee-be-littles, and on and on. The endless varieties delighted them. And it was the one time all the kids in school were mad with jealousy that the Harkness kids lived on the farm.
    But too soon it became exhausting, and the apple orchard was filled with families picking.
    Derek had always been a bit reserved, and he felt the loss of his hiding place.
    One fall day when he was seven, he trudged out to the farthest row of trees, hoping to catch a few minutes of quiet playtime, when he heard the sounds of a family invading.
    In frustration, he marched back to the farm, past the silo, past the enclosures for farm animals and deer and the duck pond, to the very edge of the cow pasture.
    And that was when he saw it.
    A hillside covered in pine trees - the farm’s choose-your-own Christmas tree forest.
    None of the children ever played there. It was on the other side of the far pasture fence. And it seemed somehow remote and wild. The Christmas trees weren’t planted in perfect rows like the fruit trees.
    Derek’s heart beat faster, and he thought back to the rules. Though they never had played in the Christmas trees, he could not remember ever being told they couldn’t play there.
    He wondered if he would be able to hear the dinner bell from so far away.
    Before he could sort it out, there was a huge commotion behind him, as yet another station wagon pulled into the rear lot and beeped at a school group that was exiting a big yellow bus and slowly crossing over to the deer enclosure.
    Forget it , he thought to himself. I’m outta here.
    He jumped the fence at the back of the pasture and soon found himself in the baby pines.
    But he could still hear the sounds of cars, so he ran deeper into the trees. He ran as fast and as far as he could, until the trees were taller, and he couldn’t hear the cars anymore.
    These trees had been planted years ago, and they were now the size to be harvested for the high-ceilinged Victorians in Tarker’s Hollow. Some were maybe even big enough for the buildings on the college campus or the behemoth new construction houses Mom called “monstrosities” that were a bit farther west into Middleton, on the land that had belonged to another farm, before the developers came.
    Derek played under the trees. He pretended they were all his and that they were covered in lights. He pretended they were ladies in big dresses and one of them was his real mother. He pretended he was a lumber jack, getting ready to chop them down and float them down the river.
    The one thing he did not pretend was that he was a bear living in a forest.
    Being a bear was the reason his real mother and father didn’t want him.
    Derek thought of the unimaginably good feeling of Mom wrapping her arms around him for a warm hug, and he shuddered at the idea of how good it would feel to get a hug from his real mother and father.
    So when his nose went all sensitive and his skin prickled a little in the excitement of being in what felt like the real woods, he shook himself like a puppy getting out of a pond and counted by fives to one hundred to stop himself from feeling like a bear.
    All afternoon Derek played and explored, but when his belly began to rumble, he decided to head on home.
    He looked around for the trees to be getting smaller. But to his dismay, he saw instead that all the trees were large, as far as he could see.
    As a matter of fact, the ones he was playing in now looked like regular trees and not Christmas trees at all. There were some pines, but also maples and