Free Return of the Homework Machine by Dan Gutman

three thousand years before Columbus was even born. Oops! That must have been embarrassing.
    JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6
    We took a break at the Mile-and-a-Half Resthouse. Funny name. It’s nothing fancy, but they have toilets, picnic tables, and an emergency telephone. We could get out of the sun for a while. It was already getting hot. Mr. Murphy kept telling us we should eat before we get hungry and drink before we get thirsty. He said plenty of hikers get heat exhaustion.
    SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6
    Mr. Murphy told us that over seven hundred people have died at the Grand Canyon. Seven hundred! It happens all the time. People get struck by lightning, or they drown in the rapids of the Colorado River. There are flash floods, snake bites, rock falls. And of course, lots of people run out of water, become dehydrated, and drop dead.
    People can be just dumb, too. In 1993, he told us, these two guys from California jumped into the canyon with parachutes. Their chutes opened, but they got tangled on the way down, and that was it for them.
    KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6
    Mr. Murphy said that lots of guys think it’s fun to pee off really high places. Like a cliff. Judy and I thought that was totally repulsive, but the boys said it sounded cool. The only problem is that some of these guys lose their balance while they’re peeing and fall into the canyon. Boys can be so stupid. I started looking up to make sure nobody was going to pee on us…or fall on us.
    JUDY DOUGLAS. GRADE 6
    Mr. Murphy told us that a lot of people even died while they were just posing for pictures. Can you imagine? Somebody would be taking a picture of their friend or something, and they’d say back up a little to get a good view, and their friend would back up and fall off a cliff. Snik laughed; I told him that it wasn’t funny. What a horrible way to die. You shouldn’t laugh at other people’s misfortunes.
    MR. MURPHY. SIXTH-GRADE TEACHER
    I probably shouldn’t have told them about the tragedies at the Grand Canyon, but it did help pass the time while we were hiking. I didn’t tell them about the people who came to the canyon to commit suicide. Or the nuts who drove their cars over the edge on purpose. Or the murders that took place there.
    In 1956, a plane was flying from Los Angeles to Kansas City with seventy people onboard. Another plane was flying in the same direction toward Chicago with fifty-eight people. The two pilots decided it would be interesting to fly over the Grand Canyon to give the passengers a view. The only problem was that they crashed intoeach other, and everybody died. It was one of the worst air tragedies ever at the time. I didn’t want to scare the kids.
    KELSEY DONNELLY. GRADE 6
    There was another rest house at the three-mile mark. My legs were already hurting from walking downhill. Mr. Murphy was making fun of us. He said we were out of shape because we spend too much time watching TV and surfing the Internet.
    I took my boots off and he told me to be careful when I put them back on. When I asked him why, he said a scorpion might have crawled into them. Great! Now I had to worry about stepping in mule manure, guys peeing on my head or falling off cliffs, and scorpions crawling into my boots. I was ready to go home.
    SAM DAWKINS. GRADE 6
    I picked up a nice walking stick. I wanted to kill a snake with it. You can spot a rattlesnake because they have a diamond-shaped pattern on their back. They usually hide from the sun, so they’re hard to find. Unless, of course, you sit in some shady spot where one of them decides totake a nap. Mr. Murphy told us that if we saw a rattler we should just leave it alone and it would leave us alone. But I wanted to kill one. It would make a good souvenir.
    BRENTON DAMAGATCHI. GRADE 6
    As you wend your way down the switchbacks on the trail, you can see the texture and the colors change on the sides of the canyon. It goes from cream to pinkish white. So you’re