Read the story.
Making Tracks
Stella was spending her first morning of the summer holidays in the vegetable garden, pulling weeds. She had plans to hang out with her friends Maya and Jin Soo later. But her dad always told her, ‘Work first, then fun.’ She pulled up the last weed and wiped sweat from her eyes.
As Stella dusted off her hands, she heard her phone chime. That meant Maya and Jin Soo were here to pick her up. Perfect timing, she thought. After a morning of hard work, she was ready to relax by the cove with her friends. The cove was a small hidden beach on the shore of a nearby lake.
At the cove, the girls noticed something strange. The sand was crisscrossed with tyre tracks, as though someone had been riding a motorcycle around on the beach. ‘Let’s see where these lead,’ Stella suggested.
The three friends followed the tracks to a dirt trail on the far side of the cove. The trail led up to a grassy hill, where a house stood overlooking the lake. ‘Do you think the person who owns the motorcycle lives in that house?’ Jin Soo said.
Stella laughed and shook her head. ‘That’s Mr Norton’s house.’ Whenever she saw Mr Norton, he was either sipping tea on his porch or pottering around the garden looking at bird feeders.
‘It looks like nobody’s home,’ Maya observed. ‘I bet Mr Norton is on holiday.’
The friends looked at each other and then looked back at the tracks. ‘Uh-oh!’ Stella exclaimed. ‘The tracks go right up to his house.’
‘If he’s not home, he probably doesn’t even know about this. Someone is riding around there without his permission,’ Jin Soo said.
On the walk back to the cove, they tried to decide what to do. Maya wanted to check whether Mr Norton was home, but Jin Soo thought they should alert the police.
Stella tried to calm them down, since she wanted to stay at the cove and swim. ‘All we saw were some tyre tracks,’ she reminded them. ‘It’s not exactly a dire situation.’
Just then, they heard an engine growl above them. They looked towards the hill and saw a man on a motorcycle. The biker paused, then flew down the trail, kicking up clouds of dust.
‘What do we do now?’ Maya asked with a shaky voice.
The biker rode towards the three girls. Maya and Jin Soo looked at each other nervously. The biker took off his helmet—and uncovered a wrinkly face and grey hair.
‘Mr Norton?’ Stella stared at the quiet man she knew, now sporting a leather jacket and a playful grin.
‘Howdy,’ Mr Norton replied. ‘My grandson got me this bike for my birthday. Ain’t it something?’