When Elspeth's family leaves her at a campsite, she decides to be a kind of Robinson Crusoe.

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She saw her parents and her uncle and aunt leave the campsite in southern Ohio on a hot summer day. Elspeth was seven and had been playing in the woods. When she emerged, she watched the two cars heading down the gravel road. Her parents were in one car, and her aunt and uncle in the other. And her little brother would be with her parents, since he had to be strapped in a special seat.

She looked on in wonder and dismay and surprise. Elspeth was reasonably sure that her parents loved her, and her aunt and uncle did as well. So why had they left without her?

But being a resourceful and intelligent little girl, Elspeth started to imagine that she was on a desert island and that it was up to her to make a new life for herself.

She decided that she needed some shelter. Yes, there were other campers on the other end of the campsite, Southern Hills, but she didn't want to approach them. No, like a hero in an adventure story, it was up to Elspeth to create a shelter and find food.

First she went back into the woods and started gathering branches. Before long she had a kind of wooden tepee, which could provide shelter for the night. Then she began to wonder what she would do for a bed. As she wandered around the woods, she found leaves and patches of moss; those would work as a bed, she decided. Besides, it was so hot that day that she doubted she needed to cover herself to keep out any cold.

Then she went looking for food. Her family had left in the middle of the afternoon, after a camp lunch of sandwiches and juice and cookies, but Elspeth knew that sooner or later she would get hungry. True, the campsite had a little store where campers could buy some supplies, but Elspeth wanted to be a true adventurer, like Robinson Crusoe. She decided that she could be just like Crusoe and began looking for food. She went deeper into the woods and finally found some berries. Elspeth had never heard of poisonous berries, though she knew that mushrooms could kill you, so she gathered the berries and soon had two little fistfuls for her supper. It wasn't much, but it was something.

She went back to her own private campsite, her tepee, and sat inside wondering if during the night she would hear wolves or owls or ghosts. Owls would be all right, she decided, but she shivered at the thought of ghosts or wolves.

Soon she heard a crackling sort of noise, as her tepee fell apart and branches landed on her head. It was not a good sign. She would have to begin again.

So she did, and before long she had a new, improved tepee. That one wouldn't fall down, at least she hoped not.

Since she was hungry, she ate all of the berries, and then she was still hungry, so she went back into the woods and came back to the tepee with two more little handfuls. She ate them, and then sitting inside her tepee she thought about her family.

Her mom and dad were great most of the time, but her little brother Elmer was a bit of a pain. Elspeth liked her own name--it sounded romantic--but she wondered if Elmer would be happy with his name when he grew up. Somehow, she doubted it. He was named for a grandfather or a great-grandfather, she wasn't sure, but he was named for someone important in the family. Otherwise, why would he have such a name?

She liked her aunt and uncle, but she didn't see them too often. They were all on their way to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Did they know that Elspeth was missing, or had they planned to leave her in southern Ohio to spend the rest of her life making tepees and picking berries? Suddenly Elspeth decided that she really wanted to go back to Ashleyville Village School in the fall, and she didn't want to be wearing these same clothes for the rest of her life. Besides, wouldn't she grow out of her clothes? Probably. One day she would hear the seams of her shorts bursting, and then what?

Then she heard people shouting. "Elspeth! Elspeth! Where are you?"

It sounded like her family. She got up out of her tepee and walked out of the woods into the clearing. There they were: her mom and dad, her uncle and aunt, and even little Elmer was wandering around calling for her.

"Here I am!" Elspeth shouted, and suddenly they were all hugging each other and talking at once.

"Elspeth, your mom and I thought you were with Uncle Ted and Aunt Marge. And Aunt Marge and Uncle Ted thought you were with us. Only little Elmer seemed to know you were missing. He kept saying, 'Elspeth! Elspeth!'"

By Anita G. Gorman

From: United States

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