Excerpt
Bang!

I slammed my locker door. “I can’t believe it!” I said.

“Get a hold of yourself, Greg,” said my friend, Mike Leduc. He glanced up and down the hallway, looking nervous. It was crammed with students hurrying to class.

“No more Legend of Cow Valley?” I asked.

“For the three-hundredth time, yes! That’s what my dad told me,” Mike said. “Now would you keep your voice down, Neufeld? I had to promise not to say.”

I lowered my voice. “He’s absolutely positive that Mr. Derksen is cancelling the show?”

“Yes,” Mike whispered back.

“This summer?”

He nodded.

“Even though it’s finally our turn to star in it?”

“I don’t think that has anything to do with it,” Mike said.

This was crazy! The Legend of Cow Valley was a play performed on Mr. Derksen’s farm every summer for only about the last gazillion years! It was a tradition in our town, Ellis, Manitoba, for the grade seven kids to be the cast.

“How can this be happening?” I wailed. “Every kid in Ellis waits their whole lives to be in Cow Valley. It’s practically the law!”

We were supposed to have auditions for Cow Valley in the school gym next week. Then, we were supposed to rehearse the play with Mr. Derksen and our drama teacher for the last few drama classes of the school year. Then, for the whole summer, we were supposed to perform The Legend of Cow Valley once a week on Mr. Derksen’s outdoor stage. How could it be cancelled this year, when it was supposed to be our turn? It wasn’t fair!

“My dad said that Mr. Derksen is selling part of his farm to the government,” Mike said. “They’re going to build a museum, or something.”

“A museum?” I asked. “Like a history museum?”

Mike shrugged. “I dunno.”

“But Cow Valley has lots of historic parts already!” I said, trying not to shout. The story of The Legend of Cow Valley takes place in Ellis over a hundred years ago. My mom said that like most legends, it wasn’t exactly a true story, but that lots of stuff in it was based on history. For instance, the play got its name from Ellis’ old nickname “Cow Valley” (because of all the cattle farms in the area, of course). Some of the characters in the play were named after real people who had lived in Ellis in the olden days. And then there is the outdoor set, which looks like a street from a cowboy movie. My dad told me that Mr. Derksen had studied black and white photos of Ellis’s Main Street from a hundred years ago when he built the set, to get the details just right. That was pretty “historic”!

“A museum won’t be the same. It can’t possibly be as fun as Cow Valley!” I said.