Boggle Sneak

Fritz Bogott

Pressed Duck, LLC (2008)

Tags:

Juvenile Fiction, General, Fairy Tales Folklore, Action Adventure, Fiction

SUMMARY:
Tiny inventors Alvy and Alby break into homes and play Rube Goldberg practical jokes. When Alvy suddenly disappears, Alby enlists the help of two of his young victims-- but they find they are dealing with forces of an unexpected scale.

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For my daughters.

One

Alvy jerks the wheel hard to the left and hangs on tight to her hat. The speedboat throws a high wall of spray as it bounces across its own wake and shoots underneath a parked car. Alvy blinks painfully in the sudden deep shadow and pushes the throttle forward to narrow the gap with her brother’s speeding sprayer truck, which is eighteen inches ahead and pumping out water so the boat can stay afloat. She can hear Alby shouting above the roar of the engines and the hiss of water hitting the road.

“Next time, I get to drive the boat,” Alby yells.

“Next time, think up your own boat,” Alvy retorts.

“Next time, build it yourself,” Alby shouts back.

It’s just like Alby to complain and forget to enjoy the ride, Alvy thinks. She sends a high wave crashing forward, flattening Alby’s hat. Alby, momentarily blinded, drives the truck’s bumper hard into the side of a beer can and sends the can spinning toward the curb. The truck skids slightly, then regains traction.

Headlights loom up behind them. Alby darts a glance back at his sister and slows, steering carefully between the rear wheels of a long black pickup before stopping and shutting off the spray. Alvy pulls the boat in behind him. Water pools and flattens around them as the car passes and disappears. They look at each other.

“That takes the fun out of it, having to stop and hide,” Alvy says. They turn their heads and watch the headlights pass by.

“Not really,” Alby says, and he turns the sprayer back on and drenches his sister, then guns the truck’s engine and peels away.

Just as Alvy catches up and is about to drench her brother with spray, something at the side of the road catches her eye. A D-cell battery! They could really use one of those! She darts a glance back toward the heap of backpacks, tool boxes, coils of wire and piles of tarps in the back of the boat. There might just be enough room.

Alby has seen it too, and is already pulling over. Alvy cranks the boat’s engine down to idle. There is a streetlight directly overhead, but there is nobody in sight to notice them. They jump out and run over to the battery. Alby tries to lift it by himself—twisting his arms around the battery in a clumsy bear hug—but when he tries to straighten his legs it barely moves. He’s going to need help. He switches his grip to one end and his sister grabs the other. They lift together and get the battery up to waist height, but then Alvy’s wet hands slip, and down the battery comes, barely missing her toes.

Alvy has left the boat running, and the exhaust is getting into Alby’s eyes. He blinks painfully. “Could you shut that thing off?”

“You first,” she says, just to be spiteful.

Alby stomps over and shuts off the truck. Alvy waits for the engine noise to die out, and then she shuts off the boat.

They return to the battery and try once again to lift it. This time they make it three steps before Alby drops his end.

Alvy dusts off her hands. “It’s not worth it,” she says.

Alby says, “Right, okay, we don’t need spare parts. I’ll build your next invention out of mold spores and traffic noise.”

Alvy isn’t backing down. “If we put any more crap into your crap closet even light won’t be able to escape.”

“That closet is what keeps us in business,” Alby says. He kicks a truck tire. “We build stuff. That’s what we do.”

“Right,” Alvy says, “That’s what we do. That’s always your attitude, isn’t it? No need for a change; just keep on doing what we do.” Even so, she helps him pick the battery back up, and they start sidestepping gingerly toward the boat.

“Oh, great,” Alby says. “It isn’t your job to worry. Everything will turn out just fine. But I’m the one making things turn out. You draw up half a sketch on a napkin and think everything after that is just nuts and bolts. You don’t see what it takes to fit all those nuts and bolts together. You get in, get out, and leave all the messy stuff for—”

Just as the battery falls into the boat, they hear a low rumble. When they look up, they see a slow-moving street-sweeper headed right toward them.

Alby runs to his truck, and Alvy scrambles over the mess in the back of the boat and fires up the ignition. The truck’s starter is screeching but its engine won’t turn over.

“Let’s go!” Alvy shouts.

“Won’t start!” Alby yells back. He tries the key again. “Something’s wrong!”

Alvy takes a quick look at the rapidly-drying street all around the boat. She’s beached. “This is just perfect,” she says. “If the boat were dead, we could at least drag it with the truck!”

By now, Alby is doubled over, tinkering with something under the truck’s raised hood. The street sweeper is moving closer. Alvy vaults into the back of the boat, digs around in a crate, and comes up with a long rope and a pair of skates.

Alby is muttering, “I knew this two-part vehicle was a mistake. Too much complexity. Too much that can go wrong.”

Alvy already has the skates on. She skates up and ties one end of the rope to the truck’s trailer hitch. She skates back and loops the rope around a cleat on the boat’s hull.

Alby, his head under the hood, doesn’t notice. “And it’s not like this thing is light either, with all this water in the back. If I can’t get the engine started in the next couple of seconds, maybe there’s some way we can take advantage of all the water to get us up out of the street. Alvy?”

Alvy is skating toward the street sweeper. She zips past it, loops the rope around a tree in the median strip, skates back up to the sweeper, and with a mighty heave, gets the end of the rope up and over the sweeper’s bumper, and tangles it into something like a hitch. Then she hangs on.

Alby leans way over and looks around the truck’s hood just as the rope goes taut. The truck jerks away from him and crashes into the boat, and both the truck and boat go bouncing up and over the curb and across the median.

He goes running off after them, but he has on his cowboy boots, and he catches a toe on the curb and goes sprawling. His hat comes off in the process, and a nest of snarled dreadlocks whips loose. He slaps uselessly at his locks as they flail like live snakes, and they speedily take advantage of their momentary freedom to bind his legs and tie his arms behind his back. He gives up the struggle, and lies there hog-tied, the truck disappearing off into his upper peripheral vision.

Meanwhile, Alvy is struggling with the knot on the street sweeper’s bumper, which has drawn up really tight under the tension of the dragging vehicles. The knot suddenly goes loose, and Alvy jumps awkwardly down off the sweeper, up the curb and over to Alby.

One lock at a time, she slowly unwinds her brother and manhandles his locks back into his hat. Alby is extremely grateful she’s not laughing—much.

“Where?” she demands.

“In the truck,” he answers.

Alvy goes over to the truck, finds the duct tape, and duct-tapes Alby’s hat down around his chin. “Looking good,” she says. She pulls off her own hat and mops sweat off her bald scalp.

Alby works his jaw. There’s no way his big sister is going to get him to admit she’s a genius for shaving her head.

“How far is it?” Alvy asks.

“Another block,” Alby answers. “Maybe we should just leave the vehicles here and come back for them after. Nobody’s going to find them in the middle of the night.” He gestures around them at the dimly-lit median. The toppled truck and banged-up boat are only fractionally taller than the half-dead, never-mown grass and weeds around them.

Alvy nods. Together, they make their way over to the boat, lift out heavy backpacks and begin laboriously bushwhacking through the grass.

After what feels like an endless hike, they finally reach their destination. Panting and catching their breath, they stare up at the screen door towering above them.

Alvy pulls a crowbar from her pack and hands it to Alby. He looks at it, shakes his head and tries to hand it back. She grins. “Monkey get,” she whispers.

Alby pries the door open and holds it, mock-chivalrously, for his sister. Alvy frowns and squeezes her backpack-widened form through the opening into the screened-in porch. Alby wedges the crowbar so it holds the door open a crack, then steps over it into the porch. It’s quiet.

The window to the kitchen is standing open, probably window-locked on the inside at three inches to keep out intruders. That’s a laugh. Alvy already has her grapnel out and is whirling it around her head. It arcs up and catches on the first try. Alvy looks smugly over at Alby, but he’s pretending to look the other way.

Alvy climbs the rope hand over hand, her boots against the clapboard. When she reaches the sill, she hauls herself onto it and crouches low, waving at Alby to join her. He is halfway up the rope when Alvy sees two sets of eyes, green and glowing, moving toward her.

She grabs the rope with both hands and throws her legs back down over the edge, kicking Alby in the side of his duct-taped head. “Hey,” he grunts.

“Cats!” she whispers.

Alby lets go and thunks to the floor. The cats are making themselves thin and squeezing through the three inches of open window. Alvy’s boots reach the floor and she and Alby begin to run, steering around the legs of the breakfast table, dodging chairs. The first two pair of paws hit the floor as Alby jumps over the crowbar and through the door. Alvy jumps too, but her pack gets caught, and she jolts to a stop.

“Help me!” she gasps.

Alby grabs her by the shoulders and jerks. She pops through, then turns back and gives the crowbar a solid kick. It hits the near cat across the bridge of the nose, and the screen door bangs shut. Alvy sticks out her tongue at the glaring cat.

Alby points around the side of the house and makes a knocking gesture. Alvy nods and starts off through the flowerbed. She reaches the foot of the trellis and shrugs out of her pack, then rummages in it. There— a pair of gloves.

Gingerly, she climbs her way up and through the roses. When she reaches the window, she removes a glove and begins to tap softly at the glass. She keeps up a steady rhythm until the eyes appear in the gloom of the dining room. Hello, eyes, she thinks. You just keep looking right…up…here.

Behind the cats there is a brief flash of light, then a huge shift in the room’s shadows as the door between the dining room and the kitchen drifts shut. Good job, Alby! She begins to climb her way back down.

Once she’s back in the kitchen, she sees that Alby is already hard at work at the foot of the refrigerator. His fingers are jammed in the soft rubber of the door seal, and he’s red in the face with strain. After a few seconds, he slumps, removes his aching fingers, and digs in his backpack. He brings out a jack, holds it up as though proud of it, then jams it into the door seal and begins to pump. This is much easier! The door unseals with a soft slurp, and the jack clatters to the floor. Now that it’s unsealed, Alby is able to shoulder the door open wider, and then he steps quickly over to his backpack, puts it back on, returns to the door and begins to scale the condiment shelves—a difficult climb with the heavy pack.

Meanwhile, Alvy has been chimneying up the crack between a cupboard door and the kitchen wall. A rope between her teeth trails off and down, the end tied to the straps of her backpack. She gets herself up and onto the counter, and begins hauling the pack up on the rope.

In the fridge, Alby has reached the shelf with the milk bottle. Someone has left the cap off, thank god. He reaches over his shoulder into his pack and pulls out the end of a rubber hose, which he threads down into the milk bottle. He then begins to squeeze the side of his pack rhythmically with his elbow. The hose wobbles slightly, as liquid pumps from the pack into the bottle. There— done.

On the counter, Alvy is trying to free-climb the blender. It’s a nice challenge; most of its surface is slick, and there’s not much to grab onto. The lid is easier. It is soft, and she can sink her fingers in and pull up.

From the blender lid, she can just get her fingers under the cupboard door and pry the door open. She steps up from the blender onto a small empty space on the shelf and looks up at the rank of hulking cereal boxes looming above her. This poses another chimneying problem; a wobbly one. When she reaches the top of the cereal boxes, she steps cautiously from one box to another, heading for the Raisin Bran, but then the Shredded-Wheat box under her feet suddenly tilts sideways several inches, and she’s dumped painfully back down to the shelf below. Nothing to do but to climb up again. Balancing carefully atop the Puffed Rice, she gets the Raisin Bran box top open and uses both arms to unroll the plastic liner. The box is about half-full—shadowy flake and raisin shapes down below in the dark. She kneels and shakes the entire remaining contents of her pack into the liner, then stands and uses one foot to stomp the liner, crinkling, back down into the box, then crouches and presses the box-top closed with her palms. Then, her pack empty and her movements light, she performs her climb in reverse. When she reaches the counter, she jogs across it toward Alby’s corner.

Alby is standing on top of the sugar canister, waiting for her. He reaches an arm down for her and helps pull her up, and then they work together to shove the lid of the neighboring flour canister so it’s partly ajar, making a crescent-shaped opening.

From his pack, Alby takes out a heavy particle mask and hands it to his sister. While Alvy is strapping it on, Alby takes out a cardboard box the size of his two clenched fists and a spool of string. The end of the string he ties to a loop on the top of the box, and then he hands the box to Alvy. She takes the box, salutes jauntily, and jumps gracefully down into the flour, throwing up only a tiny puff. The string unspools rapidly as she descends.

The surface of the flour roils for a few moments, and then Alvy’s masked head breaks the surface. The box is gone, buried somewhere in the depths of the flour. The string is looped loosely around her right wrist. She treads flour, her palms sculling steadily. Alby reaches down and pulls her out.

Moving very cautiously now, they tug the flour canister’s lid back on and begin to pay out the string: across the counter, past a few neglected dirty dishes, around a dusty garden gnome. When they reach the sink, Alby stretches out his arms and ties the string in a knot around the faucet handle. They take a careful survey of the room to see whether they’ve forgotten anything, and then they take their (much lighter now) backpacks and slip back out the open window. As they’re leaving the porch, the screen door squeaks open, then hisses shut, then closes with a soft bang.

Two

The family troops downstairs and into the kitchen. Lisa notices that the kitchen door has fallen shut. She kicks the doorstop up and down a couple of times, then rigs the door open and watches to make sure it doesn’t fall shut again right away. Dad immediately starts flipping on components of his Enormous Espresso Setup: roaster, grinder, boiler, lever. Mom’s granola is burnt because the oven timer got disrupted. Kirsten says she messed it up baking midnight cookies. Mom says it’s okay; she has some day-old granola. She gets it out and dumps fresh yogurt from the yogurt maker, then wanders out of the kitchen muttering something about e-mail. Lisa pulls a large whisk out of one of her dress pockets and sets about making an omelet. Kirsten climbs up on a footstool, takes a loaf of bread out of the bread machine and starts grinding peanuts for peanut butter. Dad is chattering about espresso, and isn’t really paying attention as he dumps out bright-blue raisin bran and pours out acid-green milk. The milk foams when it hits the cereal. Dad, still not looking, takes a bite, does a spit-take, grabs up a glass off the counter, and jerks up the faucet handle. An enormous thump sounds out, and the kitchen is instantly filled with flour. Everyone goes silent. Three ghostly shapes blink at each other. Dad purposefully fills his dusty glass with water and drinks it in a single long swallow. This rinses the flour off his lips, making them the only touch of color in the all-white scene.

“Good one, girls,” he says, and starts grinding coffee beans.

“Good one, Kirsten,” Lisa says.

“Good one yourself,” Kirsten says back.

Up on her stool, Kirsten is looking into the open cereal cupboard. She notices something, and blows some of the flour away in a big puff. There is a tiny but distinct boot print on the cupboard shelf, where the flour has stuck to a patch of spilled honey. Lisa joins her and looks over her shoulder. They blow more flour, and find more prints. Dad has the espresso machine going by this point, so he’s deaf and oblivious.

Moving the footstool along the counter by stages, Kirsten follows the nylon line from the faucet handle to the flour canister, and pulls up the remains of the bomb. Lisa is dusting for more prints, puffing her way around the whole kitchen, finding nothing, but persisting anyway. Kirsten is sniffing the milk. She pours some into a juice glass and holds it up to the pale light coming in through the floured window. Lisa gives another short huff and then suddenly stops, staring at a partial print on the sill. Kirsten sets down the glass, climbs down, and comes over to look too. They crane their necks down close to the opening, then measure it off with their fingers.

“Anybody home?” a voice calls from outside.

“Hang on,” Dad yells. He drops a sugar cube into his cup of coffee and stirs it as he walks out the door. Lisa stuffs a handful of napkins and silverware into a pocket, and the girls follow their father, holding their breakfast plates in front of them.

They stare into the dull eyes of an enormous ox standing at the foot of the driveway. The ox sighs.

On the bed of the oxcart is a shambles of a tiny two-seater convertible, soft-top caved in and caked with decayed leaves. Dull rusty paint shows through in a few spots out of a thick blanket of chicken droppings. Torn upholstery is partially visible through cracked and streaked windows.

Dad is looking back and forth, back and forth between the convertible, the ox, and the ox driver, whose denim shirt doesn’t quite reach his denim pants. The ox twitches off a fly.

“Guess you got an early start, to get here this early,” Dad says.

The 21 bus drives by. The ox slowly turns its head to watch it pass.

“What?” the ox driver says.

“Do we owe you anything, or are we all set?” Dad asks.

“Where do you want it?” the ox driver asks.

“Top of the driveway,” Dad says, “But I don’t see how…”

The driver makes a cracking noise with his tongue. The ox starts to back up and the wagon begins to twist up the driveway.

“You’ve got an ox that can back?” Dad says.

The ox driver ignores him.

The girls look at each other and at the oxcart, then start rapidly forking breakfast into their mouths.

The ox somehow steers the cart up the driveway, narrowly but precisely avoiding the neighbor’s van. The ox driver doesn’t even watch. As the cart reaches the top of the driveway, the ox driver climbs down off the rocking cart and starts removing straps.

“You need a hand?” Dad asks.

The ox driver removes the last strap. The convertible wobbles on the cart. The ox driver gives it a shove with the flat of his hand. The convertible sags off the cart and crashes to the ground. The ox driver climbs up onto the cart, says, “Okay then,” and makes the clicking sound again. The ox starts to step back down the driveway.

“Okay then,” Dad echoes, and sips his coffee. The girls finish eating and scrub their faces with the napkins.

The neighbor comes out behind the neighbor’s dog, and stares at the wrecked convertible for a moment before following the dog around the side of the house.

***

“We could rig an alarm,” Kirsten says. “In case it comes back.”

“I’m going inside,” Dad says. “Please clean up the kitchen before you go out.”

“It would be cool with lasers, like in a jewel-thief movie,” Lisa says.

“I was thinking we could just reuse the fishing line,” Kirsten says. “Maybe tie it to the door bells.”

“Okay,” Lisa says. “And we can put out some honey. That honey worked great. How come they don’t have honey in the jewel-thief movies?”

“We can get some at the co-op when I go out to buy peanuts,” Kirsten says. “They have some wormwood I’ve been wanting to try.”

The girls go back inside the house, and shut the door. The door bells jingle faintly.

Three

“Do you think we’ll ever run out of ideas?” Alvy asks, her voice crackling over the headset radio inside Alby’s motorcycle helmet.

Alby looks over questioningly at his sister, then returns his attention to his front-view mirror.

“What would we do?” Alvy asks. Her eyes are also darting back and forth between her speedometer and her front-view mirror.

“Can’t you just shut up and ride?” Alby asks. He tenses his grip on the throttle, and his motorcycle climbs the side of the barrel slightly, causing the whirling barrel to arc slightly toward the middle of the street. Alvy accelerates slightly to compensate, and the barrel returns to a straight trajectory.

“Do you think we’d have to walk,” she asks, “or stay at home?”

Alby ignores her.

“Where do you think ideas come from?” she asks.

“Ask yourself,” Alby says. “I don’t have ideas, remember? I just build things.”

“What if we only get just so many, and someday they’re all used up?”

“What if the Moon Men came and moved you to the moon? Would your ideas still be used up then? Or would you start having moon ideas?”

This shuts her up. They go back to adjusting their speed and monitoring the barrel’s forward progress.

“This is nice,” she says, “not having to hide.”

Alby sees a gray shadow in the corner of his eye, and suddenly his sister screams. A huge moth has somehow been sucked into the barrel, and it’s blown against her face shield, blinding her. Her hand spasms on the throttle, and the barrel begins to oscillate. “Help me!” she shouts.

Alby reaches out his arm and waves at the air. This does his speed-control no good, and the barrel begins to jerk violently from side to side. Alby waves at the air again. This time his fingers touch moth, and he jerks down hard on its wing. The moth pulls loose from Alvy’s face shield, and blows, flapping, back out of the barrel. The jerking subsides, and they stop to catch their breath. Then Alby sees something else out of the corner of his eye. “Uh,” he says. A uniformed policeman has stepped out of his cruiser, lights flashing, idling in the driving lane. The policeman is marching toward the barrel in the center of the road. “Um, let’s—” Alby says. Alvy nods her helmet slightly and gently turns her hand on the throttle. Alby does likewise. The barrel slowly begins to roll. The policeman quickens his step. Alvy and Alby gently increase their speeds. The barrel rolls faster. The policeman starts to jog. Alvy ratchets her speed slightly ahead of her brother’s, to turn the rolling barrel away from the center of the road and back toward the curb. The policeman lunges and sweeps his arm toward the lip of the barrel, missing by a fraction. They’re off and rolling again, bouncing over gravel and cracks in the road.

As they near the girls’ house, they slow down the barrel and roll it to the curb at the foot of the driveway. They leave their bikes parked inside and amble out, shaken by engine rumble and deafened by the sound of the exhaust pipes inside the echoing barrel.

They creep up the side of the driveway and walk slowly around the beaten-down convertible.

“Here, can you give me a hand?” Alby asks.

Alvy makes a stirrup out of her laced fingers and helps Alby vault up onto the ruined car’s bumper. With the backpack on, he is heavy. Alvy wrings out her fingers.

On the bumper, Alby reaches up and digs his fingers in along the edge of the hood and pulls himself up onto the hood. He shifts his weight from side to side a few times, testing his balance, then tiptoes up to the windshield and peers through the murk.

“How’s it look?” Alvy whispers.

“Chickens,” Alby says.

“What?”

“Shh, I think they’re sleeping,” he says.

Alvy shrugs out of her backpack and starts pawing through it. She comes up with a coil of rope and begins tying a lariat. “How do we get in there?”

Alby looks toward the top of the windshield, gauging the distance. “Well, it’s a convertible,” he says. He creeps over to the edge of the windshield and tries to peer around it. “Here, let me try,” he says. He grasps the edge of the windshield and swings his legs out into empty space, kicking his feet toward the top of the passenger-side door. “I— whoops!” he says, overshooting and falling through the missing pane of glass and into the car. He whacks down onto the passenger seat, sending up a cloud of dust and dried chicken droppings. The force of his fall startles the sleeping chickens, which start to cackle and flap wildly, raising still more dust.

Outside, Alvy is pounding on the door, in a useless effort to be helpful.

Alby flails and grabs for the door handle, which tears off but opens the door. The momentum carries him out the door, and he falls on top of his sister, flattening her to the pavement. The chickens follow, desperate to escape. Alby and Alvy are choking in the storm of dust and feathers.

Alvy gets to her feet first, still holding the lariat. She whirls it above her head and lets it fly, roping the lead chicken on the first attempt. The chicken, twice her size and terrified, fails to stop, and jerks Alvy off her feet. Alby sees his sister fall and starts sprinting after the other chicken, which is veering around insanely, not making progress in any specific direction.

Alby quickly catches up with the chicken, puts a hand on her neck and smoothly vaults onto her back. This does nothing for the chicken’s composure. The frightened bird leaps into the air, pecking and snapping frantically at the unwelcome rider. Alby locks his arms around the chicken’s neck and holds on, panting and trying to catch a glimpse of his sister.

Alvy, for her part, has become tangled around a shrub and is being stretched painfully by the panicked chicken at the other end of the rope. She stifles a cry and hangs on.

After a few seconds, the chickens spontaneously lose all memory of what the fuss was about, and their movements slow to a near standstill—their eyes looking dazedly around, wondering whether it’s time to eat, or rest, or what.

Alvy slowly picks herself up, trying not to startle her chicken. She ties her end of the rope to the shrub and walks slowly over to Alby’s chicken. “You want any help?”

Alby responds by sliding off his chicken’s back. The chicken ruffles her feathers and stares dumbly at him. Alby keeps his eyes on the bird as he slips out of his backpack and feels around for his rope.

“This would be a lot simpler if we had some corn, or Fritos, or something.” He loops the end of the rope around his chicken’s leg and ties it off. The chicken lifts her foot, clucks, and falls asleep.

“Jeez,” Alby says, and ties the other end of his rope to Alvy’s shrub. Alvy takes a crowbar out of her pack and sidles to the porch door. Alby joins her. She pries the door ajar, and they both put their weight on it, shoving it open a few inches. “Can you hold it?” she asks. Alby tenses his muscles and stares at her, so she takes her weight off the door and walks off to retrieve the chickens. The chickens take an immediate shine to the screened-in porch, and they flap up onto the picnic table and go back to sleep.

Alby has found a lovely wedge-shaped rock, which he has lugged up and jammed under the porch door to hold it open so they can ferry supplies. They’re standing by the open window, looking in.

“What do you think,” Alby asks. “Can we get through wearing our packs, or should we push them through first?”

Alvy ducks her head into the opening and measures the gap. A pair of yellow eyes rises up to meet hers. “Whoops,” she says.

The cat leaps through the gap but catches a foot in the girls’ fishing line. The line pulls tight and violently shakes the door bells. The cat screams, and claws at its tangled leg. The chickens catch sight of the cat and resume dervish mode, which further enrages the cat, and brings the other cat scrambling to investigate. The door bells jangle steadily. Alvy and Alby hustle as fast as they can, fully loaded, out the door. One of the chickens flies into the screen door with a resonant thwack, like a tennis ball meeting a racket. This dislodges the rock under the door, and the door falls shut.

The two chickens, in a merged feathery bundle, bounce down the porch steps and into the bushes. The cats decide that string-and-bells is an excellent game, and they’re now taking turns ringing the bells rhythmically, just for fun. The kitchen light comes on, and the girls are standing there in pajamas, blinking at the hopelessly snarled cats. Kirsten silently goes for the scissors.

Out in the bushes, the chickens are pacing back and forth like soldiers on guard duty. Alvy and Alby are lying in the dust, sweating and covered with dust, looking up at the fronds of lily of the valley.

“What a night,” Alvy says.

Inside, the kitchen light turns back off, and the girls troop back upstairs. The cats lap water from their dish and wash themselves, affecting to be cool and trying to recall what all the fuss was about.

Alby looks at Alvy. “Let’s get started,” he says.

Four

Dad, grumbling, shuffles over to the bedroom door and pulls it open. Smack in front of the door is a gleaming engine block. Mom is behind him, fully dressed. They stare out at the hall. Every inch of floor is covered with car parts: spark plugs, muffler, exhaust pipe, springs, wires, bolts, battery, all neatly disassembled and arranged in a careful jigsaw the length of the hall. At the far end of the hall, they can hear the shower running.

There is absolutely no safe place to put a foot down. Mom and Dad look at each other. The girls’ door is still shut. Mom says, “We could use one of the rugs.” Dad nods. Mom brings over one of the rugs and shoves it up against the engine block. Together, they rock the engine block until it rolls over onto the rug, then they tug and heave the rug until it’s a foot into the bedroom. There is now a space of wood floor about the size of a doormat visible in the hall. Mom and Dad sigh and step together out onto the bare spot, then bend and shift parts into the other half of the bare spot, leaving a stepping-stone-sized hole one step closer to the girls’ room. They step into the hole, then shift car parts into the space they were previously standing in, which opens up another stepping-stone-sized hole one more step closer to the stairs. Mom is taking a bit more time than Dad shifting parts, picking them up, looking them over carefully with her brow furrowed. She runs a finger across a hose. It comes away clean.

After a few more shifts, they reach the girls’ door and push it open. Lisa opens her eyes. “Hi Mom. Hi Dad. Why are you looking at me so funny?” She catches sight of the gleaming metal lining the hallway and crosses the door to look out.

Kirsten climbs out of bed and joins her.

“Could you girls please start hating each other?” Dad asks. “You’re too dangerous as a team.”

Lisa looks at Kirsten.

“Who left the shower on?” Kirsten asks.

The four of them look down the hall toward the sound of running water.

Lisa and Kirsten look down at the stepping stone Mom and Dad are sharing. They reach down, pick up a battery and a rim and move them inside their bedroom. Then they step out into the new double-sized stepping stone and the whole family starts junk-shifting down the hall toward the back bathroom. It goes a lot faster with four people.

After shifting the leather seats, which are worn but extremely clean and seem to have been freshly oiled, they reach the bathroom door, which is shut. Dad inches it open.

Four heads crane around the doorframe and peek inside. There, upended in the claw-foot tub, with the shower beating down on it, is the convertible’s naked body, a bit rusty but exceptionally clean. There is a long pause. Finally, Mom steps forward and shuts off the shower tap. Rivulets run off the orange paint and leave a fine sheen. Has this thing been waxed?

“You girls work fast,” Mom says.

Kirsten is staring at Lisa. Lisa is staring out the window at the end of the hall, trying to make out a pair of indistinct white blobs up in the lilac bush. “Anyone want to help me gather eggs?” she asks.

***

Late that evening, the girls are sitting side by side with their aching fingers soaking in dishpans full of ice and water. As soon as they got the car parts moved and organized to Mom’s satisfaction, they rode their bicycles to five separate fabric stores, including two in outer-ring suburbs that had possibly never seen bicycles used for actual transportation before. They brought back acres of tulle, miles of white thread and, most importantly, more than a thousand tiny jingle-bells. It was touch-and-go with the bells until the very last fabric store, which had had a two-gallon Ziploc full of left overs from the previous Christmas, when a local Episcopalian pageant unexpectedly went bust and defaulted on its order.

The sack of bells was heavy, lumpy and noisy, and made for an uncomfortable ride back to the house. The girls walked to the neighbors’ to borrow a ladder, then set about stitching wide panels of tulle, which they gaffer-taped over every possible basement and first-floor ingress, and onto which they hand-stitched the one thousand seven hundred and thirty-four jingle-bells, which after the first three hundred or so started to make their finger joints squeak.

The whole three-story house is now dressed in a huge glittering tutu. The jingle-bells, every time a strong breeze blows through, rustle with a kind of metallic high frequency that has neighborhood dogs whimpering and covering their ears.

The breezes, in fact, present a danger of constant false alarms, but it is too late to worry about that now. The one spot on the house below the second floor that isn’t draped in billowing, tinkling tulle is the front door, which is standing wide open to the street and has a huge Welcome banner draped across it.

The girls with their ice tubs are seated at a card table immediately in front of the door, along with half a dozen thermos bottles of nasty, tarry, but highly-caffeinated black tea, much of which they have already drunk.

The cats, together with a litter box and dishes of food and water, are locked away in one of the upstairs bedrooms. Mom and Dad, after asking the girls not to run up any additional spectacular water bills, have also locked themselves away upstairs. So it is only the girls, their aching fingers, their leather tongues, and the jitters.

“What if they don’t come?” Lisa asks.

“Don’t be like that,” Kirsten says.

“No, really, what if they don’t come?” Lisa asks again. “What if there’s some union regulation or something that says if the people are still awake, then just come back another night?”

“They’ve got to come,” Kirsten says. “We didn’t sew all those bells just for them not to come.”

“And anyway,” she continues. “We’ll be ready for them tomorrow night too. We’ll still be awake!” She glares at the thermos-lid and shakily takes another sip.

A gust of wind ruffles the house’s skirts, and the neighbor’s dog buries its head deeper into its paws.

Five

“Did it have to be stocking caps? Isn’t that a little cliché?”

The two stocking caps inch forward across the worn linoleum, hugging the foot of the shelves.

“Shut up,” Alvy says. “They’ve got security cameras in here. Did you want to just walk in?”

“Plus, they’re hot,” Alby says. “Couldn’t it have been baseball caps? Or sun visors or something?”

“How about black cowboy hats,” Alvy suggests. “We could tie black bandanas around our ankles.”

“How much farther?” Alby asks. “My knees are getting sore.”

“You should have worn kneepads like I said,” Alvy says. “We’re almost there.”

Alby sneaks a peak out the brim of the cap. He gazes up at the rows of bubble-packed toy airplanes and slingshots. “Did we have to pick a 24-hour Walgreens?” he whines. “This would be a lot easier if they were closed.”

“There,” Alvy says, pointing. A freshly-stocked rack of primary-colored balloons in three sizes: regular, extra-large, and sausage-shaped.

“Do we have a plan?” Alby asks.

“You’ll think of something,” Alvy says.

Alby rolls his eyes. There’s not enough space in this hat for a couple dozen packages of balloons. He drops the brim to shade his eyes from the evil yellow flicker of the fluorescent lights, and tries to think. What does he have in his pockets? Scissors, string, chewing gum.

He takes out a stick of gum and bites it. There’s really no good way.

“Sit tight a second,” he says.

He rolls onto his back, tugging the hat along with him, up against the toe-kick at the bottom of the shelves.

He peeks his head from under the brim and surveys the ceiling for visible cameras. None in sight; at least not right here.

“Come on out,” he says. “No cameras here.”

Alvy crawls out from under her hat.

“Got any string?” Alby asks.

Alvy digs in her pocket and holds up a coil of fishing line, about the same as what Alby has.

“Okay,” Alby says. “Wait here.”

He hoists himself up onto the bottom shelf and begins to climb the hooks monkey-style, until he reaches the top row of balloons. Then he shimmies back along the hook, holds on tight with his knees and ties a knot through the hole at the top of the innermost balloon-bag. He lets the rest of his string out in a long dangling loop, careful not to snag it on the merchandise below.

Alvy, watching, sucks in a nervous breath.

Alby tries to look down. He hears rustling below him. He shrinks back against the back of the shelf and holds his breath.

A uniformed employee walks by briskly, humming, oblivious.

Alby, hanging onto his hook at waist-level with the clerk, follows the clerk’s passing apron pockets with his eyes, painfully aware of the wadded empty stocking caps in the aisle below. The clerk doesn’t seem to notice them, and disappears around the end of the aisle.

Alby lets his breath out and starts threading the untied end of the string through the holes on the other balloon-bags on this hook, then pulls the string taut and swings down to the hook below and repeats the process there. He’s sure Alvy is going crazy with boredom and impatience by this point, but that’s fine. Next time she can come up with the plan.

He finishes stringing the third and final row, then hops down to the bottom shelf and finds Alvy taking a bite out of a Pez.

“You went and got Pez?” he says.

“You don’t let me in on the plan,” she says, “I go and get Pez.”

Alby holds out his hand, and Alvy slaps the heavy Pez down into it. He takes a bite.

“This is going to be a little noisy,” he says, looking down at his string.

Alvy stares at him smugly, holds up the end of her own string, and yanks it.

On the other side of the partition, half a dozen clock radios suddenly start blaring AM radio static at deafening volume.

Alby drops the Pez and runs out into the aisle, pulling on his string. The balloon-bags slide off their hooks and slap down onto the floor and each other, forming a slippery pile.

Alby and Alvy grab their hats and shove them back under the bottom row of toys. Then they wait.

The chorus of radio static thins and stops, and they can hear rustling on the other side of the partition and boxes being lifted and replaced. Then the sound of footsteps walking away.

They look at each other, then hop down onto the floor and pull the hats down over their bodies.

Alby loops the free end of the string around his waist, and they start crawling back toward the entrance with the long train of balloons trailing behind.

As they near the checkout counter, they both slow, lift their brims, and perform the best shoe-scan they can manage. No shoes are obvious, but who’s to say there’s nobody behind the counter watching the curious procession of two mashed hats and thirty-four bags of balloons on a string?

That’s just a chance they’re going to have to take. They scramble on all fours toward the exit.

Some recent patron has left a wire shopping basket on the floor in front of the checkout counter.

Alby spots it and scrabbles over to his sister, bunching the hats together. He scrambles into her hat and holds out his string for her to take.

“Let’s go!” Alvy says, turning away from his outstretched hand.

“Just take it,” Alby says. “I want to get something.”

“Get something?” Alvy says, but she takes the string, and starts pulling the balloons toward the door.

Alby steers his hat over to the basket and shoves against it, starting it toward the door.

The wire screeches against the floor.

Alvy stands up and starts to run. This causes the hat to form a sharp pyramid, and the tassel to bounce jauntily.

Alby stands and runs too, pushing the basket through the hat with his palms. The basket continues its screech.

As they reach the electric eye in front of the exit, Alvy gives a heroic leap, and her hat’s tassel flops through the light beam across the door. The door swishes open, and Alvy, Alby and their baggage train scurry through it, expecting at any second to be un-hatted by giant hands from above.

No hands appear, and they manage to shove and drag their load into the shadows on the side of the building.

They stop and pant, still expecting company from inside the store.

Finally, their breathing returns to normal.

“Good one on the balloons,” Alvy says. “But did you have to steal something four times your size?”

Alby looks at his basket and pats it lovingly. “This is just what we need,” he says.

Back at home, Alvy is using a large tank to blow up balloons. Alby is welding case-fans to the back of the wire basket.

Alvy says, “I think we need a vacation.”

Alby stops welding and raises his mask. “A vacation,” he says.

“Yeah, you know,” Alvy says, “get out of the city. Get away from the nightly grind. Go someplace new. Get a change of scene.”

Alby shakes his head and slaps his mask back down. His voice is muffled. “Where would we go?”

Alvy ties another balloon to the basket, which is now starting to shift on the concrete. She looks up at the balloon-silhouettes against the darkening sky.

“I don’t know,” she says. “Away from here.”

Alby sends a shower of sparks bouncing across the floor.

“We’ve got a job to do,” he says. “Who would do our job?”

Alvy blows up another balloon.

“Do you think the whole world would stop if we stopped doing our job?” she asks.

Alby runs his gloved finger along the joint he has just made.

“It’s our job,” he says.

He sets down his torch, takes off his mask and gloves, and walks into the shop.

Alvy ties the balloon to the basket and goes to inflate another one.

It’s a good job, she thinks. Still…

She feels the air move around her. She looks up, sees a whirl of feathers and claws, and feels herself being knocked off her feet and jerked roughly up into the night sky.

Six

The 21 bus rumbles by outside, and a breeze jangles the alarm bells. In the entryway, the girls lean against the walls, empty thermos lids in their hands, chins on chests, breathing deeply and regularly.

Alby tries jumping again. His boots thud on the wood floor, causing sand grains to jump. The girls do not stir.

He stomps over to Lisa, takes hold of the hem of her dress, and yanks. She snores on. He goes over to Kirsten’s shoe, takes off his backpack, and swings it as hard as he can against her shin. No movement.

He sighs, walks to the midpoint between the two girls, digs in his pack, pulls out a bugle, and blows a huge blast of air into it. Both girls’ eyes snap open.

Alby looks up at them. “I need your help,” he says.

Seven

The eagle’s talons press painfully against Alvy’s ribs. She had given up flailing and kicking after a few minutes and now hangs, limp and uncomfortable, saving her strength for the inevitable confrontation with the eagle’s beak. For now, though, they fly. High, pale-gray clouds reflect the steadily dimming lights of the thinning suburban sprawl.

The eagle banks, and Alvy, in spite of her fear and dread, feels faintly exhilarated by the speed and the rush of the air. They are descending toward an absurdly tall, garishly-lit theater marquee, double-outlined in neon and flashing tracer lights.

They land roughly. The eagle relaxes its claws and drops Alvy, who falls, sprawling, onto the filthy, corroded steel of the sign. She rolls and scrambles back, until her leg goes over the edge and she half loses her balance. She pulls her leg back up and returns a couple of inches, and then she and the eagle stare at each other.

Alvy is busily trying to imagine a set of defensive aerial gymnastics involving the buzzing tubes of hot neon.

The eagle bobs its head slightly but does not advance toward her.

Alvy is happy to put off her last-ditch leap for as long as possible, so she simply centers herself on the sign, prepares her muscles, and stares warily.

“I need your help,” the eagle says.

Alvy goggles, surprised, and surveys the thin air all around her once again, still hoping for some useful weapon or path of escape.

“I’ve been watching you,” the eagle says, and ruffles his feathers slightly.

Alvy sprints forward and leaps, hands out, tensed for the burn of the neon.

The eagle lazily reaches out a claw, snags Alvy in midair, and drops her back onto the sign.

“Don’t you want to hear my problem?” he asks.

Alvy backs again to the furthest edge of the sign, and folds her arms across her chest.

“I like to eat smelt,” the eagle says.

He shifts his eyes, turns his head to follow the motion of something in the sky, then turns back to Alvy.

“Something has been stealing the smelt from my part of the lake.” He pauses, lowers his head, and narrows his eyes. “I’ve been forced,” he says, “to eat herring.” He shudders.

Alvy continues to stare silently at him, her heart still thudding.

“I was on my way north,” he continues. “A couple of small creatures caught my eye.” He blinks. “Creatures of a certain size always catch my eye,” he says. “So I stopped flying north for a few days. I stopped by the river and stayed in the city and watched, and I believe I’ve seen enough. I believe you can help me.”

Alvy is scowling. “Why snatch me?” she demands. “Why not just ask?”

“You were busy,” the eagle says. “I was impatient. Once I had seen enough, I didn’t want to wait anymore.”

“Why me?” Alvy asks again.

“Oh, come now,” the eagle says. “You know it yourself. You are unique. You’re brilliant, you are inventive, you are just what I need.”

“I’m not a detective,” Alvy says.

“Inventor, detective, I really don’t discriminate. To a truly first-class mind, a problem is a problem, don’t you think?”

“My brother—” Alvy begins.

“I can only carry one, and I chose the one I wanted,” the eagle replies. “I should think you’d be gratified that you’re the one.”

“We’re a team,” Alvy objects.

“Don’t you ever wonder,” the eagle says, “whether he’s holding you back?” He taps a claw. “After all, aren’t you the brains of the operation?”

“Why should I help you?” Alvy asks. “What’s in it for me? I was happy where I was.”

“All right,” eagle says. “I’ll take you back. I’ll find someone else.”

“You said something was stealing your fish,” Alvy says, “what kind of a thing?”

“The smelt were there,” eagle says, “and now they’re not. I notice these things.”

“So notice where they’re going, and get them back.”

“You don’t enjoy a good puzzle?”

“Where is the puzzle? Perch. Watch. Notice. Catch. Eat.”

“Why do you think I asked you?” the eagle says.

“You didn’t ask,” Alvy says.

“Are you coming?” he asks. He holds out a claw. “The flight north will be a lot more comfortable, since I know you won’t be trying to wriggle free.”

“My brother—” Alvy says again.

“Are you coming?”

Alvy walks forward, and the eagle’s claw closes around her.

Eight

There is a knock at the door.

Alby looks around, panicked.

Kirsten appears from the kitchen with a couple of large bowls. She uses the bowls to gesture toward a pile of books in the corner of the room, and Alby sprints over and hides himself behind them.

Lisa opens the door, searches her pockets, and trades the delivery man a handful of bills for two heavy plastic sacks. She shuts the door and scoops Alby from his hiding place up onto the table.

Kirsten lifts a fat phone book onto her chair and sits on it. The girls peel the wrappers from their chopsticks, dump noodles and broth into the bowls, and start to wolf.

“Let’s go over this again,” Lisa says, around a mouthful of noodles.

Alby had turned his back on Alvy and gone inside the shop for a minute. When he came back out, the basket was still bobbing in the breeze, pulling gently against its tether. The bag of balloons Alvy had been drawing from still lay just where it had been. The moon still shone through the dusty air. There was no sign of his sister. He walked straight to the edge of the garage roof, and looked off, but there was no sign that anything unusual had taken place.

“Alvy?” he called.

He walked back into the shop and looked around, shaking his head perplexedly, and confirmed in his mind that he hadn’t seen his sister walk through. There was no way off the roof except through the shop. Even though he was certain he hadn’t seen her pass through, he nevertheless walked back into their shared living space, looked everywhere, and even walked all the way down to the street. Still no trace. He walked back out onto the roof, and looked carefully around. Nothing there but the familiar shapes of finished and half-built vehicles, scavenged junk, gravel, waves where the roofing tar had heaved, and close to the edge, rolling slowly in the breeze, a lone brown feather.

He walked over to it. As he approached, the feather twitched and levitated slightly. Strange— the wind didn’t seem to be shifting. He took another step forward. The feather let out a tiny but distinct spark of static electricity and jumped again. Alby reached out his hand toward the feather. The feather darted toward him, avoiding his outstretched fingers but flying parallel to his arm, and stuck tight against his shirt. When he pulled on it, it was surprisingly hard to remove, and it sent another painful spark into his hand.

Alby and the girls study the feather before them on the table, weighted down by the empty tea thermos.

“I wouldn’t have thought something brown could glow like that,” Kirsten says. She uses her chopsticks to spoon the remainder of the rooster sauce out of its container and onto her bowl of noodles.

Lisa lifts the thermos, just to see, and the feather again darts through the air and sticks itself against an empty Styrofoam take-out container. She picks it off and sticks it back under the thermos. “Let’s say she was carried off by the bird that dropped this weird feather,” she says. “That’s bad.”

Alby, pale, looks down at the floor.

“We need a tracking device for weird birds,” Kirsten says. “Maybe we should call the Department of Weird Birds, and ask whether they have a radio-collar program.”

“What’s with that tape on your head?” Lisa asks Alby, changing the subject. “Did you hurt yourself?”

“We had a disagreement,” Alby replies.

The girls look at him, confused.

“My hair and I,” he clarifies.

“Bad hair day?” Lisa asks.

“Exactly,” he nods.

“Can we see?” Kirsten asks.

Alby looks up at the girls. It might be nice, he thinks, to have some full-sized help for hair care. He shrugs. “You should be able to handle it.” He starts unwrapping tape. “I’ll probably need a little help…”

The tape comes off the hat with a linty rip, and the hat falls into his lap. Alby’s hair, free at last, explodes outward in all directions. There is a loud thunk as the thermos falls over. The feather sails into the hair, which begins to wind tightly around it.

“Hey,” Alby says. His arms flail at the hair and the feather. “Help!”

Lisa pokes her fingers into the corona, pinches the feather, and pulls.

“Ow!” yells Alby, as Lisa uses her other hand to free the feather.

“Mmf,” he says, as the hair, irritated, begins to cocoon his head.

Kirsten reaches in, pulls the hair back, and holds it in a ponytail with her fist.

“I see what you mean,” she says. “Bad hair.”

Lisa holds Alby’s hat onto his head with her thumb and twists the used tape in loops around the hat and Alby’s chin. The tail of the tape refuses to stick and dangles down, but the loops hold.

Lisa looks at the toppled thermos and twists the feather in her fingers. “A whole bird full of these would really be something,” she says. “I wonder whether we could use your hair kind of like a compass needle.”

Alby shakes his head. “If that were going to work, why didn’t it work just now? All I got was a snarl.”

“Maybe there’s too much interference,” Kirsten says. “Maybe if we could get you way out in the middle of nowhere…”

“… or way up in the sky,” Lisa says. “Didn’t you say you were working on a balloon?”

“You saw what happened,” Alby says. “I can’t just go up in a balloon and take my hat off! I’d just as soon jump out and try to fly!”

“We didn’t have any trouble with the hair,” Lisa says. “We’ll just do what we did.”

“Um,” Alby says, holding his arms out. “The basket’s only this wide.”

“Oh, right,” Lisa says.

“So unless you’ve got your own balloon…” He takes a bite of shrimp-chip.

Kirsten is concentrating. “Feel like another trip to the all-night Walgreens?” she asks.

***

“This is stupid,” Lisa says, setting the heavy shopping bags down on the sidewalk.

“His sister is missing,” Kirsten says. “We don’t know how much time we have. Come and help me get the Sunfish down.”

Alby watches from the side of the garage as Lisa, up on a step ladder, untwists the rope and slowly lowers the Sunfish down from the rafters.

Kirsten immediately starts stripping off the sail.

“Dad’s going to kill us,” Lisa says.

“He’s going to kill himself because he didn’t think of it first,” Kirsten says.

She tosses the sail aside in a heap. “Let’s get this thing out to the street.”

They wait for the 21 to pass, then drag the Sunfish out into the street. Alby watches anxiously, peeking out from under the flap of Kirsten’s backpack.

Kirsten pulls a roll of packing tape out of a Walgreens bag, twists a loop of tape around the tip of the boom, and leaves the roll dangling. She takes out another roll and repeats the process, about an inch removed from the first roll. She takes roll after roll out of the bag, until tape-rolls dangle from the full length of the boom. Then she sticks a broomstick through the rolls and looks to Lisa for the all-clear.

Lisa checks the street again, then gives her the thumbs-up.

Kirsten begins to run, holding the broomstick out, unrolling the tape as she runs.

Lisa shakes her head, but she hangs another Walgreens bag over her arm, takes a bottle of root beer out of the bag, shakes the bottle, untwists the cap, and starts to run after her sister, spraying root beer onto the tape as she runs.

Kirsten is still keeping about a block ahead.

Lisa’s bottle runs dry, and she switches it for another one. After five blocks, the tape and the root beer run out, and the girls dash back the way they came, hoping to make it before the next 21 comes along.

Kirsten is breathing hard, holding her broomstick like a spear.

“This isn’t going to work,” Lisa says. “It’s night.”

“So?” Kirsten says, and then they hear it: the humming.

“See?” Kirsten says.

The early dawn air vibrates with the intense hum.

“It’s a law,” Kirsten says.

The strands of tape are starting to buck and rise.

In the distance, they can hear the sound of a diesel engine.

“It’s the 21! Quick!” Lisa says.

The tape is moving faster now, slanting up toward vertical.

Kirsten catches up her backpack, which knocks Alby over and tosses him into the bottom of the pack.

The girls hop into the Sunfish, which is now starting to rise.

“This is disgusting,” Lisa says.

“Jealous,” Kirsten says.

The girls look up at the seething buzz of millions of root beer-addled flies, stuck tight to the packing tape.

Alby, bruised, crawls out of the pack and joins the girls looking up at the black sails.

“I can’t believe that worked at night,” Lisa says.

The little boat rises higher and higher, floating up into the first rays of the morning sun.

Nine

The eagle spreads his wings wide, braking and landing on a high branch of a bleached dead tree. “Here you go,” the eagle says, setting Alvy down on a limb. “Let me know when you have the thief.”

The eagle steps away from her and prepares to take off. Alvy goggles at him. “Where’s my workshop? Where’s my stuff? How am I supposed to contact you? How am I supposed to get out of this tree?”

The eagle turns away and beats his wings. “You’ll think of something,” he says. “That’s why I picked you.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Alvy asks, but the eagle is already soaring high into the sky.

Alvy continues to stare, dumbstruck. At the foot of the tree, a stream sparkles and widens, pouring over smooth granite boulders and disappearing over an embankment down to the still expanse of the lake.

She tests her footing. The branch looks rotten but feels solid enough. It is difficult to get a clear idea of the size of the tree from this vantage. She can see the trunk rising above her, and she can see other leafless limbs in the air all around her, but she has to take on faith that her own limb in fact meets up with any path to the ground.

She begins to edge sideways. She is grateful that the limb is dry, not wet and slippery.

Suddenly the wood beneath her feet turns to powder, and she is falling, reaching out to get her arms around the limb as she passes it but missing, then bicycling for a grip on anything but finding nothing.

She can feel her body accelerating, and then suddenly gray dust and chips explode around her, as she crashes spread-eagled into last year’s nest. Her fragment of nest jerks free of its branches, and she falls with it, loose fragments flying up around her, blinding her, filling her mouth and nose. Then she hits bottom, and the remainder of the nest disintegrates and settles over her in a filthy gray blanket.

Seconds pass. She seems still to be breathing. She lifts a bruised arm and twitches nest-dust away from her mouth and nose with the back of her hand. It tastes foul.

She scrabbles at her eyes and blinks away splinters, chalky rivulets of tears running down her cheeks. This is just unacceptable. The eagle should just have eaten her, the way she originally expected. What is she supposed to do out here in the middle of the woods without any tools? What did she let the eagle talk her into? The eagle picked her to find his fish. Isn’t that because he wants her to do what she does? But what she does takes paper, it takes gasoline, it takes tools! What it doesn’t take is rocks and water and a bunch of plants. Surely that was obvious!

She sits up and slaps at her clothes. Stupid eagle! I don’t belong out of the city!

She stands up, takes a step, and buries a leg deep in the pile of leaves and branches where she had landed. She pulls it free and slithers clumsily down off the pile. It feels great to get her boots back on solid ground!

She looks at the trunk of the eagle’s tree and spits. What she wouldn’t give for a speedboat or a dirt bike, right about now! What kind of a story was that eagle telling, anyway?

She can see the smooth steel of the lake spreading all the way to the horizon. All that lake, and not enough fish to satisfy one lousy eagle? Even if the eagle in question is finicky, stupid, mean, and crazy?

She sits down on a rock. What’s the point of stealing fish, anyway? She imagines smashing the glassy surface of the lake with a brick and reaching in through the shards to remove a fish. Putting on a mask and holding up the lake at gunpoint, the waters of the lake giving up a duffel bag filled with shining, flopping fish—one of them surely carrying a dye bomb.

She looks around her. Assuming the eagle wasn’t just raving nonsense, assuming the eagle was telling the truth and not just yanking her chain so he could dump her out here a million miles from civilization, assuming any of that, then this right here is the scene of an ongoing crime, where somebody is going to the trouble of systematically emptying the lake of the eagle’s favorite fish.

Come to think of it, it’s actually pretty funny. The thief might just have the kind of mind she could appreciate. Maybe she should catch the thief just to meet the thief. Maybe she should catch the thief just to congratulate the thief for finding such a perfect way of messing with that arrogant eagle. Maybe—oh, wait— Maybe she should catch the thief just to catch a ride back to any kind of town!

She wipes more dust from her cheeks. To do any of that, she’ll have to catch the thief. The thief, who is in the middle of a large-scale crime spree, right here, right now. She looks around, suspecting she might not be completely alone.

Here’s the thing, though; if the thief were just walking around in the open, then the eagle would have spotted him. On the other hand, even the eagle says he’s impatient. Maybe he didn’t do a good job of looking, preferring to let somebody else do his dirty work. Maybe what this job needs is someone just to do the work, take a careful look, and be patient. All she needs is a really good vantage point, where she can see the whole inlet.

She twists her body and looks slowly up the tall dead tree.

Drat!

She walks over to the tree and digs the toes of her boots into the cracked bark. She digs her fingers in, and slowly begins to climb.

Back out on her old limb, she finds that she can get a clear view of the entire inlet if she shimmies far enough out, to where the limb was too thin to safely hold the eagle, but where she feels secure enough, if a bit exposed.

***

After a couple of hours, she has seen the wind change twice, she’s seen what looked like a deer approach the water and turn back into the woods, and she’s seen a squirrel fall from a branch in the neighboring tree, only to catch itself on the branch below and scamper out of sight.

It doesn’t require an eagle-like impatience to conclude that she is not going to be able to perform a twenty-four-hour stakeout without leaving this branch. For one thing, she is thirsty. The good news is, she has become inspired to test out some tactics from watching the squirrel. Just out of reach is a thin green twig at the end of a long thin branch on the neighboring tree. Alvy jumps out slightly, grabs the twig (which bends under her weight) and swings down to a similar twig below, and so on down to the ground. Small size seems to confer some advantages.

Water is going to be easy, but other things are going to pose more of a challenge. Food, for example. She decides to take a tool inventory. Pockets of her leather jacket: empty. Front jeans pockets: empty. Rear jeans pockets: lint, otherwise empty. Meh! She really is no better off than a squirrel!

She walks down to the stream, kneels down, and scoops up water to her mouth with her cupped hands. Really the only thing she has that a squirrel doesn’t have is some past experience with improvisation. That nest might turn out to be good for something.

She walks over to the leaf pile and finds a handful of destroyed nest. It is papery, brittle, and bone dry. Perfect!

Alvy carries the nest flakes over to a granite ledge by the stream and sets it down in a small depression. Then she finds a couple of fist-sized rocks and clacks them together above the nest material, hard. She is surprised by how much this hurts her hands. She tries a slightly different technique, striking down with one rock against the other. It makes a loud noise and leaves a mark on both rocks. She tries again, wincing at the impact and the noise. Isn’t this how this is supposed to work?

The sky begins to darken but she works on, oblivious.

Isn’t there some other way to do this?

She walks back to the leaf pile and digs out a narrow stick about the length of her forearm. Hmm, maybe. She carries the stick back to her tinder pile, kneels, and rubs it back and forth vigorously between her palms. It makes her palms hot; hopefully it’s making heat down in the tinder too. She keeps at it. Sawdust wears off the stick and mixes in with the nest-particles, and her palms get hotter and hotter, but still no noticeable result. Something pokes dully into her shoulder. She looks up. A fat raindrop plops into her eye. Oh, great.

She redoubles her efforts, leaning out over the tinder to shelter it from the rain. More drops hit against her jacket.

The tinder stirs and stirs, but generates no spark, no heat, no smoke.

More drops hit against her hat, her arms, the stone around her. She sets the stick down, frustrated, and scans her surroundings for shelter. Nothing obvious presents itself.

She starts walking rapidly away from the lake, hoping to spot something she has missed. The patter of the rain increases, turning to a shower, then a downpour. Exhausted and lost, she runs into the wan shelter of a birch and watches herself get soaked.

Ten

Alby looks so proud and puffed up, with his shoulders thrown back and his long dreadlocks pointing straight ahead, that the girls have to laugh. Alby, for his part, is delighted to have even a temporary break from his hat. This eagle-tracking is great for hair obedience!

“Course correction, eighteen degrees,” Kirsten says.

Lisa shakes up another root beer and uncaps it, directing the spray high into the air, eighteen degrees to starboard, then drops the empty bottle onto the growing pile on the floor. There is a mad buzz as the flies change course to pursue the root beer.

“Sir, we’re running out of root beer, sir,” Lisa says. “We might want to start saving it for coarser adjustments. Plus, I want to be navigator now.”

The girls switch positions.

Alby shakes his head violently, enjoying how his dreadlocks stay still even when his head is in motion. Usually it is the other way around.

“We’ve been over water for a long time,” Kirsten says. “Do you suppose we’ll ever see land?”

Lisa points to a faint line on the horizon. “What bothers me,” she says, “is that we know what direction we’re going, but not how far we’re going. Maybe we’re going to fly across all the Great Lakes. I wish we had brought some sandwiches.”

Kirsten nods. It has been a long night.

***

When Kirsten wakes, clouds have moved in, and the line of shore has grown much closer. Lisa and Alby have drifted off, too. Alby’s head is lying on his folded arms on the bow. His locks are straining outward, straight ahead.

Good. They haven’t drifted off-course while she slept.

The first raindrop hits the deck.

It’s going to be weird, she thinks, if the boat fills up with rain, and we have to bail.

More raindrops fall. There is a crackling sound above her. She looks up and sees one of the ribbons of tape waving and buckling.

Up to now, the flies have kept the tape in pretty constant tension.

It is starting to be a real rain.

Lisa stirs.

Another strip of tape loses its rigidity and begins to flap.

Is the rain bothering the flies somehow?

Lisa opens her eyes.

Kirsten points out the flapping tape. Lisa’s eyes grow wide. “Hey Alby, wake up!”

Alby’s head jerks up. “What’s going on?” he asks.

“We’re not sure,” Lisa says. “Either the rain is washing off the root beer, or…”

The Sunfish’s bow takes a sudden dip, and throws Alby and the girls into a heap.

“…or it’s washing off the flies,” Alby finishes.

The rain falls, long ribbons of tape whip and snap around them, and the choppy surface of the lake grows nearer and nearer.

“I would feel a lot worse,” Kirsten says, “if we weren’t in a boat.”

The boat hits the lake, and an icy wave washes over them.

Lisa is the first to her feet. “Help me with the tape,” she says.

Kirsten stands and joins her.

Lisa reels in tape, hand over hand. Kirsten sticks a length of tape on the diagonal, from the boom to the mast, then starts joining other strips to the first, overlapping them in layers, trying to smooth them with her fingers. In the rain, the adhesive is tacky and sloppy. It holds, but the strips bunch together.

“This is going to be ugly,” Kirsten says.

They work quickly, reeling and sticking.

A sodden triangular mat is taking shape, with ugly tangled loose ends. It catches the wind and yanks the tape from their hands.

“Worked, though,” Lisa says.

The shore is growing very close, maybe a few dozen yards away.

They blow on, and more and more water appears to be pouring in. They are listing hard to port.

“Didn’t Dad say he was going to patch the hole in the hull?” Kirsten asks.

“Yeah,” Lisa says.

Kirsten looks down at the bobbing empty root beer bottles, useless for bailing. She splashes water out of the boat. As if that will do any good. And the water coming in, fast now, is cold.

She looks anxiously toward the shore. How far could they swim if they were really cold? It would be such an insult to freeze in the summertime within a few steps of land.

“Alby,” Lisa says, “this might be a good time to get on my shoulders.”

At least the waves aren’t so high.

The hull’s heavy side goes under again. The girls hang on tight.

Alby scrambles up onto Lisa’s shoulders. His locks, soaking wet, are wrapped tightly around his head but thankfully don’t seem to be getting in the way of his arms.

Wait! Have the locks lost the eagle’s trail?

The hull goes under again. The sail no longer seems to be providing much forward momentum; it is just acting to push the hull further under the waves.

The girls’ legs are already underwater inside the boat, even though the boat is still partially afloat. Their feet are starting to feel numb. The shore is still thirty yards away. An easy swim if it weren’t so cold.

“Let’s go,” Lisa decides. She looks over her shoulder at Alby, then jumps into the water. It hurts. She starts to paddle. In warmer water she is a competent—even elegant—swimmer. But nothing seems to be working right. It is like having several fewer joints.

Kirsten is slightly behind her, beating at the rain and the lake with wooden arms.

The wind is at their backs. At least the wind isn’t cold.

“Hey,” Kirsten yells out.

Lisa looks back.

Kirsten falls forward, and then stands upright. They have reached the shallows!

Lisa orders her legs to straighten. They half-comply, and she finds the bottom.

She fumbles forward, and slowly begins to rise from the frigid water into the rainy but pleasantly warm air.

Kirsten is thrashing at her side.

They slog through ankle deep water and up onto rocks and mud. Cold. Both girls are shivering hard and unable to stop. Lisa, her teeth clenched to stop them chattering, looks over her shoulder for Alby. He isn’t there. Did he lose his grip at the last minute? She scrambles to her knees. Where has he—

There— he is lying on the very edge of the water, unconscious, like a waterlogged branch washed up by the storm.

Lisa picks him up and holds him close. She can feel his tiny breaths heaving in and out. She lies back beside her sister, shivering, with the rain still falling down.

Eleven

Alvy, hungry, wet and cold, sits with her arms crossed and her head bowed at the foot of the tree. A shaft of golden sunlight pierces the dissipating clouds and illuminates the spot where she sits, warming her and causing her to look up. A film of rain glistens on every surface. The lake has calmed, and light dances on small waves like fish scales. Fish scales.

She stands up. Her clothes are clammy and cling to her skin. It is an unfamiliar, unpleasant sensation. Will she be able to walk herself dry, or will she just mildew to a standstill?

She begins to jump, two-legged, from rock to rock. It feels good.

Jump. Bam! Jump. Stupid eagle! Jump. Ditch me out here in the middle of nowhere! Jump. All so you don’t have to eat herring? Jump. Well, bring me some herring! Jump. Stupid eagle!

Her clothes stay damp, but her muscles begin to warm up.

Jump. If I had some tools… Jump. …you stupid eagle… Jump. …I could catch your fish thief. Jump. But what am I supposed to do? Jump. Beat him to death with sticks? Jump. Stupid eagle! Jump. Clang!

Clang?

She stops jumping and looks down. Underfoot is a flat scrap of rusted metal about the size of her torso.

She picks it up and shakes some of the mud off it.

This is what I have to work with? But at least it’s something.

She kicks around a bit and finds a cracked piece of driftwood to use as a handle for the metal scrap. There— a makeshift shovel. She surveys the area once again.

If you assume that the thief is fishing smelt out of this inlet, and if you assume that the thief is coming and going by land, then you can imagine a line—and not a very long one—that the thief has to cross.

She walks to one end of the imaginary line and starts to etch this imaginary line into the ground with the shovel. As she paces and etches, she tries to make a plan: I could dig a pit to trap the thief, but that would take forever. I could use the shovel to dig a bare patch on the ground, and use the bare patch to trap a footprint. But what if the thief runs off and all I have left is a footprint? I could—

The dragging scrap metal hisses along the ground, and then suddenly clunks into rock.

She looks down and sees that the whole remaining third of her imaginary line is covered with rock. Digging or scraping isn’t going to help her there. She shoves her ugly shovel violently into the ground in frustration. There is a buzz, and the dust around the shovel bursts into flame.

What’s this?

She digs again, cautiously, with the tip of her shovel, and brings up a severed, rubber-coated wire. Electricity? Out here? But first things first: she digs around the smoldering weeds and carries them in the shovel, gently, over to a patch of exposed rock. Then she sets the weeds down and sets about gathering the driest twigs and branches she can find.

After a few minutes, she has a satisfactory campfire going, and she sits down beside it to soak up the heat and the smoke.

***

When she wakes up, the fire has dwindled down to embers and has to be resuscitated. Once that’s done, she returns to inspect the wire she has uncovered. Perhaps it leads somewhere?

She scratches the shovel against the exposed wires, looking for more sparks. When there are none, she begins to dig along the wire, uncovering it and pulling it to the surface. For the first time since her arrival, it feels like progress.

Little by little, she uncovers the wire, skirting the rocks and looping around trees. It seems to be working its way toward the shore, but via a roundabout path determined by the presence of dirt and absence of rocks. She works faster as she goes along, drawn on by the hope of finding something, anything that might help to justify all this work and this whole stupid situation.

When she is within ten feet of the shore—hot, tired, but mercifully drier—the wire suddenly dives straight down into the soil and disappears.

Several minutes of excavation make a big hole and expose more wire but don’t make anything clear and don’t provide any way to continue. A wild-goose chase.

Alvy sits down, leans back on her hands, and shuts her eyes. She can’t recall a time when she felt such a loss of confidence. Does she really have it? Or is all her success bound up in her home, her tools and her brother?

She opens her eyes and looks at the long, useless wire lying in the dirt, looping out of sight. She wishes she had not wasted the effort. But then she had started out trying to establish a perimeter, to draw a line around the inlet that the thief would have to cross; to find some way of rigging a trap or an alarm to give her a moment’s advantage; to give her some chance of catching—or at least identifying—the thief.

She takes her shovel and severs the near end of the wire, then starts coiling it around her arm, and humming.

She retraces all her steps, all the way back to the beginning of her imaginary line.

Now then, where was I? This time, I have an additional tool; something that may actually get the job done right.

She climbs up into the low branches of a bush and ties off one end of the wire, tugging at it to make sure it is reasonably secure. Then she climbs down and runs from bush to bush, stringing the wire out at about the height of her raised arms, and twisting it around tree trunks. Not invisible, of course, but if the thief isn’t expecting it… And especially at night…

The work goes quickly, and even the rocky section has just enough exposed plants growing out of cracks to provide hooks and hangers and tie-points for the wire.

She reaches the end of the imaginary line and drops the remaining loops of wire onto the rocks. The wire is long enough! It’s about time her luck took a turn for the better. She surveys her handiwork. Not elegant, certainly. Ugly. But all she needs for starters is a trip and a shout…

At that moment, the wire pulls taut and shakes violently. Something is pulling on it, and hard.

Right now? How could her trap have worked so quickly?

She begins to follow the wire back, trying not to expose too much of herself to the eyes up ahead.

The line continues to jerk.

She jogs along, hoping against hope, dying to see what she has caught. The wire is unstrung, and has been pulled under a leafy bush. She tugs gently on the wire, and gets a powerful jerk in return, followed by a sudden silence.

She creeps forward, not knowing what she will find. The bush remains motionless. Cautiously, she reaches out an arm and slowly, gingerly lifts the nearest branch.

Furious yellow eyes stare out at her.

Oh, perfect: she has snared a lynx.

She can see that the lynx has a twist of wire wrapped around its foreleg. The lynx has figured this out too, and seems to be pondering its options. Alvy doesn’t love any of hers, either. Until she gets the lynx sprung, her trap is ruined, half pulled down. But if she frees the lynx, then she’ll have a freed lynx to contend with.

She walks off down the wire to look for her shovel. When she gets it, she walks back, and stares at the lynx-bush. Maybe this is the point when she should chuck it in, leave the lynx to starve, start walking, and try to find a road, figure out how to hitch a ride, find her way back to the city. If she stays out here much longer, she might starve along with the lynx. But walking away from the tangled lynx doesn’t seem within the spirit of the game as she has ever played it, so she takes a look at her shovel and her surroundings: Can lynx swim? She takes a look at her boots. Couldn’t I have put on running shoes when I woke up yesterday morning? And then she brings down her shovel and chops off the wire.

The lynx gives a medium-sized tug at its end but then goes still again.

Oh well, maybe this is going to be easier than she thought.

She tiptoes around to the other side of the bush and whacks another break in the wire.

No movement at all from under the bush. That’s a relief. At least she doesn’t have a loose, angry lynx to contend with.

But then the lynx is out of the bush and bearing down on her fast.

She takes a giant leap over the boulders, and lands wrong. She’s bringing a big pile of brush and debris sliding down after her. The lynx is in the air, and Alvy is sliding, falling, tumbling… and the pile of branches and stones is falling right on top of her, scratching and pummeling and tossing her, debris falling down… Then, silence.

It’s dark under here, but she’s not badly hurt as far as she can tell.

She lies very still, and holds her breath, waiting to see yellow eyes or feel digging, batting paws but there’s nothing. How long is it prudent to wait? Do lynx have long attention spans?

Alvy lies very still for several minutes, then tries an exploratory kick. There’s no return motion, so she tries her arms. They seem to be working normally, so she rolls a bit and starts lifting off sticks and rolling off rocks. It’s a wonder she wasn’t killed just by the rocks; boulders as big as her head have rolled down and piled up on the branches and sticks that seem to have saved her.

She dusts herself off. Now, where was I? Oh, yes. If you assume that the thief is stealing fish out of this inlet, and if you assume that the thief is coming and going by land…

She walks up the hill to the severed wire. It has just enough slack in it to allow a splice. Now that’s a mercy. But if you don’t assume that the thief is coming, and going by land…

She applies the other splice and lifts up the section of wire the lynx has pulled down. Then she walks down to the shore and stares at the water and the waves rolling in.

Twelve

When Kirsten opens her eyes, Lisa has found a soggy pack of matches in her dress pocket and has a small fire going. Kirsten edges over toward it, grateful for the extra warmth. The sun is out now, but it’s still cold inside her wet clothes. Alby has come to, and he is sitting close to the fire with his arms around his knees. The smoke rises straight up as they sit and scheme. Kirsten notices that she is still wearing her backpack, and the straps are starting to chafe. She loosens them and slips out of the pack. A wave of water pours from the flap and hisses around the fire. She opens the flap to see how the contents have fared. The cheese and crackers, wrapped in plastic, have done okay. She breaks them out. Alby has to hold a single slice of cheese with both hands, and he has to open his jaws wide to take a bite. This makes the girls laugh. It’s not a real meal, but it’s enough to help give them some spirit back.

They look out at the lake. Lisa says, “I guess your locks won’t work when they’re wet.”

Alby says, “They might not work anyway, like at your house: they couldn’t pick anything up until we were way up in the air.”

Kirsten asks, “How long until they dry out, and we can try again?”

“It’s hard to say. It’s sunny, so probably not too long.”

They go back to watching the lake. After a few minutes, Alby stands up. “I’m going to take a look around,” he says. He walks off into the undergrowth.

“Are there any more crackers?” Kirsten asks. Lisa passes her the wrapper.

Suddenly, they hear a scream.

Kirsten drops the crackers, and both girls start crashing through the woods toward the source of the noise. It’s Alby, with his legs kicking the air, high off the ground. Evidently, his locks have dried. They have seized the opportunity to snake upward, grab an overhanging tree branch, and pull Alby off his feet and into the air.

His face is red. He is swinging his arms, trying to catch hold of the branch so he can take some weight off his scalp.

Kirsten wrestles his locks free of the branch, and holds them in a knot in her fist while she lowers Alby down and lets him catch his breath.

“Alvy had the right idea, cutting hers off,” he mutters.

Kirsten can feel the locks flexing in her hand, but she has a strong grip and doesn’t let go.

Lisa has found a sodden piece of string in her dress pocket, and she helps Kirsten bind the locks into a single frustrated bundle. Alby pats his hair warily. “Well, I guess that answers that,” he says. “When they felt the pull, they didn’t have time to mess with me. I guess they’ve lost it.”

“Maybe if we get out somewhere high,” Kirsten says, surveying nearby trees for their climbing potential.

“Easy for you to say,” Alby says. “I’ve had enough of heights for a few minutes.”

Lisa looks at him apologetically, and puts him in her pocket. “If we want to find Alvy…” she says.

She grabs a low branch, and swings her legs up. Alby hangs on. She gets up to the next branch, and Kirsten swings up from the ground, following.

“Do we all need to go?” Alby asks. “Shouldn’t somebody stay down to catch us when we fall?”

Lisa, fairly high in the tree by now, tests a branch with her toe, and decides it’s a bit too small. They’ve climbed as high as they can in this tree. “Ready?” she asks.

Alby shrugs helplessly. There isn’t another way.

Lisa steadies herself, and shucks off the string one-handed. Alby’s locks pause, considering, and then whip painfully around Lisa’s wrist and lever Alby out of her pocket until he is upside down, rigidly tethered to Lisa’s wrist. Alby and Lisa both yelp in pain.

Kirsten, on the limb below, is too far away to help. “Alby, you okay?” she asks.

Between the pain and the indignity, Alby can only sputter.

Lisa, for her part, is trying to figure out how she can get a hand free to work on the locks without losing her grip and falling out of the tree. She decides that she’s going to have to climb down out of the tree with Alby still attached, and worry about removing him once she’s on the ground. “Sorry,” she says, and reaches a foot down. Kirsten sees what she’s doing, and tries to get herself down and out of the way.

Alby just grits his teeth and holds on. Lisa swings down off the limb and onto the ground, jarring Alby and making him gasp in pain. Kirsten rushes up and pries him loose.

The girls retie the locks into a paralyzed bundle.

Alby is fuming. “Any other bright ideas?” he snaps. “Maybe you could just throw me out of the tree and see what happens.”

“Maybe if we were out on the water,” Kirsten says. “Maybe that would cut down on interference.”

“I’m not going out there again,” Alby says, stubbornly jutting his chin. “That was cold, remember?”

“She means in a boat,” Lisa says.

“Right,” Alby says, “just float me out there in one of your shoes. My hair and the laces should get along great.”

“We could build a birch-bark canoe,” Kirsten says. “At least an ugly, floppy one.”

“We would have to have something to sew with,” Lisa objects. “And something to seal the seams with. It would take us until fall.”

“How about a dugout,” Kirsten says. “We’ve got the fire. Maybe we could hollow out a log by burning it. Since we are stuck in the Stone Age.”

Alby and Lisa frown at her.

“You got anything better?” she asks.

They continue to frown, but don’t offer up other alternatives.

“Okay then,” Kirsten says. “Let’s go look for logs.”

Shaking their heads, Lisa and Alby walk slowly off into the woods.

Kirsten starts off along the shoreline, looking for fallen trees. This time it’s Lisa who calls out.

“Hey,” she yells, “come look at this!”

There is some rustling and crashing while Kirsten and Alby try to get over to where Lisa is. Lisa is looking at a leafy, muddy mound, which gradually resolves itself into an old-style Volkswagen Beetle, incongruously parked here in the woods, far from any road. Its wheels are straddling a canoe-sized fallen tree trunk.

“There’s your log,” Lisa says. “I guess that’s what stopped the car.”

“Pretty funny car for off-road,” Alby says, but the girls ignore him. They are busy checking out the condition of the car. It doesn’t look good. The tires are shredded, the hood is crumpled, and the body is eaten with rust.

“Planning to make this fly?” Alby asks.

“No, but it might float,” Kirsten says.

Lisa nods, smiling.

“Great,” Alby says. “Let’s carry it over to the water.”

“Quit pouting, and help us think about this,” Lisa says. “It doesn’t look easy to roll.”

“Maybe if we had some skids,” Kirsten says, “we could slide it?”

Alby tries to picture the three of them pushing or pulling a car. “Got any salt?” he says. “Maybe we could attract a herd of deer to help pull.”

“Or squirrels,” Kirsten says. “Lots of squirrels.”

Lisa has stalked off, climbing up over the rise and following the sound of running water. There’s a small creek running over rocks in a curving path down to the lake. She looks back the way she has come, down toward the stranded Volkswagen.

“Hey,” she yells, “I’ve got a better idea.”

Kirsten and Alby come to join her, and Kirsten quickly sees what she means.

Both girls start gathering armloads of brush and dumping them into the creek. Most of the brush washes downstream. Alby points a finger at a tall downed birch sapling, and the girls drag it over and dump it across the stream. Its branches reach in and down, and up and out.

The girls bring more brush, which washes and catches in the birch tree’s branches. It’s hard work, and the girls are soon muddy and covered with twigs.

The creek widens slightly behind the girls’ growing dam.

Alby walks off for a few minutes. When he returns, he directs the girls to another downed birch tree, and they drag it over and add it to the pile. The dam is growing pretty dense now, and the water is stacking up behind it, forming a small pond. The girls eyeball it.

“Maybe one more tree?” Kirsten says.

Alby goes and finds them another tree. They drag it, scraping and snagging across the ground, and lay it crown to crown with the first tree, forming a huge, curving wall.

The water rushes under and around this third tree, but with another dozen armloads of brush, the pond begins to fill, and a thin trickle of creek water begins to run down toward the Volkswagen.

The three of them walk down, well to the side, to wait and watch. It’s a long wait, the leaves and grass around the car slowly rustling and stirring and flowing, and another small pond forms on the uphill side of the log under the wheels of the car, but eventually the log and car together rock slightly, and begin to slide— slowly at first, then faster— stopping and starting and stopping, as the water and mud push them down toward the lake.

A final surge carries them forward, and the log and car splash into the lake and then sit there, beached on the rocks.

The girls scramble down to take a closer look.

“Hard to say,” Kirsten says.

“Here,” Lisa says, and she darts up onto the bank and brings back a long branch the size of a pole.

The two girls together try to lever the Volkswagen out of the shallows.

“Why are we messing with the car, again?” Alby asks.

But the girls give a final heave, and the car totters, tips, and splashes over on its side in a deep spot, then rights itself and begins to bob out into the lake.

“Quick!” Lisa says, and the girls wade in deeper, catch the car by the bumper, and drag it back before it gets out of reach.

“Here’s our boat,” Lisa says.

***

It’s a bit of a struggle to get the car dragged into shallow enough water to be able to get the doors open. In any case, only one of the doors opens at all; the passenger side door appears to be stuck permanently shut. When they get the driver’s side door open, Alby and the girls pile in and shut it behind them, only to realize that this means the car is stranded in shallow water on its rims. Someone will need to get out. After a brief exchange of glances, Lisa slides across the other two and climbs out, shutting the door behind her. She’s going to have to paddle. She does a quick search for the flattest, whitest piece of driftwood she can find, then wades back out into the chilly water with the paddle under her arm. She puts her shoulder against the car, and shoves. It grates across the gravel and begins to bob. She takes a splashing running start, and bounds up over the submerged bumper and onto the roof of the car, where she sits cross-legged on the sunroof and tries to reach the water with the paddle.

She finds it works best if she lays herself flat, reaches way out, and sculls the paddle in the water. She doesn’t have a lot of control this way, but she’s got the car moving out away from shore.

Alby and Kirsten are looking up at her anxiously. The car does appear to be watertight, and they can see the surface of the lake level with the bottoms of the windows.

There is a gentle breeze, but it doesn’t seem to be able to get a grip on the exposed portion of the VW, so Lisa has a slow but fairly easy time rowing. About a hundred yards offshore, she takes a break and knocks on the sunroof, startling Alby and Kirsten out of their hypnotized enjoyment of the gentle boat ride. Lisa points toward shore, widens her eyes, and shrugs. Kirsten reaches up and tries to open the sunroof. It’s stuck. Lisa shifts her weight around until she’s straddling the sunroof, and then Kirsten tries again. This time, it opens. When it gets all the way open, Lisa reaches down to try to grab Alby, who is being held up by Kirsten. The stretch causes her to lose her footing, and she tries to catch herself but drops one leg down the sunroof, and then all of her tumbles in after it, squashing Alby and Kirsten, and causing the car to tilt violently to one side, which dips the sunroof under the surface for a moment, and they all get soaked again.

Alby is unhurt, and when they get themselves untangled, Lisa stands on the seat, quickly frees his hair, and holds him aloft, one-armed.

Alby’s locks foing out horizontally, pointing toward land, and he smiles with relief.

“That white tree,” Alby says, pointing. The girls’ heads are also out of the sunroof, and they look, and see what he means. Lisa winds his locks tightly and hands him down to Kirsten, who sets him on the seat. Then Lisa climbs back out, straddles the sunroof until Kirsten gets it closed, then begins to paddle.

Thirteen

Alvy hums as she works. This is going to be a big fish! She had started with the spine, gently bending a long, thick branch, then had spent a happy hour hunting down appropriately-sized curved sticks to use for ribs, laying them out along the spine to get the relative sizes correct. Then she had used her shovel to chop down an armful of grass stems the length of her forearm, and now she was carefully using the stems to tie the ribs in place along the spine, holding the spine down with one foot and pulling up hard on the ends of each stem to draw each knot down tight. It was coming together rather nicely, and she was enjoying both of the art of it and the hard muscle work in the warm sunshine. It wasn’t clear that the tail was going to look quite right, but then this was only improv.

She puts a finishing touch on the approximate skull and stands back to take a look. Yes, that should do nicely. She climbs in and crouches in the body of the skeleton, gauging the clearance of the ribs above her head. Really, this is turning out to be one of her best efforts. Alby would be proud. She frowns, thinking of her brother, and hopes he isn’t worrying too much. She shakes the thought aside and steps out. Now I need a skin. She walks along the edge of the shoreline, carefully scrutinizing the piles of driftwood and debris. There. That looks perfect.

She stretches out her hands and gathers up a faded but intact bread bag that has washed or blown in from who knows where. The size looks just about right. She hikes back over to her skeleton with her armload of bread bag. It is quite a struggle pulling the bag over the skeleton’s head all the way down over the tail, and when she is done, the bag, worn looking and sloppy, hides her masterpiece skeleton, making it look like a great flabby heap. But there is no helping that. She lifts the light but ungainly bag-mass over to the fire, then sets it down and edges it nearer to the flames. At a certain point, the thin plastic begins to melt and shrink, pulling tight against the twig bones until they protrude slightly. Then she snatches the fish away and turns it, roasting it carefully until the skin is taut all over, a misshapen but recognizable trout with garish orange and pink dots and blobs.

Now for the tricky part. She has laid out two nearly-identical sticks almost exactly her height, and she holds one immediately above the fire’s flames until its bark begins to smoke. Then she uses the smoking stick to stab the trout in the ribs, stretching the plastic deep into the wound without causing large tears. She leaves the stake in place, then deliberately repeats the procedure on the other side of the fish. It seems successful; there are no noticeable holes except the remaining un-shrunken mouth of the bag flapping past the fish’s tail. Perfect. She carries the fresh fish wobbling down to the water, and sets it in nose-first. She smiles broadly. This is going to be fun!

She lifts the bag and crawls inside the fish. Visibility isn’t great. At best, the clear sections of the bag had turned cloudy when the plastic shrank, but she can still make out objects as if through greasy glass.

She tucks the mouth of the bag in after her and ties it off as best she can. It looks like it ought to hold. Then she rocks the fish gently from side to side, pulling carefully on the oars, until the bank lets go of the tail and she began to float. The round sticks do not make ideal oars, but the fish floats, and it flops forward, deeper into the water of the inlet. It would be ironic, she thinks, if the thief took the land route and sprung the wire trap now while she is out here on the lake, but it is good to be moving in a vehicle of her own design. It has been too long.

She rows steadily, and the trout makes its way out into the center of the little lagoon.

Now then, if I were a fish thief… She allows the trout to drift. Is there really anything to see out here?

She hears the faint throbbing of an engine in the water. Amazing, how sound carries. The throbbing gets louder, resolving into the steady chop chop chop of… what? A ship’s propeller? She rows with one arm, turning the trout, and tries to get a full view of her surroundings. She sees a huge shadow looming nearby, and the chop chop chop becomes intense. She stirs the water vigorously, trying to get a perspective on the source of the noise. Out of the murky section of the bag on the bottom of the fish, just past her thigh, she catches a glimpse of a large translucent moving object. Another bagfish? She swirls the oar. The object is big and appears to be hourglass shaped. There aren’t jellyfish in the Great Lakes, are there? Certainly none with motor noise…

The thing is moving fast and changing direction, zigzagging beneath her. She drops the oar and presses her face against the belly of the fish, hoping to get a better view of the thing’s next pass. There! In the rear half of the hourglass— a flash of scales. The body of the hourglass is a mesh of something. Netting? Is it some kind of fish trap?

The thing reaches the end of a pass and doubles back, this time closer to her depth. Time to row.

She beats at the water, producing plenty of bubbles but not a lot of motion. Really, now. That thing is bearing down fast!

There is a sudden tearing sound, and Alvy’s fish is ripped free of the water and up into the air. She scrambles around the careening fish on her hands and knees, trying to find a window that points upwards, so she can try to get a clue of what’s going on.

The fish is being carried by some kind of large bird—an osprey?—and other bird shapes are closing in. It’s a flock of gulls, harassing the osprey. Are all birds like this? Can’t a guy eat his fake fish in peace? The gulls are beating the air around the osprey and diving at it.

The osprey drops the fish to pick up speed, and Alvy is falling out of the sky. She is arrested by the beak of a gull with no sense of proportion—her fish is almost as big as it is—and the gull flaps clumsily for a few seconds above—is that a road?—and then spits her out.

Alvy and her fish flop out of the sky, head-over-tail, side-over-side, and finally slap down into the bed of a speeding pickup truck. They tumble a few more times and come to rest against the tailgate. The fish crinkles softly in the wind.

***

Alvy lies still for a long time, no longer able to ignore all her bruises. She’s grateful now for all the breaks in the bag letting fresh air in, and she lets the air blow over her, not moving, hoping she hasn’t broken too many bones.

She doesn’t try to move again until the truck slows, turns, rolls down some bumps, and finally stops. The doors open and shut, and the bed of the truck rolls a little on its springs as people get out.

She peels herself out of the mashed fish. All of her seems mostly to work, so she climbs up on the wheel well and peeks over the edge.

She’s in a campground. Nobody appears to be looking her way. She heaves herself out and over, falling a long way, and rolling on the landing. She darts over into a patch of weeds and sits down to look around some more and take stock. On a picnic bench in the nearest campsite is a bag of Cheetos. It’s good to be back in civilization! She verifies that there is another weed patch on the far side, then dashes through, leaping high and snagging the Cheetos as she goes by, then dragging the bag behind her as she sprints back into the weeds. Ah, Cheetos. Life is sweet.

She takes an enormous mouthful of Cheeto and comes away with powdery orange grease covering her nose and ringing her eyes, but she doesn’t care. She’s been starving for a night and day, but now she has a whole sack of Cheetos, food of the gods. She’s going to need something to drink pretty soon, though.

She takes another bite of Cheeto and looks out.

Two pairs of campers pass each other, one pair carrying a cooler between them.

“They are out of smelt,” one of the men with the cooler says, “but they think they’ll have some in the morning.” He jerks a thumb toward the edge of the campground.

Alvy drops her Cheeto. This might be worth checking out. She waits for the campers to pass, then darts out and runs to the next patch of weeds. Ahead of her is a blue wooden-sided building. She runs up to it, presses close to the wall, and sticks her head around the corner. There is no one in sight, but she has a wide expanse of parking lot to cross, unless she can reach—she sprints again—that tree. There’s another tree, and then she can see the sign over the back door of the fish market. Well, this is a predicament. She’s hiding against the trunk of this tree, with the beach on one side, parking lots on the other and plenty of places to hide— there are empty crates and boxes stacked up behind the fish market— but she’s tired, she’s thirsty, and she may have to wait until morning to see who will be delivering the smelt. She would just as soon be somewhere more comfortable, or at least somewhere she can get a drink of water.

Across the way, she sees a woman walking up to the blue building. Well, it’s worth a try, but she’ll have to get back over there.

She plots out a route with a few patches of grass the height of her shoulder and decides to move slowly and take her chances. Don’t fast-moving objects capture attention anyway?

She saunters slowly along the strip of grass, even slower across a strip of bare gravel, and practically oozes back against the blue building. She thinks she passed the door on this end when she was going by a minute ago. And here it is!

She leans against the door, and it opens a crack, just enough for her to squeeze through. It’s dim in here, and quiet. Boats and the frames of boats hang in the rafters. She feels homesick for her workshop.

At the far end of the open space is a sink. Too high to reach, but if she climbs up on these books here… and from there onto this bench… then she can get up onto the table… and jump from the table onto this counter here… and then it’s a short walk over to the sink.

She pushes against the faucet handle with both palms and turns on a trickle of water. She hops down into the sink and enjoys the tall waterfall, then holds out her hands and drinks delicious mouthfuls of cold water, washing the remaining orange crumbs off her face. It takes several slippery flying leaps to get hold of the lip of the sink and pull herself back out. She shoves the faucet shut, climbs up a fishnet, walks out onto a rafter, then lies down to wait for nightfall.

Fourteen

As before, it’s not too hard to get the Volkswagen to move, but accurate steering is a whole different matter. Although Lisa is trying hard to keep the car heading toward the white tree, she is soon forced to be glad that she’s heading toward shore at all, and she gives up on accuracy.

When the Beetle finally lands, they are completely out of sight of the white tree. It’s around off to the north someplace. They’ll have to go and find it.

Kirsten shoves open the driver’s door, and water floods into the car, which sways slightly, then settles down a little.

Kirsten passes Alby to Lisa, who carries him to shore. Lisa’s arms and shoulders are sore from all that rowing. They start to walk north, hoping they’ll be able to get a vantage point that looks anything like what they saw from out on the lake. Off in the woods, they catch a glimpse of the tufted ears and tail of something stalking between trees.

“Hey, a lynx!” Lisa says. “Dad’s always talking about those.”

“We could probably get a closer look,” Kirsten says. “We’ve got bait.”

“Hey,” Alby says, “this is the great North Woods. You never know what could be hiding in those trees. Maybe you girls are the bait.”

“It’s a beautiful summer day,” Lisa says. “Warm, sun shining. Perfect for ghost stories.”

Alby ignores her.

“You would think that monsters only come out at night,” he says. “But the really dangerous ones—the really scary ones—only come out on perfect days like this. They wait for days like this, because that’s when you least expect—”

They didn’t even see it coming—the brown blur that darted out and pulled Alby off his feet and dragged him toward the line of trees. Some kind of big weasel?

Both girls immediately give chase, yelling and waving their arms.

The marten drops Alby and disappears up a tree.

The girls run up to Alby, who is scraped up and gasping for breath. He puts his head in his hands, and the girls give him some room. Then he looks up. “We’ve got to find her,” he says.

***

They have almost given up hope when they finally spot the white tree. They reach its trunk and stare up at the bare limbs.

“Well?” Kirsten says.

“I’ll do it,” Alby says, gritting his teeth. He unties his locks. They tense and writhe slowly, seeming confused. Alby folds his arms, waiting for the locks either to point a direction or else tie him in a painful pretzel-knot. They continue to writhe. “I’ve never seen them do that before,” Alby says. “I wonder what it’s supposed to mean.”

He cautiously starts to pull them together and tie them up. The locks don’t resist, which is alarming. He ties the knot tightly and looks at Kirsten for a decision. “I guess we follow the bearing,” she says, and stalks off into the woods. Lisa and Alby follow.

After a few minutes, they come to the road. Lisa puts Alby down into a pocket, where he makes a weird bulge. They wait for a string of cars to pass, then jog across and try to spot a route up the steep hill beyond. It’s going to be a long climb.

Alby actually has the easiest time of it, running from rock to rock. The girls follow him, stepping on the same rocks, but the rocks tend to roll under the girls’ feet and tumble down the hillside. Alby still looks grim, bounding on ahead of the girls, hoping they’re getting close, hoping for some sign. Then there is a loud snap.

The string around Alby’s hair breaks, and his locks stand out from his head in a spiky bouquet. Alby freezes, darting his eyes around, hoping there’s something to see.

“Up there,” Kirsten points.

On a ledge immediately above them, there’s a tall pine, and high in the pine they can see a nest.

Alby runs up a narrow ravine and pokes his head over, then runs up the rest of the way. The girls can see the tops of his crazy locks bobbing above the lip of the ledge.

Lisa holds out her hands in a stirrup and boosts Kirsten up, then Kirsten holds out an arm and pulls, and Lisa scrambles up after her.

Alby is over by the foot of the tree, staring at something. The ground around him is littered with feathers and eagle droppings, fish scales and broken bones. Partly covered by debris is a shape that looks neither fish nor bird. It’s a hat.

Alby starts to sprint, pouring on a remarkable burst of energy, dashing his body into the trunk of the pine, clawing with hands and feet at the bark, scrambling straight up like a demented squirrel. There is a high scream and a sudden shadow. The eagle dives toward Alby, and all his locks dive toward the eagle with such force that they carry him away from the tree and into the air where he falls, windmilling, and Lisa snatches him up just before he hits the ground.

Both girls jump from the ledge and bend their knees in anticipation of the impact. Lisa lands badly and cries out in pain.

The eagle’s arc carries it back high into the sky, and it circles, watching. Lisa tries to take a step and crumples to the ground. Kirsten, looking over her shoulder at the eagle, offers Lisa a hand, and pulls her back to her feet, helping her a few steps down the slope and under the branches of a birch. The eagle is soaring away, disappearing.

Alby is no longer ahead of them, so they turn and look. He’s just standing there, locks twisting above him, looking up at the sky where the eagle had been.

Fifteen

Alvy wakes up just as the sun is going down. She sits up, stiff from lying on the bare rafter. It’s completely silent except for a low murmur from the campground and the quiet splash of the waves. She climbs down the net by feel and drops onto the counter, then decides she wants another drink of water. This time she remembers to push a plastic cup into the sink ahead of her, to make sure she has something to climb up on so she can get back out.

After her drink and a quick wash, she creeps down her ladder of objects, hurries across the length of the room, and squeezes out the crack in the door.

The trip across the open space between the parking lot and the dock is much easier in the dark. There’s a large dog sniffing off in the shadows of the dock, but either it’s downwind of her or else just doesn’t care. It ignores her completely as she passes by.

There’s a truck idling out back of the fish market. Curses! Has she missed the delivery? Is it going on right now?

She runs across a wedge of shadow toward the stack of discarded crates and boxes. Suddenly she finds herself flying forward, and she tumbles to the ground. Her foot has caught in something. She picks herself up and tries to untangle her foot. She has stepped into a short coil of fishing line, broken at one end, with a lead sinker tied to the other.

There is movement on the other side of the market’s back door. She creeps carefully to the stack of boxes, winding up the fishing line as she goes. She drops the line and sinker into a pocket, and then pulls herself up and finds a vantage point in deep shadow, on top of a wooden crate against the market’s cedar siding.

A man pushes out the door backward, his arms wrapped around an evidently heavy cardboard carton. Another man follows, walking forward, supporting the other end of the carton.

“All the fishermen up here are a little weird,” the first man says, “but not like this. I’ve never even met the guy. We just keep exchanging notes like we’re in grade school or something.”

They lower the carton carefully to the ground.

“And I don’t know what’s up with this barter arrangement. I could pay him money, but I guess this is what he wants.”

The man opens the door, and steps back so the other man can pass ahead of him.

“Well,” he continues, “he can get smelt when nobody else can, and it’s always fresh.”

The door swings shut, muffling the men’s voices.

Alvy settles down, making herself comfortable for the long wait ahead. She wishes she could make out the lettering on the carton, but she doesn’t want to be down on the driveway when the men come back out.

It turns out this is a good decision, because the door immediately swings back open, and the men walk out, now wearing light jackets. They get into the idling truck and slowly drive up the driveway, crunching gravel.

Alvy waits and listens to the silence descend. When she’s sure everything is completely still, she climbs down off her crate and over to the carton. The letters are large enough to read even in the dim glow of the distant security lights, but they seem only to contain an unfamiliar manufacturer’s name and handling instructions, with no clue to the nature of the crate’s contents.

She climbs onto the carton and makes a halfhearted effort to pull it open, but the glue holds and she quickly gives up and returns to her perch by the wall. The quiet deepens. Cars pass occasionally, and indistinct voices float up the hill on the other side of the market.

Finally all sound dies away, and Alvy is alone with the motion of the water, some lost moths, and the whine of a single indifferent mosquito.

Her legs begin to get sore.

***

Something about the shadows rearranges itself. A portion of the dark darkens. Alvy shifts in her seat. A huge box-shape is coming down from the sky.

She gets to her feet. The box settles down onto the driveway, squeaking softly and unpleasantly as it lands. Styrofoam! But that doesn’t explain the descent from above.

She squints up, trying to see. There’s something big up there, blocking out the stars, but she can’t bring it into focus.

There’s a soft pop, and something breaks free from the top of the big styrofoam box and swings over toward the cardboard carton the men brought out.

She starts to scramble down to get closer, no longer worried whether or not she’s making noise. The swinging object is a large black puck. The puck wavers slightly, then sticks fast to the carton and begins to lift it into the air. Alvy jumps for it, and sends the carton swinging on the end of its invisible tether, but she fails to get a grip, and falls, sprawling, as the carton rises above her.

Now that she has some idea what she’s looking for, she thinks she can make out a dark balloon hovering high above the fish market. The balloon is beginning to move to the side—perhaps it’s being pulled?

She hears a clatter and a curse from up on the roof. The roof! She begins to run, and vaults up on the stack of boxes, causing the stack to sway alarmingly. The balloon is drifting above her, moving up and over the market. Her last leap causes a box to topple and start a noisy avalanche, but she throws herself up and out, catching herself on a drain pipe. She clambers up onto the roof, where she can see a small dark shape disappearing over the far edge.

She sprints across the roof and sees the shape drift lazily to the ground. The shape has arms and legs, and moves in impossible, graceful bounds.

There is no obvious route to the ground on this side of the roof, but there’s a weedy pine nearby. It is unacceptable that she should lose sight of the carton or the bounder towing the balloon, so she throws herself desperately in the direction of the tree and claws at the air, hoping to snag a branch. Dry needles burn across her palms, and she falls, bouncing from branch to branch, each branch slowing her and stinging her until she reaches the lowest one, and then she falls the remaining distance onto an ugly flat bush. She collects herself and begins to dash toward the bounder.

She pulls her fishing line out and into motion, hoping the line doesn’t tangle too badly, letting the sinker fly toward the bounder. The loops of line uncoil and then suddenly snag, twisted around her arm. She cries out in frustration, running clumsily, looking down at the mess around her arm. Then the line pulls taut, and she’s jerked roughly into the air. The other end of the line has miraculously snagged the bounder who, Alvy can see, is slapping feverishly at the tangle on the other end.

The bounder touches down, and then, painfully, Alvy does too, crashing and dragging along the ground. Then the bounder is off and up again, towing Alvy behind. Alvy’s extra weight is making each bound shorter, less graceful.

“Stop!” Alvy yells, trying to twist any slackness in the line around her arms and shorten the distance between them.

The bounder, angry, makes each jump harder and higher, but with each landing, Alvy, now a twisting nebula of hopelessly snarled and knotted fishing line, is barreling up closer, now a twisting nebula of hopelessly snarled and knotted fishing line. Soon Alvy is close enough to reach out a badly scraped and bruised arm and grab the bounder by the fabric of the bounder’s suit.

She’s surprised to confirm that the bounder is her own size and approximate shape, if seemingly heavier and strangely muscled. The bounder slaps at her hands a few times, then eventually slows, bobs to a stop, and turns to glare at Alvy. Alvy looks into the bounder’s angry eyes and realizes she’s looking at a girl, about her own age.

“Get off me,” the girl says.

Alvy tries to speak but finds her voice muffled by the cloud of nylon. She shrugs hard, trying to get her face clear of the line. “Was that you, with the fish trap?” she asks.

The girl continues to glare. “What do you want?”

“The trap scared me to death,” Alvy says. “It’s a nice design, though.”

The girl has started searching through her pockets, looking for something.

Now that she’s up close, Alvy can see that what she had taken for muscle is actually part of the girl’s suit. She glances up at the balloon, and suddenly gets it. “Ballast?” she asks. “Nice!”

The girl now has a small knife out, and she’s sawing away at the loops of fishing line. The severed segments to fall to the ground around their feet. “You still haven’t told me what you want,” she says.

“Alvy,” Alvy says, holding out her hand.

The girl looks at Alvy’s hand for a couple of seconds, then relaxes a little, snaps her knife closed, and takes Alvy’s hand. “Oili,” she says, shaking firmly, and letting go.

“Come on,” she says, jerking her thumb in the direction of the balloon and its load. “We’ve got a delivery to make.” She starts walking off without looking back to see whether Alvy is following.

Alvy hurries behind her, trying to catch up.

Now that she’s no longer bounding, Oili’s walk has a weird underwater quality, as she tugs the balloon along in her heavy suit. Alvy appreciates the courtesy. “What do you do if there’s a wind?” she asks. “More ballast?”

“Or stay home,” Oili answers, still not looking back.

They’re deep into the trees now, walking up a steep hill, following a weaving path Alvy guesses is designed to keep the tether clear of branches. She’s impressed that it seems to work.

Oili’s responses are terse to the point of rudeness, but Alvy notices that she is moving very slowly now, possibly in acknowledgment of the difficulty of getting up this hill when one is not tethered to a giant balloon carrying a heavy carton of…

“What’s in the carton?” Alvy asks.

“Wait,” Oili answers.

The hill becomes even steeper, and Alvy has to drop to all fours to move forward at all.

Oili bobs up and over the ridge, with Alvy crawling along behind her. They’re in a clearing with a rotten picnic table, a fire ring full of ancient gray ash, and a dented aluminum trailer.

Alvy looks around warily, worried they’ll be seen. Oili shakes her head. “Just us,” she says.

She leads Alvy up to the trailer. A steel ramp with a few residual scraps of carpet leads up to the door. They walk up the ramp. Alvy cranes her neck, trying to see the handle in the dim light. “How—” she asks.

Oili presses her palm against the bottom edge of the door frame. Bright lights turn on inside, and the door swings open several inches. Alvy looks at Oili, impressed. They walk inside. Alvy’s jaw drops. The whole facing wall of the trailer has been subdivided into six wide shelves with ladders running from one to the next. Each shelf is strewn with Oili-scale tables, chairs, cabinets, tools and parts, approximately organized by function. One shelf appears to be the kitchen and dining room, except that it also contains the bare chassis of some kind of all-terrain vehicle. One shelf is half bedroom and half sewing room, covered with scraps of cloth, piles of fasteners and heaps of lint and fuzz. Another shelf is a machine shop, full of tools, shavings, and chunks of metal in various stages of fabrication and destruction.

Oili swarms up the ladder, disappears for a moment, and comes back down with mugs of water, which she carries one-handed. She hands one mug to Alvy. Alvy takes it gratefully and gulps half of it down. Something is bothering her. “What do you do for power?” she asks. “There’s none around here to steal.” She gawks around some more and finishes her water. “Do you have a generator?”

“Not exactly,” Oili says. She leads Alvy along the foot of the shelves, toward the rear of the trailer. In the very back corner is a dented footlocker with a door on its side about the width of Oili’s shoulders. The footlocker is giving off a very low rumble that Alvy can’t place.

“Here, hold this,” Oili says, handing Alvy her mug of water. Then she bends down, unlatches the door, and swings it open. The rumble gets louder, and now Alvy can also hear a high-pitched hiss. A fine mist hits her face, then a faint smell of ozone. She can see a mass of containers and plumbing in glass, stainless steel and copper, but the mass doesn’t resemble any machine she has seen before. This irritates and frustrates her. She presses her face closer into the fine spray, trying to see what Oili is doing.

Oili reaches her arm up inside the mass of tubing, and turns something. All the trailer lights go out.

“There’s a flashlight on the floor,” Oili tells Alvy.

Alvy finds it by feel, picks it up, turns it on, and shines it toward Oili’s hidden arms.

Oili is twisting something. She withdraws her arms. She is holding a big glass jar with some kind of complicated lid. She motions with her head back the way they came.

Alvy starts walking slowly, illuminating the floor with the flashlight. The door swings open as they approach. “Nice door,” Alvy says.

“Just wait,” Oili says.

They walk down the ramp and part way out into the clearing. The flashlight looks feeble in the moonlight, and she switches it off.

Oili sets the jar on the ground. “Oh, wait,” she says. “I forgot something.” She jogs back up the ramp and disappears inside.

Alvy stares at the jar, wondering what’s coming. The jar looks normal enough, full of clear fluid like water, and from the way Oili was carrying it, it must weigh about that much.

Oili comes back out, carrying a rolled-up umbrella.

Alvy looks up at the sky and sees only stars.

“Ready?” Oili asks, handing Alvy the umbrella.

Alvy takes it and looks expectantly at Oili. Oili stares at her, exasperated, and mimes that Alvy should open the umbrella.

Alvy looks up once more at the clear sky and opens the umbrella. It’s large, wide, opens nicely. Big deal.

Oili is down on her hands and knees, working at the lid of the jar. She twists it open.

There is a loud hiss, and Oili bounces over to Alvy, jostling her roughly underneath the umbrella. Alvy stumbles and catches herself.

Out of the jar, a tall waterspout is shooting high into the air. The first fat drops of water are beginning to return to earth, smacking against the umbrella. Oili is wearing a face-splitting grin of joy. Alvy is merely dumbfounded. She stares at the water shooting impossibly from the jar, waiting for the trick to end or the jar to run dry. Water continues to pour down from the sky, watering the clearing, drumming on the umbrella.

Alvy is irritated. She hasn’t gone through all this for a magic show. She holds out the umbrella handle towards Oili and lets it go, not waiting for Oili to take it. She walks out into the downpour and shoves the jar aside, in order to push it off the hidden pipe that’s undoubtedly feeding it. A pointless, juvenile prank, a waste of all the effort required. But there is no pipe.

She shifts the jar again, confused. Then she lifts it up and looks under it. Solid glass bottom; regular glass jar. She is now at the center of the downpour, and it’s almost hard to breathe.

Oili is laughing so hard she is barely able to keep the umbrella upright. Alvy sets the jar down and walks over to Oili, water streaming off her in rivers. She glowers at Oili, who continues to howl with laughter.

“Good trick, right?” Oili asks, trying to catch her breath. “Here,” she says, holding out the umbrella handle, “can you hold this for me while I get that thing closed up?”

Alvy takes the umbrella, follows Oili, and holds it out, careful to avoid holding it directly over the spout, while Oili screws the jar lid shut. The spray slows, then stops.

Oili, with a smug look on her face, lifts the jar and starts walking back toward the trailer.

Alvy shuts the umbrella, picks up the wet flashlight where she dropped it, and follows Oili. She’s dying to ask, but doesn’t want to give Oili the satisfaction.

“I presume you’re dying to ask,” Oili says, “but you don’t want to give me the satisfaction.”

They go through the door. Alvy clicks on the flashlight.

“That’s fair,” Oili continues. “But I couldn’t resist.”

They’re back at the footlocker, and Oili grunts, her arms again in the guts of the thing, trying to reinstall the heavy jar. “For what it’s worth,” she says, “I have no idea how it works either.”

The rumble, hiss and mist start up again, and the lights come on.

Oili withdraws her arms.

“But it’s beautiful, isn’t it? All the power we can use, way out here, with plenty of privacy. No need to hide.”

Alvy can see how this would be nice, although not having to hide takes away some of the sport.

“I think it’s been a good trade, even though we’re still making payments.”

They go back out the door into the muddy clearing. Alvy switches the flashlight off and sets it down. Oili points at the cardboard carton, soggy now. “Barter, right? There’s no accounting for taste.”

Alvy can’t follow any of this but she’s too tired and overwhelmed to protest.

Oili is working a long lever attached to the side of a large wooden box on the ground. Alvy had taken the box to be garbage.

One whole side of the box swings up, and yellow light pours out. What is in there?

“Can you give me a hand?” Oili says. She has her knife out, and she makes a broad slash across the cardboard carton. Waist-high cans of food roll out, causing Oili to jump aside to avoid being crushed.

Alvy walks over close, to read the labels in the dim light. Vienna sausages. Her face shows a look of revulsion.

Oili is back to her standard maniacal grin. “I told you there’s no accounting for taste,” she says. “Come on!”

Oili is rolling a can toward the open wooden box.

Alvy sighs and starts shoving a can of her own. When they reach the opening, Oili shoves her can inside. There’s a clunk, a loud mechanical hum, and the screech of steel. Oili steps aside. Alvy pushes her can up to the opening, and looks inside. Even after all of this, she can’t believe it. It’s a long train of can-sized cars, descending off into a tunnel longer than she’s able to see.

She pushes her can in. It clunks into a train car, and the train inches forward, presenting an empty car for the next can.

Alvy turns to face Oili and her insane grin. “Unlimited free hydropower is great!” Oili says. “Lets you do anything!”

Oili starts rolling another can, and Alvy goes and gets one too.

Oili says, “Of course, the train is really part of the payback. But it was fun to build, so who cares?”

Alvy deposits her can and goes to get another. “Payback?” she asks weakly.

“We’ll go meet him when we deliver the cans,” Oili says. “We’re paying him back for the thing in the jar.”

The train advances a car, and Alvy goes for another can.

“Where he got it from is another question,” Oili says, “but he’s not an easy person to talk to. You’ll see.” She deposits her can. “So I’ve never asked.”

Moving the cans is hard work.

“Smelt for cans,” Alvy says, “and cans for the thing in the jar.”

Oili is trying to get a can loose from the carton, and it tips over onto its flat side. Alvy goes to help her turn it over.

“Ideas and junk are always free,” Oili says, “and now that we’ve got all the power we need…” She rocks the can out of the mud-hole they made trying to turn it over. “…we’ve been having a bit more fun.”

It is slowly dawning on Alvy that she has reached the end of her adventure, but it’s not bringing her any joy. She is busy trying to work out her loyalties. Does she really wish Oili would stop catching smelt so that insufferable eagle can go back to his preferred diet? Did she really make any promises to the eagle anyway; by letting him fly her up here and not trying harder to resist? Why didn’t she resist, anyway? Was it really that compelling, solving a missing-fish mystery in the middle of the Northwoods? On the other hand, this thing Oili has going is pretty appealing. Alby would really appreciate it. Maybe she and Oili can figure out some way of contacting him. He’d be mad to have missed out on all the excitement, but he’d sure find some good uses for that thing in the jar. Maybe even more than Oili has.

“Okay,” Oili says, dropping the last can into place. “Hop in!”

Sixteen

Alby has turned pale and gone mute. Kirsten has tied up his locks just in case they get organized again. Lisa is also pale but least is willing to talk a little. Kirsten has tried a few more times to support her sister, but they have never made it more than a few paces before Lisa’s pain becomes too much or Kirsten can’t hold her anymore. They sit morosely as the twilight dims.

“Here,” Lisa says, holding out her pack of matches. Kirsten checks the limbs overhead, and decides they are high enough not to be much of a fire risk. She spends a few minutes collecting kindling, grateful for something to do. Every time she checks on Alby, he’s still sitting there motionless, knees drawn up to his chest, jaw tightly clenched. She tries to imagine what it would be like to lose Lisa, then pushes the thought way, and picks up another twig. When she has assembled a decent sized pile, she lights a match and holds it to the moss at the bottom of the pile, watching the smoke plume and wondering whether the twigs aren’t too wet, and whether they’ll just have to get through the night in the cold. But the moss catches, the tiny flame rises, and soon the whole pile is crackling nicely.

Lisa scoots herself a few inches closer. Alby just sits.

***

When Lisa wakes up a couple of hours later, she’s thirsty and cold and uncomfortable from sleeping on a root. The fire has died. Kirsten and Alby are still and silent, presumably still asleep. In Lisa’s dream she had been awakened by a peculiar chorus of clicking, like the cracking of knuckles or the creaking of joints, and she discovers she can still hear it. Do ghosts have tendons? Plus, these ghosts are big, giant slabs of shadow gliding gracefully between the trees.

Caribou! They have been surrounded by a herd of caribou while they were sleeping. Lisa nudges Kirsten so she can see too.

Kirsten opens her eyes, then hears the sound and sits up slightly. She sees the shadows too. She nods past Lisa, and Lisa turns to look behind her. A young caribou is standing there, still and alert. They all blink at each other.

Lisa can hear Kirsten rustling for a few moments, and then a round shape prods her in the side. Lisa slowly reaches down and takes the apple Kirsten has dug out of her backpack. She holds it out to the caribou. The caribou doesn’t move, and it doesn’t appear to shift its gaze.

Kirsten rustles again. She gets to her feet and very slowly steps over to Lisa, holds out her hand for the apple, then takes another step and holds the apple close to the caribou’s nose.

The caribou’s gaze still doesn’t shift from Lisa’s eyes, but its nostrils flare, and it snorts slightly. Kirsten looks at Lisa and nods at her. Lisa looks at her sister questioningly, but slowly gets to her feet, careful not to put her weight on her bad ankle.

The caribou has continued its surreptitious sniffing of the apple, and now it takes a bite. Kirsten’s hand trembles slightly. Kirsten cocks her head again, and Lisa moves closer to Kirsten and the caribou, shifting her eyes from one to the other, expecting the caribou to bolt at any moment.

The herd is mostly still, a few animals taking a few steps, the rest standing as if waiting. Kirsten cocks her head again. Lisa looks at her now, not understanding. Kirsten widens her stance, bends her knees, and holds out her free hand as though holding invisible reins. She has got to be kidding!

Lisa sticks out her tongue at Kirsten. Kirsten shakes her head vigorously, then repeats her pantomime. Lisa doesn’t believe it! The situation is bad enough, and now she’s supposed to ride a reindeer? Kirsten shrugs at her as if to say, “Have you got any better ideas?”

This is stupid. They should just wait for daylight, and then Kirsten should just walk into town and get help. But Lisa isn’t dying to wait until tomorrow afternoon to get off this hill, and this little caribou is sweet, and certainly seems docile. She reaches out a hand and touches its back. Its skin twitches, but it continues taking dainty bites of apple. Keeping her hand in place, Lisa drags her hurt foot alongside the caribou and stands there, trying to imagine what to do next; trying to screw up her courage.

“Go,” Kirsten whispers through clenched teeth. “The apple’s almost gone.”

Lisa takes a deep breath, then grabs the caribou and swings herself up with all her strength. The caribou, not surprisingly, is terrified and begins to run. This spooks the other caribou, which begin to run too, filling the air with rapid-fire clicking. Kirsten had thought she was ready for this but is still taken aback by how sudden the transition is. She starts to run too, the dark shapes flowing by her. Alby, awakened by the commotion, dashes to the relative safety of the lee of a tree trunk. After waiting for all the shadows to disappear he peeks out, ascertains that the girls are gone, then starts jogging off in the direction all the shadows went.

The caribou, particularly with Lisa’s extra weight clinging desperately to it, is much slower than the larger, stronger members of the herd, and it’s soon at the rear of the stampede, still running, trying to get away from Kirsten, who is running noisily behind and rapidly losing ground.

Kirsten is back far enough that she is the first to make out the wolves, which have been following the herd at a distance, trying to keep downwind. The wolves have noticed that there is one young caribou running unusually slowly and strangely, and which looks extremely peculiar. It’s suffering from some injury or insult the wolves have never seen before. But an opportunity is an opportunity, and the wolves begin to advance upon the hobbled caribou. Lisa has been turned entirely to jelly by the violent motion of the terrified caribou and the intense effort required to hang on. She’s breathing hard and willing all the oxygen down into her arms, which are screaming with fatigue. She hears the wolves before she sees them, noticing the mass-panting sound that isn’t right for people or caribou. She looks down and sees the low, bounding shapes and knows this is not good.

Kirsten is afraid the herd, the pack, and her injured sister will all disappear into the darkness before she can do anything, and she’ll never be able to catch up. She starts yelling and shouting and kicking at the underbrush as she runs, hoping to make enough noise to break up the party, frighten the wolves, and interrupt this whole chain of events she has unintentionally started. The wolves hear the yelling but it’s far behind them and may not be any of their business. The caribou hears the yelling but its attention is much more sharply focused on the panting sound made by the hot breath on its heels. Alby hears the yelling, and feels glad he has a sound to guide him back to the girls—although the yeller sounds very unhappy. Lisa hears the yelling, and starts to yell too, which drives the poor caribou right to the edge of a heart attack. This new yelling baffles the wolves but they still tighten the circle and ready themselves for the takedown, when suddenly a powerful shockwave races along the rocky ground, rattles the leaves in the trees, makes the air thicken and blur, deafens the wolves, causes the girls’ ears to ring, and knocks Alby flat on his back. The caribou bucks violently, throws Lisa to the ground, and pelts away, clicking. The wolves yelp and dash away into the trees, tails between their legs. Alby picks himself up, shakes his head to clear the daze, and widens his eyes in disbelief— was that a belch?

Seventeen

The train ride was rather uncomfortable, as the cars were designed to hold cans, but Oili didn’t appear to mind. On the contrary, as soon as the train started moving, she assumed a grin so wide it made it difficult for her to talk.

“How does it know when to go?” Alvy shouted over the din of the wheels on the rails and the cans on the cars.

“Lock the doors from the inside, wait a few seconds, it just goes!” Oili yells back, her speech slightly slurred by the force of her smile.

“How does it know when to stop?” Alvy yells again.

Oili’s knuckles are white as she grips the front lip of her car with one hand and the rear lip with the other. Maybe her whole body is tense that way. “It’ll stop when we get…”

The force of the stop sends Alvy out of her car, clear over Oili in her car, and into a painful landing on top of the can in the car in front of Oili. She catches herself making an angry growling noise like a polecat. She takes a deep breath, tries to calm herself, and peels herself up off the can, concerned for the state of her spine.

Oili is still wearing the idiot grin, surrounded by a weird halo in the bright electric light of the train tunnel. Alvy pinches the bridge of her nose, hoping she hasn’t been hit on the head once too often in the course of the last couple of days. Oili strides past her, stepping lightly from can to can. Alvy tries to keep up. It hurts.

At the very front of the train is a squat chunk of metal that looks like a steel brick with wheels. Alvy supposes it’s an electric tractor under a big ugly cover, but it seems to work well as a platform. Oili is standing on it, fooling with something over her head.

There’s a clank, and then a metal door scrapes open, and all the lights go out. It’s quiet out there, and Alvy can see a few stars and shadowy tree shapes.

Oili hops out, and Alvy crawls out. Will Oili ever stop grinning like that?

Oili slams the door behind them. There is a groan from below their feet, and then cans start popping up out of a hole in the ground, rolling and spilling dangerously around them. Oili starts to laugh, and she keeps on laughing until she’s doubled over, tears running down her cheeks. Alvy watches her, feet wide apart, arms crossed, scowling.

“Everybody out!” Oili says when she finally catches her breath. “Let’s go have some fun!” She starts humming and rolling a can.

Alvy has had it with rolling cans. She stalks along behind Oili, in no hurry to catch up. Oili stops at the edge of a deep hollow.

Alvy thinks something about the night-sounds is all wrong here. Or is it the air? Is it the air that has suddenly gone wrong?

Oili has taken a couple of sections of pipe out of some improbable pocket of her coveralls, and she’s screwing the sections together. Alvy hopes it’s a gun. That’s really the only thing that’s been missing from these events.

But Oili uses the screwed-together pipe to pry up the ring on the top of the can, and then uses the pipe for leverage to pull the ring and bend open the can. A predictable stench issues forth. Why won’t she stop that confounded humming?

Next out of the miraculous coveralls is a length of rubber tubing, doubled over, knotted at one end, and dangling some long laces. Oili jogs over to the foot of a sapling and ties the laces to it, then trots—almost skips—to another sapling and ties again. She’s obviously done this before.

The tubing is dangling in a catenary between the two saplings. Alvy can see what’s coming, and she doesn’t like it. Oili begins to roll up her sleeves, and she looks over expectantly at Alvy. Alvy has reassumed her cross-armed, wide-legged glowering stance.

“Suit yourself,” Oili says, and she plunges both arms deep into the gelatin in the can. She comes up with a wiener practically half her size, staggers over to the tubing, loads, and stretches the tubing back with all her weight. With an ecstatic exhalation, she sends the frank sailing high into the sky above the hollow. Something splashes up from below, and the sausage vanishes.

Alvy blinks.

If anything, Oili is humming even louder now. She pries up another sausage and lets it fly, and again it vanishes in a spout from below. More humming, as Oili returns to the can.

“What is it, some kind of toad?” Alvy asks.

“Something like that,” Oili says. “Want to try one?”

Alvy thinks she can beat Oili for altitude, so she starts to roll up her sleeves.

“Open your own can,” Oili says, holding out her length of pipe. “We’ve got all night.”

***

Alvy finds that her arms are really sore after a can and a half. “Does it talk?” she asks.

“Not exactly,” Oili says. She doesn’t appear to be getting tired. Better conditioning, maybe. She must do this a lot.

Alvy takes a break and leans on her open can, her forearms glistening with gelatin. “But there was, like, a negotiation?”

It’s just possible that Oili is slowing down, a little. She laughs. “Long story.” Then she pauses too, holding her arms away from her sides.

“I used to trade smelt for batteries,” she says. “Good trade, right? You can never have enough power.” She waits for Alvy to nod. “Anyway, I was loading up my catch and all of a sudden I found myself up in this tree staring at a big, ugly eagle!”

Alvy’s knees give way and she stumbles.

Oili nods her head dramatically. “I know!” she says. “I figured I was some kind of snack! But the eagle wanted to make a deal.”

Alvy is breathing hard. “He wanted you to stop stealing his smelt, right?” she says.

“Huh?” Oili says. “What does an eagle care about smelt?”

Alvy is confused. “Favorite food, right?” she says.

Oili looks at her strangely. “I’ve never known an eagle to eat anything that small,” she says. “Eagles mostly eat trout.”

Alvy is frowning now. “Go on,” she says.

“He says he wants me to keep an eye out for a giant toad,” Oili says. “Says if I see one to let him know.”

“What does an eagle care about toads?” Alvy asks.

“Right!” Oili says. “But he gives me one of his feathers as a down-payment. Says he’ll give me another if I find the toad for him.”

“Feathers?” Alvy says. “You like feathers, huh?”

“Hate ‘em,” Oili says. “But that first feather covered our power needs for a week before it burned out.”

“You burned it?” Alvy asks, confused.

“Ran a dynamo,” Oili says, nonsensically. “Seemed like a good trade, anyhow. So I kept an eye out.” She shakes out her arms and reloads. “And found a safer place to dock the fish trap. I figured there was a catch, but I didn’t figure out what it was until I saw our friend there.” She slings the sausage into the sky. “The eagle said he was big, but I thought he meant, you know, big for a toad.”

“Plus,” Alvy says, watching the wiener vanish in a water-jet she could swear was curving somehow, “wouldn’t a regular toad use his tongue?”

Oili shrugs. “When I first saw him,” she says, “I didn’t believe it, so I kept coming back every day, just to make sure.”

She walks to a can and pauses, hands on the rim. “I figured the eagle could wait. And I figured the toad-thing wasn’t going anywhere. I think he’s too big to move. Anyway, I stopped by every day, and he was just sitting there, breathing, and blinking, and not doing a thing.”

She grubs up a sausage and pauses again.

“But I guess he must have been watching me too, because one day when I came up, that thing in the jar was just sitting there right about here.”

She walks to the spot.

“I mean, I had to bring my own jar, later. It was just a fountain, shooting up out of the ground.” She fires off the sausage, rather halfheartedly. Alvy knows she can do better than that.

“So I just stood there, getting wet, and then he said, ‘Food,’ or at least I think that’s what he said.”

Alvy launches a virtuosic sausage high into the dawn air, where there is no way the toad can catch it.

An impossible jet of water nevertheless flashes out, and the sausage fails to land. She is disappointed.

“Why Vienna sausages?” she asks.

Oili shoots one off at least as high, and it, too, fails to reach the ground. “Where was I going to get enough bugs to feed a supernaturally giant toad?” she asks.

Now Alby’s competitive spirit is aroused. “Why not just feed him the smelt directly?” she asks, zinging a sausage in a flat, stinging arc, forcing the toad to change tactics. She jogs back for another sausage.

“Tried that,” Oili says. “He can spit really far.”

Oili then, having evidently been holding back for Alvy’s sake, executes a shot that causes the wiener to execute an implausible S-curve in midair before the toad is able to snag it. How does she do that?

“So then…” Alvy prompts.

“So then…” Oili says. Ah ha! She’s no longer humming! “Then one day I came up with a jar, and bottled the thing, and carried it off.”

Alvy gives Oili an extra turn, trying to spot how she manages to put English on a sausage. “And the eagle?” she asks.

“Kept my mouth shut and never saw him again,” Oili says. “This is a way better trade.”

She lets off a slider that zings out, and then counter-physically halts in midair and plops down onto the flabby, complacent head of the toad. The toad then splits the air with a belch so awful, so enormous, that the empty cans fly back end-over-end, and even the full cans drop over onto their sides. Alvy and Oili are pitched backwards into the branches of a bush and a low tree. It’s a miracle they aren’t impaled.

Alvy has to shake herself loose, and when she drops down from the bush onto her feet, she sees that her jacket has a large tear in the shoulder.

Oili, up in her tree, is having another of her laughing jags.

Alvy is on the verge of seeing her point when a terrorized caribou bolts past.

From somewhere nearby, a girl’s voice calls out, “Lisa? Are you okay?”

Eighteen

Alby picks himself up and resumes running. Whatever just happened, it happened up ahead where the girls are. The first thing he sees when he pops out into the clearing is a tiny body up in a tree, having convulsions. Alvy? Could it be? But then the body looks toward him and freezes, and no, it’s not Alvy; just somebody her same size. His heart sinks.

“Come on, get me down!” yells the girl in the tree.

Alby jogs over to help. He waves his arms in the air, unable to reach, and wonders why the girl is grinning like that.

He hears heavy footsteps behind him, turns, and sees Kirsten dragging Lisa, Lisa’s arms wrapped around Kirsten’s shoulder.

Lisa is looking up at Oili, surprised. “Is this her?” she asks.

Alby looks down at his feet, unable to answer.

Kirsten sets Lisa down, and Lisa grunts with pain. Kirsten gently lifts the grinning Oili down out of the tree and sets her on the ground. Oili dusts herself off and looks around, missing somebody. “It’s okay! Come on out!” she yells.

Alby and the girls look at each other, wondering who Oili is talking to.

The leaves rustle, and a face pops out. It’s a girl about Oili’s size, except bald. Alby looks like he is going to faint. “I thought the eagle—” he says.

At that moment, the morning sky turns black, and a cold wind pounds down on the clearing. From down in the hollow, there is a harsh croaking sound. Everyone in the group turns to look at the dull, mud-colored skin of the creature that made the sound. Whatever it is, it seems to be growing.

“What—” Lisa says.

“Big toad,” Alvy answers, and then there’s a scream from directly overhead—everywhere overhead.

“Big eagle,” Alby says, only this eagle—if that’s what it is—seems to be filling the whole sky with black feathers full of angry yellow sparks.

The swelling toad has now filled the hollow and is rising above it like a nightmare swamp-mushroom, sending a wave of churning mud directly toward them. Oili begins to back away, and then the others too begin to run, trying to escape into the woods, and suddenly the ground beneath them caves in, and they’re surrounded by mud grabbing at their shoes, pawing at their legs, and pulling them under.

Lightning flashes.

The toad has grown huge—a fat worm on horse’s legs—and it sends a furious waterspout high into the sky. A blast of wind strikes back at the spout, swatting it to the ground and roiling the mud. Lisa churns to the surface, gasping for air, and reaches out blindly for her sister.

The toad-creature vomits again and a roar of water explodes upward. The wings above beat back and the water hammers down. On the crest of a mud-wave, Alvy is screaming something inaudible at the boiling sky.

Lightning slashes as the toad-creature roars, and the fire and water send a slime-bubble bursting outward.

Oili, eyes wide with shock, sails past the needles of a great white pine tumbling out of the forest toward the hollow where Kirsten—also hurtling through the air—has drawn herself up into a ball. There is a blinding, burning flash, and boulders of hail sink deep into the ground.

Then there is an ugly silence.

***

Kirsten’s face is covered by a red welt turning rapidly to a purple bruise where she was struck by—what? Hail? A tree branch? A rock sticking up from the forest floor? She hugs her hurt arm close, and is glad she is able to walk.

A jay squawks overhead. Well, at least something is still alive.

She looks down curiously at the glint of something metal half-buried in the mud. She digs at it with her toe, and rolls it out. Vienna sausages. She frowns at the bad taste of this cosmic joke.

A huge white pine, unimaginably tall, has crashed down from far away, lying down like a huge ink slash crossing out this whole part of the forest, almost filling the clearing and its hollow with its broken needly branches. The trunk of the great tree has snapped across the back of the flat mound of what used to be the toad-thing, its long, bony legs sticking out at unfortunate angles from its train-car body, now dented with fist-sized gouts of hail. Were those legs really supposed to lift that body?

Kirsten limps further around the mound, for no reason searching for the thing’s head. It did have a head, didn’t it?

She hears pine needles quaking and looks down to see a tiny mud-splattered boot kicking angrily at the finger-thin branch that has pinned it. It’s the grinning girl she lifted down from the tree. Not grinning anymore.

Kirsten reaches out with her good arm and frees the girl, then holds her up, and the two of them silently regard the pile.

“Not a toad,” the girl says.

“Nope,” Kirsten agrees.

Slow footsteps approach behind them. It’s Alby, lifting his mud-caked shoes one at a time like iron boots. He clumps up and stops. “I’ve lost her again,” he says.

Kirsten’s hands suddenly turn cold as she thinks of her own missing sister. She sets Oili down roughly and dashes off around the perimeter of the pile, leaving Alby glaring at Oili as if this were all her fault.

“Maybe it is,” Oili says, but this just leaves Alby looking confused.

They hear puffing, and Lisa and Kirsten run up in a crazy three-legged hop from the direction opposite the one Kirsten took. They must have gone all the way around.

Lisa is trying to smile. “I found something,” she says, and reaches into a pocket of her uniformly mud-brown dress. She pulls out Alvy, who is limp and too exhausted even to look up.

There is a soft thump. Alby has passed out and hit his head on a root. But he’s smiling.

***

It has started to get hot, and Oili is miles away from her characteristic grin. She’s grimacing and jumping angrily up and down on a crusted-over shingle of mud. The others look on, baffled.

“It’s her train,” Alvy says, as though this clarifies things.

“Get over here and help me!” Oili screams, petulant.

Kirsten takes an unhappy step forward, not sure what she’s volunteering for.

Oili is snarling and performing some kind of demonic hat dance, kicking at the dried mud in a circle, inscribing a shallow groove with the scuffed toes of her boots.

Kirsten kneels down, hoping to see what Oili is digging for. Oili doesn’t offer any information, but instead steps viciously off away from the group, needing to be alone.

Kirsten, now that she’s down here, digs mud with her good hand, scooping up handfuls from Oili’s circle, deepening and widening it, and dumping the handfuls in a pile off to the side. She keeps scooping, building up the rhythm, hoping for some encouragement or explanation from the sidelines, from someone.

Finally, she takes a great scoop and cuts a painful gash into the side of her hand. She yells angrily and pulls her hand to her chest. Her good hand! Oili runs up, her grin turned back on. Kirsten thinks of swatting her like a fly. What are you grinning about? What about my hand! But Oili has resumed her hat dance, and she kicks the remainder of the dirt and mud away from the door that leads down to her train.

None of the switches seem to work. “Here,” she says to Kirsten, “could you…?”

Kirsten thinks she has a real nerve, but she uses the tip of her thumb to pry up the steel trapdoor, expecting another cut, and then it will be all over. But the door lifts, her thumb remains intact, and she withdraws her hand.

Oili stares down into the tunnel. “No lights,” she says, then jumps down inside and disappears.

Kirsten walks back over to the group, nursing her muddy, cut hand. Everybody waits, silently, impatient to get on with whatever it is.

Oili’s head emerges. “Something’s wrong,” she says. “There is no power. We’re going to have to walk.”

A drop of sweat rolls down Alby’s forehead and into his eye. He blinks, but doesn’t have the energy to lift his head to wipe it away. His dreadlocks are clenching and unclenching semi-rhythmically, like an angry man working his jaw. He wonders what that’s about. Alvy is trudging beside him, her head bowed. Alby wonders where she’s been, what she’s done, and why she isn’t prepared to talk about it. But if she doesn’t want to talk, then he doesn’t want to ask. And anyway, he’s tired.

Oili is marching furiously far on ahead, forcing everyone else to work hard to keep up.

Kirsten is stumbling along with Lisa riding piggyback, Lisa’s legs tangled clumsily to keep Kirsten from having to use her cut hand. Kirsten has to stop every few paces to catch her breath. She’s not sure she can go on much longer without some water.

Lisa is willing herself to be lighter, crazy with frustration that she can’t get down, and run, run all the way down the mountain for a wheelbarrow or a shopping cart so she can give everybody a ride, and save the day. Maybe her ankle is better now. Maybe if Kirsten just sets her down…

“Hey!” Lisa yells. She’s the only one not winded. “Hey! What’s your name?”

Either Oili doesn’t hear or she’s ignoring her. Oili’s head disappears beyond a rise.

“It’s Oili,” Alvy grunts.

Alby looks over. Good. She can talk.

“I would have been okay,” Alvy says, lower now, meant for only Alby to hear.

She is angry with me? “What would you have done?” he asks, feeling bitter. This is the thanks he gets?

“I would have thought of something by myself,” she says again. “I did do it by myself. I found the thief.” She sounds unsure.

“What are you talking about?” Alby demands. “What are you doing out here? We found the eagle’s nest. We found your hat. We thought…” He has to blink again. He’s not able to finish the sentence.

“Some eagle,” Alvy says, spitting the words out.

***

“You’d think they’d be happy,” Lisa says, looking at Alvy and Alby walking ahead. It looks like they’re ready to fight each other.

Kirsten agrees, but she’s breathing too hard to speak. She steps carefully over a fallen branch. Her leg weighs a ton.

“When he asked us for help, I thought we’d end up rescuing her,” Lisa continues. “This isn’t exactly what I imagined.”

Kirsten stops, lowers Lisa to the ground, and draws heaving breaths for a few seconds, her hands on her knees.

***

They stumble into Oili’s clearing a little while later. Kirsten is relieved to see that the trailer is built to her scale. Maybe it will contain somewhere to sit. She sets Lisa down, and Lisa lies flat out on the grass, enjoying the sun and the calm. Kirsten follows Alvy and Alby up to the open door of the trailer. Maybe there’s even a fridge in there!

Oili comes dashing out of the darkness in the trailer, carrying some kind of jar in her arms. She runs to the middle of the clearing, kneels, and claws at the lid of the jar. The lid tumbles to the ground, and Oili stares into the jar. What is she expecting to see?

Kirsten walks up and looks into the jar. It looks like a jar full of water to her.

Oili is pale, looking pleadingly at Alvy.

Kirsten’s attention is on the jar. “Can I have some of that?” she asks. “I’m dying of thirst.”

Alvy’s head turns slowly toward Kirsten. She’s glaring, furious.

Kirsten looks from Alvy to Alby, hoping for some clarification.

Alby looks just as confused as Kirsten feels.

“I guess when the toad-thing died…” Alvy says.

Oili is staring at the jar again. “Now what are we going to do?” she says.

***

There is a faint sound at the edge of the clearing. Lisa turns her head. A small shape darts behind a tree. Lisa turns her head the other way and counts: One, two, three. Yep: Alby, Alvy, and Oili are accounted for. They are over with Kirsten, making a big deal about a little glass jar. So who’s this, then?

She props herself up on her elbows and scans the tree line. There does seem to be a shadow down there, edging toward the side nearest to the trailer.

She scans back toward the group with the jar. Kirsten glances toward her. Lisa nods her head in the direction of the trees. Kirsten follows her gaze. What ever it is, it has stopped moving, probably aware that it’s being watched. No, there— a glint of sunlight off something reflective. Oili looks up, sees that Kirsten’s attention is focused on something, and does a quick scan around the clearing.

“It’s okay,” she shouts. “Come on out!”

Nothing happens. Then that glint again. Then the rustling again, and then a tiny figure edges out into the light. He’s wearing long shorts and a T-shirt, has his locks tied back like Alby’s, and he’s got some kind of big snorkel mask over his eyes and nose. That must be where the glinting is coming from! No snorkel, though. He walks over, eyeing the strangers with suspicion.

Oili says, “Say hello to my brother, Olli.”

Olli blinks and looks confused.

“Olli’s the brains of the outfit,” Oili says.

“Your brother?” Alvy says. “But I thought you…”

“I know,” Oili says. “It was flattering that you thought I invented all this. But I’m mostly wrenches and muscle. Olli and I work best as a team.”

Alvy looks at Alby, who is looking back at her.

Olli is holding the jar, swirling the water. He tips it, and lets the water pour out on the ground. He looks up questioningly at his sister.

“The eagle dropped a tree on the toad,” Oili says, taking the jar and rolling it between her palms.

“And lightning,” Alvy adds.

“And hail,” Kirsten says, running a finger over her bruised cheek.

“The eagle?” Olli asks. “How did he find you?”

“Um,” Alvy says, clearing her throat.

Everyone turns to look at her.

***

“You did it for nothing?” Oili asks, incredulous. “He didn’t even give you a feather?”

Alvy looks at the ground.

“I still don’t see how he found you,” Olli says. “Was he following you? Did you agree on some kind of a system?”

“The eagle—or whatever it was—sent Oili after the toad, or whatever it was,” Kirsten says. “He sent Alvy after Oili. It doesn’t seem like the eagle’s style to do his own watching and following.”

“The ‘electric eagle?’” suggests Lisa, “and the ‘Frankentoad?’”

“‘Waterspitter?’” volleys Kirsten. “‘Lightningbird?’”

Olli clears his throat. “Whatever it was,” he says, “who did it send after Alvy?”

Alby’s eyes open wide with realization. “He didn’t have to send anybody,” he says. “We took care of that for him.”

***

Olli, still bug-eyed in his snorkel mask, turns out to be more useful as a host than Oili, who has drifted away from the group and is rolling the jar around the clearing with a series of kicks, hands behind her back, apparently lost in thought.

Olli has gone inside, tromped through the ramps and hallways of the shelving, and located an ace bandage, which for him is the size of a futon. He’s busy trying to roll and shove it back down the zigzags of shelves when Kirsten sticks her head inside the trailer, sees what he’s doing, and smiles.

“You’re sweet,” she says, “but you could have just asked.”

The snorkel mask fogs slightly. Is he blushing?

Kirsten gently reaches out a hand, and Olli steps aside and lets her lift the bandage down. He’s not used to dealing with people who double as construction cranes.

Kirsten takes the bandage outside and tries to see if she can’t use it to do something helpful for Lisa’s ankle.

Olli’s next priority is up on the roof. He climbs a ladder from the top shelf up to the ceiling, and pops open a trapdoor. Once he’s out on the roof, he realizes that, for this errand, he really does need help.

“Um,” he says.

Kirsten looks up from Lisa’s ankle and sees him waving. Lisa takes over tugging on the bandage.

Kirsten walks over, loses sight of Olli, walks clear around the trailer looking up, and finally climbs up on the bumper and sticks her head over.

Olli is leaning against a big bottle of what might be water.

“I’ve been saving this,” he says.

It’s so hard to know what he’s thinking with that thing on.

“What’s with the mask?” Kirsten asks.

“Lost my glasses,” he says. “Can you help me get this thing down?”

“How did you get this thing up here?”

“Don’t ask,” he says.

“How about a hose?” Kirsten suggests.

Olli walks over and disappears down the trapdoor. Kirsten hops off the bumper, and goes and sticks her head in the door. Sure enough, he’s found a coil of rubber tubing, and he’s trying to shove it along the top shelf. Why do they keep all the heavy stuff up high like that?

Kirsten pulls the coil down, causing Olli to lose his balance for a moment. He watches the tubing go, then runs down to a lower shelf.

Kirsten is standing on the bumper with the tubing, wondering how she’s going to do any good with it, when Olli emerges with a ballpoint pen. Of course! She smiles at Olli, strips the pen, and wedges the hollow shell into the tubing. Then she punches the pen through the seal on the bottle, pinches off a coil of tubing, and yells, “Come and get it!”

With the bandage on, Lisa is able to hobble a little better. She follows up at the end of the line. Kirsten, half dazed with thirst herself, finds it a little tricky to let up just enough on the kinked hose to let everyone drink comfortably—especially the little ones.

“Hey!” Alvy yells, genuinely irritated at being soaked for the thousandth time in two days.

“Sorry,” Kirsten says, clamping the kink tighter.

Everyone cycles around for thirds before Kirsten has a chance to drink some herself. It tastes great, although now she’s starting to think that the thirst was just a stalking horse for the humongous hunger that’s right behind it. She fights that thought down. “Want some?” she asks Olli.

Fishbowl-Olli shakes his mask. He’s using both arms to hold out a tube of ointment. They’ve got everything in there! Kirsten directs a spray of water at her hurt hand, washing it out carefully, then makes a knot in the tubing and jumps down.

Everyone has gathered around Oili, who has finally dropped her jar and has a determined look on her face. “You guys said you found the eagle-thing’s nest?”

Olli comes bobbing up too, to listen.

“Think you can find it again?”

Nineteen

Alby, frustrated, watches Oili and Lisa lacing together rubber tubing. He can think of a hundred better ways to launch a sausage. Hairspray, for one. You can really do a lot with a tube, an igniter, and a little squirt of hairspray. Also, he’s frustrated to be on lookout duty. Anybody could do lookout duty. Shouldn’t he be doing something else—showing those two how to get more distance out of their slingshot, for example? Third, he’s frustrated because this whole part of the plan was puerile. They have seen what the eagle-thing can do, and the best they can come up with is this?

He scans the skies again.

Lisa looks questioningly over at him, and he shakes his head. No eagle.

Oili does a final check of the tension while Alby cranes his neck.

High above them, near the nest, there is a faint stir in the air. Slowly, slowly, a gray feather floats down. Lisa reaches out a hand to catch it, then jerks back as if stung. On the ground, tiny sizzles of sparks jump across the surface of the feather. Alby’s dreadlocks clench. Alby, Oili and Lisa form a huddle so they can whisper together. Oili speaks first: “You know what this means?”

Lisa nods. “It looks like he’s up there in his nest, maybe sleeping.”

“Or maybe watching us,” Alby says. “Maybe he’s been watching us this whole time.”

Oili says, “I think this is good news. It means we don’t have to hit a moving target.”

“Unless he has been watching us,” Kirsten says. “Then he might take off before we can launch.”

“It means,” Alby says, “that we have to shoot straight up.”

They consider this for a moment.

“He’s right,” Oili says, looking at Lisa. “We are going to have to re-string. How are you at climbing trees?”

***

It takes several minutes for Oili and Lisa to untie the knots Lisa has just finished tightening. Once they get the tubing loose, Lisa coils it up, puts it in a pocket, and carefully scales a pine. Then she laces one end to a branch about twice her height from the forest floor. She ties the knot tightly and hopes that she doesn’t have to undo it again. Then she tosses the other end of the tubing straight out, and the laces tangle in the branches of the neighboring tree.

Alby, looking up, isn’t sure she’s going to be able to reach the laces where they’ve caught.

Lisa climbs out of the first tree, climbs up the second, and only by leaning dangerously far out, one-handed-monkey style, is she able to grab the laces and pull them in where she can tie them off. She descends, and they stare up at the loose band of tubing hanging between the trees.

“Um,” Alby says.

“It’s okay,” Lisa says, and goes off to look for a stick long enough to hook the tubing and pull it to the ground. The stick she finds proves to be just slightly too short, but after four or five heroic jumps, she is able to catch the center of the tubing with a stick. She carefully draws it down, then holds on to the tightly-stretched rubber. It takes a lot of muscle to hold it. She whispers, “Is he still up there?”

Alby, who hasn’t been watching all that carefully, nevertheless says, “Yes.”

Lisa looks down.

Oili retrieves one of her lengths of pipe from against a tree trunk, cracks open a can, and tries to lift the can up to Lisa. Lisa stretches down, sploits out a sausage, and transfers it to the hand that’s holding the slingshot. Then she reaches down again. “Hop in,” she says.

Oili sets the can down and goes first. Lisa uses her free hand to lift her and drop her gently into a pocket. Then she pockets Alby the same way. Alby doesn’t like this one bit.

Lisa loads the sausage and holds down the slingshot with both hands. She squints up at the nest.

“A little to the left,” Oili says. “A bit more. There.”

Lisa doesn’t know how Oili can be so sure, but she’s the boss.

They all hold their breath. Lisa looks down at the quivering sausage.

“Now!” Oili whispers.

Lisa releases the tubing, which flops high into the air. Then she jogs over to the dangling cable and clips it to her harness. From high overhead there is an eagle-scream of rage. With cold, nervous fingers, Lisa un-clips the balloon from the tree trunk and leaps with all her might.

Trunks and branches sail past, and then she’s up above it all, able to leap the forest canopy in a single bound. She can see the sparkle of the lake approaching fast. Then she’s drifting back down to the hillside far below, and then the shadow of the wings overlays itself upon hers, and the wing-shadow is growing.

Alby crawls deeper into the pocket. He can’t watch this.

Lisa’s bandaged foot pounds sickeningly into the dirt, and she sends herself skyward again. The eagle rounds for another dive.

On the edge of the lake, Olli, Alby and Kirsten watch the huge balloon drifting down and see the eagle speeding toward it. Olli has brought one of his foam ice chests as a prop, hoping the eagle will mistake him for his sister. Hey eagle! I betrayed you! Remember me?

Lisa, soaring down, can see her friends at the water’s edge, and she starts to prepare her legs for another rough landing, when she hears the eagle scream and fabric rip. Suddenly the balloon is nothing but a long bundle of ribbons in the sky, and she hurtles down toward the beach.

The eagle then turns his attention to the tiny masked figure and his huge chest of smelt, and he begins a steep and speeding dive.

Lisa, on the end of her balloon-ribbons, makes herself into a ball and braces for impact.

The eagle’s talons are outstretched, and Olli ducks behind the ice chest as the talons close in.

Lisa bounces across the beach like a tumbleweed.

The eagle hits the edge of the ice chest, and Kirsten pulls on ropes that draw a fishing net over the chest, the eagle, and Olli. Lisa tears at the harness to free herself of the ruined balloon. Olli scrambles out from the mesh of the fishnet. They all stare at the bulge in the tangle where the eagle must be, but then there’s a swift slicing sound, and from the net a huge black pair of wings begins to emerge. The sky goes dark, and the wind begins to blow.

Olli, Alvy, and Kirsten run toward a small boat floating near the shore. Lisa is running, too, with Oili and Alby hanging onto the fabric of her dress and hoping not to be thrown out.

The eagle-thing is still growing, rising without moving its wings, and is the one still point in the sea of roaring air. There is a wild scramble into the boat, as the boat is blown into the foaming water and violently shaken.

Six pairs of hands grip of the gunwales as the tiny boat spins and rockets away from land, ricocheting off of the high waves.

The thing above the beach is now beating its wings, still rising and growing and swallowing the sky. The noise of the wind is agonizing, the water of the lake a boiling froth.

Far ahead, a huge freighter is steaming across the lake, its crew terrified by the instant and impossible storm.

The tiny boat is the focus of the howling wind, and it skips like a stone toward the wall that is the freighter. Then it pitches and flips, and its passengers are spilled across the waves, but still the wind howls on.

Lisa has landed twisted in her dress, and her skirt, stretched across an arm, acts as a sail. She is blown high up, above the rocking shadow of the freighter.

Kirsten, holding her backpack above her head with arms already growing numb, also catches the wind and flies up and out of the water.

A column of debris rises from the beach. In its center is Olli, still holding tight to the foam lid of his ice chest, whirling and buffeting up and up.

A downdraft dashes Lisa onto the deck of the freighter, and Kirsten crashes down a moment later. Alby tears himself free of Lisa’s pocket and scrambles to the edge to look down, down, down, trying to catch sight of his sister.

The freighter is now listing and quaking, pounded by the fury of the wings beating from every corner of the sky. Lisa and Kirsten, crawling along the deck, have found the switch that controls the freighter’s anchor, and the anchor is groaning down toward the surface on its impossibly heavy chain.

The crew hears the anchor start to go, and they are straining against the force of the wind to reach the girls, to stop them from stopping the ship.

The great anchor hits the surface of the water, and an unearthly roar splits the air. The great ship strains against the anchor, tipping and pulling against the great chain that is swiftly unrolling toward the depths. The ship groans and heaves and suddenly pulls free of the water, blown like a million-ton kite on a thousand-ton string. The crew starts to pray, wondering what they could have done to arouse the anger of the storm.

The eagle readies itself for the final blow, summoning all its strength and poising itself for the great crack of lightning that causes the ship to blaze with light and a sun-sized spark to blaze down its length and explode down the chain toward the irresistible pull of the…

And then everything is still. The ship, like the punch line of a joke, plunges down out of the windless sky and smashes into the surface of the calming lake. The startled sun beams down on a circle of gently expanding ripples.

Lisa and Kirsten stare down from the deck of the ship toward a distant bobbing speck.

Aboard the speck, a grinning Alvy holds aloft a dimly glowing mason jar, attached by a thin copper wire to a fishing sinker whipped desperately around the ship’s massive steel anchor chain. “Good job, guys!” she yells, knowing they can’t hear. “I got him!”

Twenty

It takes the ship’s crew a few seconds to pick themselves up off the deck and blink at each other to determine they’re not dead, before they go running out on deck to figure out what’s going on with the anchor. They follow a weird screeching, whistling sound, and find two strips of packing tape securely tied to the railing, and a pair of colorful shapes disappearing down at the other end. Weird.

Twenty-One

They lie on the grass, staring at the jar. Alvy wants to kick it. Instead, she holds up a smelt she’s been grilling, and takes a big bite. A tiny, angry spark sizzles along the jar’s copper wire.

“It’s only fair,” she tells the jar. “I did your dirty work, now you can do some of mine.”

The light in the jar throbs with frustration. Alby wishes she’d stop doing that. It makes his hair clench.

Oili’s voice echoes out of the trailer: “I’m ready. Bring him in.”

Lisa picks up the jar, and hobbles with it over to the open trailer. She passes it down to Oili, who patters off with it. In a few seconds, the trailers lights come on, and everyone applauds.

Oili comes out, looking pleased. “He turned red, but he’s working all right,” she says.

Twenty-Two

“Don’t you think this is a little conspicuous?” Lisa asks.

The trailer is moving smoothly down the road, the warm air of the summer night blown back toward them by the three dozen electric fans they’ve got harnessed up there like horses, the force of the fans pulling the trailer down the road. The fans purr softly, happy to be on the move. Oili is watching them, a smug and happy look in her eyes.

Lisa and Kirsten have their heads out the skylight, enjoying the breeze. “Do you think Mom and Dad will have noticed we were gone?” Kirsten asks.

Alby and Olli are up on a shelf, sleeves rolled up, side by side, wiping wrenches down with mineral oil and arranging them by size. Alby is pretty sure his collection is bigger, but Olli has some unusual ones he’s never seen.

Alvy is sitting by herself in the very back, bathed in a dim orange glow. It wasn’t really a vacation, she thinks, but it was something. She looks at the jar. “Keep it up,” she tells it. “It will be good to get back home.”

Thanks to:

Ted Cushman and Andrea Selese Carlson for help with the underlying folklore.

Anders Matney for help with ornithology and ecology. Any inaccuracies are mine not his (for example, the only caribou on the North Shore are imaginary ones.)

Ryeon Corsi, Josh Ferguson, Ed Vogel and the Bisco Kid for early encouragement and incisive comments.

My editor Marisa Ring. This story’s faults remain because I have ignored her advice in my vanity and sloth.

Peet Fetsch (aka Cork Leg Nelson) for energetic and implacable design work. www.corklegnelson.com

Mozhi my prosthetic right brain.

Rachel for unwavering confidence and support.

Table of Contents

License

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two