THE NEXT MORNING Ethan awoke from dreams of freakish versions of baseball where there were seven bases, two pitchers, and outfields beyond outfields reaching into infinity, to find the little red fox-monkey sitting on his chest. Its thick fur was neatly combed and braided, and the braids on its head were tied with bright blue ribbons. And it was smoking a pipe. Ethan opened his mouth to scream but no sound emerged. The creature weighed heavily on his chest, like a sack of nails. Whoever had bathed it and tied its hair in bows had also doused it in rosewater, but underneath the perfume it stank like a fox, a rank smell of meat and mud. Its snout quivered with intelligence and its gleaming black eyes peered curiously at Ethan. It looked a little dubious about what it saw. Ethan opened and closed his mouth, gasping like a fish on a dock, trying to cry out for his father.
“Calm, piglet,” said the fox-monkey. “Breathe.” Its voice was small and raspy. It sounded like an old recording, coming through a gramophone bell. “Yes, yes,” it went on, soothingly. “Just take a breath and never be afraid of old Mr. C., for he isn’t going to hurt not the tiniest hair of your poor hairless piglet self.”
“What—?” Ethan managed.” What—?”
“My name is Cutbelly. I am a werefox. I am seven hundred and sixty-five years old. I have been sent to offer you everlasting fame and a fantastic destiny.” He scratched with a black fingernail at an itch in the dazzling white fur of his chest. “Go ahead,” he said. He pointed at Ethan with the stem of his pipe. “Take a few deep breaths.”
“Sitting…” Ethan tried. “On… my… chest.”
“Oh! Ha-ha!” The werefox tumbled backwards off of Ethan, exposing him to the startling sight of its private parts and furry behind. For Cutbelly was quite naked. This had not struck Ethan as odd when he was under the impression that he (Cutbelly was definitely a he) was an animal, but now Ethan sort of wished that Cutbelly would at least wear some pants. After completing his back flip, Cutbelly landed on his long bony back paws. The feet were much foxier than the quick black hands. “My apologies.”
Ethan sat up and tried to catch his breath. He looked at the clock on his nightstand: 7:23 A.M. His father might walk in at any moment and find him talking to this smelly red-brown thing. His eyes strayed to the door of his bedroom, and Cutbelly noticed.
“Not to worry about your pa,” he said. “The Neighbours worked me a sleeping grammer. Your pa would not hear the crack of Ragged Rock.”
“Ragged Rock? Where is that?”
“It isn’t a place,” Cutbelly said, relighting his pipe. It had been worked from a piece of bone. Ethan thought: Human bone. On the bowl was carved the bearded likeness of Abraham Lincoln, of all things. “It’s a time. A day, to be precise. A day to wake anybody who might be sleeping, including the dead themselves. But not your pa. No, even come Ragged Rock he will sleep, until you return safely from speaking with the Neighbours, and I tuck your little piglet self snug back into your bed.”
In a book or a movie, when strange things begin to happen, somebody will often say, “I must be dreaming”. But in dreams nothing is strange. Ethan thought that he might be dreaming not because a nude werefox had shown up making wild claims and smoking a pipe that was definitely not filled with tobacco, but because none of these things struck him as particularly unexpected or odd.
“What kind of a fantastic destiny?” he said. He did not know why, but he had a sudden flash that somehow it was going to involve baseball.
Cutbelly stood up and jammed his pipe between his teeth, looking very foxy.
“Aye, you’d like to know, wouldn’t you?” he said. “It’s a rare chance you’re to be offered. A first-rate education.”
“Tell me!” Ethan said.
“I will,” Cutbelly said. “On the way through.” He blew a long steady jet of foul smoke. It smelled like burning upholstery. Cutbelly sprang down from the bed and crept with his peculiar swaggering gait towards the window. He reached up with his long arms and dragged himself up onto the sill.
“Wear a sweater,” he said. “Scampering is cold work.”
“Scampering?”
“Along the Tree.”
“The Tree?” Ethan said, grabbing a hooded sweatshirt from the back of his desk chair. “What Tree?”
“The Tree of Worlds,” Cutbelly said impatiently. “Whatever do they teach you in school?”
WEREFOXES HAVE LONG been known for their teacherly natures. As they started down the drive from the Feld house, Cutbelly lectured Ethan on the true nature of the universe. It was one of his favourite subjects.
“Can you imagine an infinite tree?” Cutbelly said. They turned left at the mailbox that read Feld Airship, Inc., ducked under a wire fence, skirted the property line that separated the Felds from the Jungermans, and wandered west a little ways. “A tree whose roots snake down all the way to the bottomest bottom of everything? And whose outermost tippity fingers stretch as far as anything can possibly reach?”
“I can imagine anything,” Ethan said, quoting Mr. Feld, “except having no imagination.”
“Big talk. Well, then do so. Now, if you’ve ever looked at a tree, you’ve seen how its trunk divides into great limbs, which divide again into lesser limbs, which in turn divide into boughs, which divide yet again into branches, which divide into twigs, which divide into twiglings. The whole mess splaying out in all directions, jutting and twisting and zigzagging. At the tips of the tips you might have a million million tiny green shoots, scattered like the sparks of an exploding skyrocket. But if you followed your way back from the thousand billion green fingertips, down the twigs, to the branches, to the boughs, to the lesser limbs, you would arrive at a point – the technical term is the axil point – where you would see that the whole lacy spreading mass was really only four great limbs, branching off from the main trunk.”
“OK,” Ethan said.
“Now, let’s say the tree is invisible. Immaterial. You can’t touch it.”
“OK.”
“The only part of it that’s visible, that’s the leaves.”
“The leaves are visible.”
“The leaves of this enormous tree, those are the million million places where life lives and things happen and stories and creatures come and go.”
Ethan thought this over.
“So Clam Island is like a leaf?”
“It isn’t like a leaf. It is a leaf. This tree is not some fancy metaphor, piglet. It’s real. It’s there. It’s holding us all up right now, you and me and Bulgaria and Pluto and everything else. Just because something is invisible and immaterial doesn’t mean it isn’t really there.”
“Sorry,” Ethan said.
“Now. Those four limbs, the four great limbs, each with its great tangle of branches and leaves – those are the four Worlds.”
“There are four Worlds.”
“And all the twigs and boughs are the myriad ways among the leaves, the paths and roads, the rambles and routes among the stars. But there are some of us who can, you know, leap, from leaf to leaf, and branch to branch. Shadowtails, such creatures are called, and I myself am one of them. When you travel along a branch, that’s called scampering. We’re doing it right now. You can’t go very far – it’s too tiring – but you can go very quickly.”
The werefox scrabbled up a low bank, in a spray of dead leaves and pebbles, then leapt through a blackberry bramble headfirst. Ethan had no choice but to follow. It was briefly very dark inside the bramble, and cold, too, a dank chill, as if they had leapt not through a blackberry bramble but into the mouth of a deep cave. There was a soft tinkling like the sound of the wind through icy pine needles. Then somehow or other he landed, without a scratch on him, at the edge of a familiar meadow, beyond which lay the white mystery of the birches.
“Hey. How’d we—? Is this—?”
They had been walking for a few minutes at most. Now, Ethan had done a fair amount of ranging alone through the woods and along the gravel roads of Clam Island. But he had never considered trying to walk all the way from his house to the Tooth. It was just too far. You would have to walk, he would have said, for more than an hour. And yet here they were, or seemed to be. The broad sunny meadow, the birch trees, the brackish green Sound that he could smell just beyond them.
“Now, there’s one last thing I want you to imagine,” Cutbelly said. “And it’s that because of all the crazy bends and hairpin turns, because of all the zigs and zags in the limbs and boughs and branches of this Tree I’m telling you about, it so happens that two leaves can end up lying right beside each other, separated by what amounts, for a gifted shadowtail like myself, to a single bound. And yet, if you were to follow your way back along the twigs and branches, back to the trunk, you would find that these two leaves actually grow from two separate great limbs of the Tree. Though near neighbours, they lie in two totally different Worlds. Can you picture that, piglet? Can you see how the four Worlds are all tangled up in each other like the forking, twisting branches of a tree?”
“You’re saying you can scamper from one world to another?”
“No, I can leap. And take you with me into the bargain,” said the werefox. “And the name of this World is the Summerlands.”
It was the Summerland Ethan knew; yet it was different, too. The plain metal bleachers and chain fences of Jock MacDougal Field at the far side of the meadow had been replaced with an elegant structure, at once sturdy and ornate, carved from a pale yellow, almost white substance that Ethan could not at first identify. It was a neat little box of a building, with long arched galleries through which he could see that it was open to the sky. It looked a little like the Taj Mahal, and a little like a big old Florida hotel, towers and grandstands and pavilions. There was an onion-shaped turret at each corner, and along the tops of the galleries rows of long snaky pennants snapped in the breeze.
“It’s a ballpark,” Ethan said. “A tiny one.” It was no bigger than a Burger King restaurant.
“The Neighbours are not a large people,” Cutbelly said. “As you will soon see.”
“The Neighbours,” Ethan said. “Are they human?”
“The Neighbours? No, sir. Not in the least. A separate creation, same as me.”
“They aren’t aliens?” Ethan was looking around for possible explanations for Cutbelly. It had occurred to him that his new friend might have evolved on some distant world of grass where it might behove you to work your way up from something like a fox.
“And what is an alien, tell me that?”
“A creature from another world. You know, from outer space.”
“As I thought I had made clear, there are but four Worlds,” Cutbelly said. “Though one of them, I should mention, is lost to us for ever. Sealed off by a trick of Coyote. Yours, including everything that you and your kind call ‘the universe,’ is just one of the three remaining ones, though if I may say, it’s my personal favourite of the lot. Just now you and I are crossing into another one, the Summerlands. And this is where the Neighbours most definitely dwell. Now as I was saying, they are not very grand. In fact they are quite literally Little People.”
“Little People?” Ethan said. “Wait. OK. The Neighbours. They are. Aren’t they? They’re fair—”
“Fair Folk!” Cutbelly cut him off. “Yes, indeed, that is an old name for them. Ferishers is the name they give themselves, or rather the name that they’ll consent to have you call them.”
“And they play baseball.”
“Endlessly.” With a roll of his eyes, Cutbelly threw himself down in the grass and weeds, of which he began gathering great handfuls and stuffing them into the bowl of his pipe.
“In that little building over there?”
“Thunderbird Park,” Cutbelly said. “‘The Jewel of the Chinook League’. When there was a league. It’s a drafty old barracks, if you ask me.”
“What is it… what is it, uh, made of?” Even as he said it the thought strayed once more into his mind: human bones.
“Ivory,” Cutbelly said.
“Whale?”
“Not whale.”
“Walrus?”
“Nor walrus, besides.”
“Elephant?”
“And where would anyone get hold of that much elephant ivory around here? No, that ballpark, piglet, was carved from giant’s ivory. From the bones of Skookum John, who made the mistake of trying to raid this neighbourhood one day back about 1743.” He sighed, and took a contemplative puff on his pipe. “Ah, me,” he said. “Might as well have a seat, piglet. They know we’re here. A moment will bring them along.”
Ethan sat down beside Cutbelly in the grassy meadow. The sun was high and the tall green grass was vibrant with bees. It might have been the loveliest summer day in the history of Ethan Feld. The birch forest was loud with birds. The smell of smoke from Cutbelly’s pipe was pungent but not unpleasant. Ethan suddenly remembered a similar afternoon, bees and blue skies, long ago… somewhere… at the edge of a country road, beside a grassy bank that ran down to a stagnant pond. It must have been at his grandparents’ house, in South Fallsburg, New York, which he had heard his mother speak of but, until now, never remembered. The country house had been sold when he was still a very little boy. His mother crouched down behind him, one slender hand on his shoulder. With the other she pointed to the murky black water of the pond. There, hovering just a few inches above the water, hung a tiny white woman, her hummingbird wings all a-whir.
“That was a pixie, actually,” Cutbelly said, sounding more melancholy than ever. This time Ethan noticed that his thoughts had been read. “And you were lucky to see one. There aren’t too many of them left. They got the grey crinkles worse than any of them.”
“The grey crinkles?”
In the trees to their left there was a sudden flutter, like the rustle of a curtain or a flag. A huge crow took to the sky with a raucous laugh and what Ethan would have sworn was a backwards glance at him and Cutbelly.
“It’s a great plague of the Summerlands,” Cutbelly said, his bright black eyes watching the crow as it flew off. “More of Coyote’s mischief. It’s horrible to see.”
Cutbelly puffed dourly on his pipe. It was clear that he didn’t care to say anything more on the sad subject of the vanishing pixies and the dreadful plague that had carried them off.
As is so often the case when one is in the presence of a truly gifted teacher, Cutbelly’s explanations had left Ethan with so many questions that he didn’t know where to begin. What happened when you got the grey crinkles? What did coyotes have to do with it?
“What’s the difference?” Ethan began. “I mean, between a pixie and a fair—a ferisher?”
Cutbelly clambered abruptly to his feet. The plug of charred weeds tumbled from the bowl of his shinbone pipe, and Ethan’s nostrils were soon tinged by the smell of burning fur.
“See for yourself,” Cutbelly said. “Hear for yourself, too.”
They travelled, like the ball clubs of old, in buses – only these buses could fly. They came tearing out of the birch forest in ragged formation, seven of them, trying to keep abreast of one another but continually dashing ahead of or dropping behind. They were shaped more or less like the Greyhound coaches you saw in old movies, at once bulbous and sleek. But they were much smaller than an ordinary bus – no bigger than an old station wagon. They were made not of steel or aluminium, but of gold wire, striped fabric, some strange, pearly silver glass, and all kinds of other substances and objects – clamshells and feathers, marbles and pennies and pencils. They were wild buses, somehow, the small, savage cousins of their domesticated kin. They dipped and rolled and swooped along the grass, bearing down on Ethan and Cutbelly. As they drew nearer, Ethan could hear the sound of laughter and curses and shouts. They were having a race, flying across the great sunny meadow in their ramshackle golden buses.
“Everything is a race or a contest, with the Neighbours,” Cutbelly said, sounding fairly fed up with them. “Somebody always has to lose, or they aren’t happy.”
At last one of the buses broke free of the pack for good. It shot across the diminishing space between it and Ethan’s head and then came, with a terrific screech of tyres against thin air, to a stop. There was a loud cheer from within, and then the other buses came squealing up. Immediately six or seven dozen very small people piled out of the doors and began shouting and arguing and trying to drown each other out. They snatched leather purses from their belts and waved them around. After a moment great stacks of gold coins began to change hands. At last most of them looked pleased or at least satisfied with the outcome of the race, and turned to Cutbelly and Ethan, jostling and elbowing one another to get a better look at the intruder.
Ethan stared back. They looked like a bunch of tiny Indians out of some old film or museum diorama. They were dressed in trousers and dresses of skin, dyed and beaded. They were laden with shells and feathers and glinting bits of gold. Their skins were the colour of cherry wood. Some were armed with bows and quivers of arrows. The idea of a lost tribe of pygmy Indians living in the woods of Clam Island made a brief appearance in Ethan’s mind before being laughed right out again. These creatures could never be mistaken for human. For one thing, though they were clearly adults, women with breasts, men with beards and moustaches, none stood much taller than a human infant. Their eyes were the colour of cider and beer, the pupils rectangular black slits like the pupils of goats. But it was more than their size or the strangeness of their pale gold eyes. Looking at them – just looking at them – raised the hair on the back of Ethan’s neck. On this dazzling summer day, he shuddered, from the inside out, as if he had a fever. His jaw trembled and he heard his teeth clicking against each other. His toes in his sneakers curled and uncurled.
“You’ll get used to seeing them in time,” Cutbelly whispered.
One of the ferishers, a little taller than the others, broke away from the troop. He was dressed in a pair of feathered trousers, a shirt of hide with horn buttons, and a green jacket with long orchestra-leader tails. On his head there was a high-crowned baseball cap, red with a black bill and a big silver O on the crown, and on his feet a tiny pair of black spikes, the old-fashioned kind such as you might have seen on the feet of Ty Cobb in an old photograph. He was as handsome as the king on a playing card, with the same unimpressed expression.
“A eleven-year-old boy,” he said, peering up at Ethan. “These is shrunken times indeed.”
“He goin’ to do fine,” said a familiar voice, creaky and scuffed-up as an old leather mitt. Ethan turned to find old Ringfinger Brown standing behind him. Today the old man’s suit was a three-piece, as pink as lipstick, except for the vest, which was exactly the colour of the Felds’ station wagon.
“He’ll hafta,” said the ferisher. “The Rade has come, just like Johnny Speakwater done foretold. An’ they brought their pruning shears, if ya know what I mean.”
“Yeah, we saw ’em, din’t we, boy?” Ringfinger said to Ethan. “Comin’ in with their shovels and their trucks and their steel-toe boots to do their rotten work.”
“I’m Cinquefoil,” the ferisher told Ethan. “Chief o’ this mob. And starting first baseman.”
Ethan noticed now that there was some murmuring among the ferishers. He looked inquiringly at Mr. Brown, who gestured towards the ground with his fingers. Ethan didn’t understand.
“You in the presence of royalty, son,” Mr. Brown said. “You ought to bow down when you meetin’ a chief, or a king, or some other type of top man or potentate. Not to mention the Home Run King of three worlds, Cinquefoil of the Boar Tooth mob.”
“Oh, my gosh,” Ethan said. He was very embarrassed, and felt that a simple bow would somehow not be enough to make up for his rudeness. So he got down on one knee, and lowered his head. If he had been wearing a hat, he would have doffed it. It was one of those things that you have seen done in movies a hundred times, but rarely get the chance to try. He must have looked pretty silly. The ferishers all burst out laughing, Cinquefoil loudest of all.
“That’s the way, little reuben,” he said.
Ethan waited for what he hoped was a respectful amount of time. Then he got back to his feet.
“How many home runs did you hit?” he asked.
Cinquefoil shrugged modestly. “Seventy-two thousand nine hundred and fifty-four,” he said. “Hit that very number just last night.” He pounded his mitt, which was about the size and colour of a Nilla wafer. “Catch.”
A small white sphere, stitched in red but no bigger than a gumball, came at Ethan. The air seemed to waver around it and it came faster than he expected. He got his hands up, just, and clutched hopefully at the air in front of his face. The ball stung him on the shoulder and then dropped with an embarrassing plop to the grass. All the ferishers let out their breath at once in a long deflated hiss. The ball rolled back towards Cinquefoil’s black spikes. He looked at it, then up at Ethan. Then with a sigh he bent down and flicked it back into his mitt.
“A hot prospect indeed,” said Cinquefoil to Ringfinger Brown. This time Mr. Brown didn’t try to stick up for Ethan.” Well, we got no choice, an’ that’s a fact. The Rade has showed up, years before we ever done expected them, and yer about ten years shy o’ half-cooked, but we got no choice. There ain’t no time ta go looking for another champion. I guess ya’ll hafta do.”
“But what do you need me for?” Ethan said.
“What do ya think? To save us. To save the Birchwood.”
“What’s the Birchwood?”
The little chief rubbed slowly at chin with one tiny brown hand. It seemed to be a gesture of annoyance.
“This is the Birchwood. These trees – ain’t ya ever noticed them? They’re birch trees. Birch wood. These woods is our home. We live here.”
“And, excuse me, I’m sorry, ha, but, uh, save it from what, now?”
Cinquefoil gave Ringfinger Brown a hard look.
“Ta think that we done paid ya half our treasure fer this,” he said bitterly.
Ringfinger suddenly noticed a bit of fuzz on his lapel.
The ferisher chief turned to Ethan.
“From Coyote, o’ course,” he said. “Now that he done found us, he’s going ta try ta lop our gall. He does that, that’s the end o’ the Birchwood. And that’s the end o’ my mob.”
Ethan was lost, and embarrassed, too. If there was one thing he hated more than anything else in the world, it was being taken for stupid. His natural tendency in such situations was to pretend that he understood for as long as was necessary until he did understand. But whatever the ferisher was talking about – lop our gall? – it sounded too important for Ethan to fake. So he turned for help to Cutbelly.
“Who is Johnny Speakwater?” he said miserably.
“Johnny Speakwater is the local oracle in this part of the Western Summerlands,” the werefox said. “About ten years ago, he predicted that Coyote, or the Changer as he is also known, was going to find his way to the Birchwood. Listen, now, you remember I was telling you about the Tree – the Lodgepole, as these people call it.”
At these words, a groan went up from the assembled ferishers.
“He don’t even know about the Lodgepole!” Cinquefoil cried.
“Stop givin’ me the fisheye,” Ringfinger Brown snapped. “I done told you they was slim pickin’s.”
“Shrunken times, indeed,” the chief repeated, and all his mob nodded their heads. Ethan could see they were already very disappointed in him, and he hadn’t even done anything yet.
“Every so often,” Cutbelly went on patiently, “two branches of a tree will rub right up against each other. Have you ever seen that? Every time there’s a stiff enough wind. They do it so long, and so furious, that a raw place, a kind of wound, opens up in the bark on each limb where it’s been rubbing. And then, over time, the wound heals over with new bark, only now, the two limbs are joined together. Into one limb. That joining or weaving together of two parts of a tree is called pleaching. And the place where they are joined is called a gall.”
“I’ve seen that,” Ethan said. “I saw a tree in Florida one time that was like that.”
“Well, with a tree as old and as tangled-up as the Lodgepole, and with the Winds of Time blowing as stiff as they like to blow, you are bound to have some pleaching, here and there. By now it’s been going on so long that these galls are all over the place. Galls mark the spots where two worlds flow into each other. And they tend to be magical places. Sacred groves, haunted pools, and so forth. Your Summerland is just such a place.”
“So, OK, Summerland is in my world and this one,” Ethan said, to Cinquefoil as much as to Cutbelly, hoping to demonstrate that he was not totally hopeless. “At the same time. And that’s why it never rains there?”
“Never can tell what’s going to happen around a gall,” Cutbelly said. “All kinds of wonderful things. A dry sunny patch of green in a land of endless grey and drizzle is just one of the possibilities.”
“And now this Coyote wants to cut the worlds apart again?”
Cutbelly nodded.
“But why?” Ethan said.
“Because that’s what Coyote does, among a thousand other mad behaviours. He wanders around the Tree, with his Rade of followers, and wherever he finds the worlds pleached together he lops them right apart. But this local gall is tucked away in such a remote corner of the Worlds that he’s missed it until now.”
“OK,” Ethan said. “I get it. I mean, I sort of get it. But, I mean, you know, I sort of agree with the whole idea of how I’m a, well, a kid. Like, I don’t know how to use a, what, like a sword, or even ride a horse, or any of that stuff, if that’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. It was as if they had all been hoping in spite of themselves that Ethan was going to rise to the occasion and come up with a plan for saving Summerland. Now that hope was gone. Then, from the edge of the meadow, there was a scornful laugh. They all turned in time to see a crow – the same great black bird, Ethan would have sworn, that he and Cutbelly had seen earlier – take to the sky. Some of the ferishers unslung their bows. They nocked arrows to their bowstrings and let fly. The arrows whistled into the sky. The black bird took no notice of them. Its wings beat slowly, lazily, with a kind of insolence, as if it thought it had all the time in the world. Its rough laughter caught the breeze and trailed behind it like a mocking streamer.
“Enough o’ this,” the chief said, at last, his face grim and his tone gruff and commanding. He tossed the tiny baseball to Ethan again. This time Ethan just managed to hold on to it as it came stinging into his palm. “Let’s go talk ta that crazy old clam.”
THEY TROOPED ACROSS the meadow, past the gleaming white ballpark, and down to the beach. Here in the Summerlands, in the Birchwood, there was no ruined hotel, no collapsed dance hall or pier. There was just the long dark stretch of muddy sand, with the ghostly trees on one side of it and the endless dark green water stretching away on the other. And, in the middle of it all, that big grey log of ancient driftwood, spiky and half-buried, on which he and his father had once sat and shared a lunch of chicken sandwiches and hot chicken soup from the thermos. Was it the same log, Ethan wondered? Could something really exist in two different worlds at the same time?
“That bristly old chunk of wood is the gall, some say,” Cutbelly told him.” The place where the worlds are jointed fast.”
They seemed in fact to be headed right towards it.
“But I thought you said the Tree was invisible, and untouchable,” Ethan said. “Immaterial.”
“Can you see love? Can you touch it?”
“Well,” Ethan said, hoping it was not a trick question. “No, love is invisible and untouchable, too.”
“And when your pap puts on that big Roosters jersey of his, and sits there watching you in the bleachers with the smile never leaving his face? And slaps palms with you after a game even though you struck out four times looking?”
“Huh,” Ethan said.
“Some things that are invisible and untouchable can nevertheless be seen and felt.”
They had reached the driftwood log. At a gesture from Cinquefoil a dozen or more ferishers got down on their knees and began, slowly and with a strange tenderness, to dig in the sand underneath it. They were digging separately, but all of them stayed in the area shadowed by the upraised, snaggled roots of the log. They slipped their small hands into the sand with a hiss and then brought them out, cupped, with a soft, sucking pop. The sand they removed in this way they drizzled through their fingers, writing intricate squiggles on the smooth surface of the beach. The driblets of sand made daisies and cloverleaves and suns. At last one of the ferishers cried out, pointing at the pattern her wet handful of sand had formed, like a pair of crossed lightning bolts. The other diggers gathered around her, then, and with vigour, they began to dig all together at the spot. Before long they had dug a hole that was three times taller than any of them, and twice as wide. Then there was another cry, followed by what sounded to Ethan like a loud, rude belch. Everyone laughed, and the diggers came clambering up out of the hole.
The last three struggled out under the shared burden of the largest clam that Ethan had ever seen. It was easily as big as a large watermelon, and looked even bigger in the ferishers’ small arms as they staggered up onto the beach with it. Its shell was lumpy and rugged as broken concrete. The rippled lip dripped with green water and some kind of brown slime. The ferishers set it down on the beach and then the rest of the mob circled around it. Ringfinger Brown gave Ethan a gentle push at the small of his back.
“Go on, boy,” he said. “Listen to what Johnny Speakwater gots to say.”
Ethan stepped forward – he could almost have stepped right over the ferishers, but he felt instinctively that this would be rude. He arrived at the innermost edge of the circle just as the ferisher chief was going down on one knee in front of the clam.
“Hey, Johnny,” Cinquefoil said in a low, soft voice, calling to the clam like a man trying to wake a friend on the morning of some long-awaited exploit – a fishing trip or camp-out. “Whoa, Johnny Speakwater. All right now. Open up. We need a word with ya.”
There was a deep rumble from inside the clam, and Ethan’s heart began to beat faster as he saw the briny lips of the shell part. Water came pouring out and vanished into the sand under the clam. Little by little, with an audible creak, the upper half of the clamshell lifted an inch or so off of the lower half. As it opened Ethan could see the greyish-pink glistening muscle of the thing, wet and slurping around in its pale lower jaw.
“Burdleburbleslurpleslurpleburbleburdleslurp,” said the clam, more or less.
Cinquefoil nodded, and pointed to a pair of ferishers standing nearby. One of them reached into a leather tube, a kind of quiver that hung at his back, and pulled out a rolled sheet of what looked like parchment. The other took hold of one end, and then they stepped apart from each other, unrolling the scroll. It was a sheet of pale hide, like their clothing, a rectangle of deerskin marked all around with mysterious characters of an alphabet that Ethan didn’t know. It was something like a Ouija board, only the letters had been painted by hand. The ferishers knelt down in front of the clam, and held the unfurled scroll out in front of him.
Cinquefoil laid a hand on the top of the clam’s shell, and stroked it softly, without seeming to notice what he was doing. He was lost in thought. Ethan supposed he was trying to come up with the right question for the oracle. Oracles were tricky, as Ethan knew from his reading of mythology. Often they answered the question you ought to have asked, or the one you didn’t realise you were even asking. Ethan wondered what question he himself would pose to an oracular clam, given a chance.
“Johnny,” the chief said finally.” Ya done warned us that Coyote was coming. And ya was right. Ya said we ought ta fetch us a champion, and we done tried. And spent up half our dear treasury in the bargain. But look at this one, Johnny.” Cinquefoil made a dismissive wave in Ethan’s direction. “He’s just a puppy. He ain’t up ta the deal. We been watching him for a while now, and we had our hopes, but Coyote’s done come sooner than ever we thought. So now, Johnny, I’m asking ya one more time. What are we ta do now? How can we stop Coyote? Where can we turn?”
There was a pause, during which Johnny Speakwater emitted a series of fizzings and burps and irritable teakettle whistlings. The letter-scroll trembled in the ferishers’ hands. From somewhere nearby came the disrespectful cackling of a crow. Then there was a deep splorp from inside Johnny Speakwater, and a jet of clear, shining water shot from between the lips of his shell. It lanced across the foot or so of air that separated the clam and the letter-scroll, and hit with a loud, thick splat against a letter that looked something like a curly U with a cross in the centre of it.
“Ah!” cried all the ferishers. Cinquefoil scratched the U-and-cross into the sand.
One letter at a time, slowly, with deadly accuracy, Johnny Speakwater spat out his prophecy. As each wad of thick clam saliva hit the parchment, the letter affected was copied into the sand by Cinquefoil, and then wiped clean. The clam spat more quickly as he went along and then, when he had hawked up about forty-five blasts, he stopped. A faint, clammy sigh escaped him, and then his shell creaked shut again. Ferishers gathered around the inscription, many of them murmuring the words. Then one by one they turned to look at Ethan with renewed interest.
“What does it say?” Ethan said. “Why are you all looking at me?”
Ringfinger Brown went over to take a look at the prophecy in the sand. He rubbed at the bald place on the back of his grey head, then held out his hand to Cinquefoil. The chief handed him the stick, and the old scout scratched two fresh sentences under the strange ferisher marks.
“That about right?” he asked the chief.
Cinquefoil nodded.
“What did I tell you, then,” Ringfinger said.” What did I say?”
Ethan leaned forward to see how the old man had translated the words of the oracular clam.
FELD IS THE WANTED ONE FELD HAS THE STUFF HE NEEDS
When he read these words, Ethan felt a strange warmth fill his belly. He was the wanted one – the champion. He had the stuff. He turned back to look at Johnny Speakwater, flush with gratitude towards the clam for having such faith in him when no one else did. What he saw, when he turned, made him cry out in horror.
“The crow!” he said. “He has Johnny!”
In all the excitement over the words of the prophecy, the prophet had been forgotten.
“It ain’t a crow,” Cinquefoil said.” It’s a raven. I’d lay even money it’s Coyote himself.”
When their backs were turned, the great black bird must have swooped down from the trees. Now it was lurching his way skyward with the clam clutched in both talons. Its wings beat fitfully against the air. It was a huge and powerful bird, but the enormous clam was giving it problems. It dipped and staggered and listed to one side. Ethan could hear the clam whistling and burbling in desperation as it was carried away.
Something came over Ethan then. Perhaps he was feeling charged from the vote of confidence Johnny Speakwater had given him. Or perhaps he was just angered, as any of us would be, by seeing an outrage perpetrated on an innocent clam. He had seen birds on the Fauna Channel making meals out of bivalves. He had a vision of Johnny Speakwater being dropped from the sky onto some rocks, the great stony shell shattered and lying in shards. He saw the sharp yellow beak of the raven ripping into the featureless, soft greyish-pink flesh that was all Johnny Speakwater had for a body. In any case he took off down the beach, after the raven, shouting, “Hey! You come back here! Hey!”
The raven was not making good time under all that weight. The nearer he got to the robber bird, the angrier Ethan got. Now he was just underneath the struggling pair of wings, right at the edge of the trees. A few seconds more and he would have run out of beach. The whistling of the clam was more piteous than ever. Ethan wanted to do something to help Johnny Speakwater, to justify its faith in him, to prove to the ferishers that he was not just a raw and unformed puppy.
There was something in Ethan’s hand, round and hard and cool as a sound argument. He looked down. It was the ferisher baseball. Without considering questions of air resistance or trajectory, he heaved the ball skyward in the direction of the raven. It arced skyward and struck the bird with neat precision on the head. There was a sickening crack. The bird squawked, and fluttered, and let go of Johnny Speakwater. A moment later something heavy as a boulder and rough as a brick smacked Ethan in the chest, and he felt a blast of something warm and marine splash across his face, and then he felt his legs go out from under him. The last thing he heard before he lost consciousness was the voice of the ferisher chief, Cinquefoil.
“Sign that kid up,” he said.