moss that forms a new species of pebble. She drops one into her pocket for Gaia. She’ll love it. Like her mother, she takes pleasure in nature’s gifts. She’ll probably name it and create a special bed for it out of cereal boxes and tissue paper.
Just then, a noise makes her look up. A distant rumbling. She moves forward, her bare feet stepping into the cool water. Though the mists make it difficult to see, she knows that the sound is coming from the field directly opposite, a green slope that drifts down to the other side of the fjord. A splash. Her breath catches in her throat. She squints, tries to see through the fog, but she already knows what it is. The thundering hooves of reindeer.
As she wades into the water to get a closer look, the fog thins, and she sees the white and black bodies funneling down the slope toward the water, antlers rising from their heads like a tangle of tree branches against the moth-light.
Already several are in the water, and she wonders whether they’ve not seen the edge of the land and have fallen in. She glances behind her. Is Tom here? Maybe they can call someone. She’s not sure what to do, or what she can do. She watches as the view clears, the mists divide, and buttery sunshine funnels through pearly clouds to reveal the scene in its tremendous, mythic spectacle: hundreds, maybe thousands of reindeer charging into the water. Aurelia would almost not believe her own eyes were it not for the ripples that are gathering now around her calves, sent from the cascading herd in front of her. The light strengthens and she lifts a hand to shield her eyes against the sun. Antlers and snouts bob ahead, about a quarter of the way across the fjord. They are swimming. She gives a shout, a laugh, to witness this. Reindeer migrating across bodies of water was something her grandfather Gunnar had told her about, but she’d thought he was making it up. She begins to wade out toward them, her clothes ballooning in the cold water. The meandering causeway of fuzzy, bloodied antlers and white faces, their long, strong legs striding through the water.
It’s a long distance from one side of the fjord to the other. She swims out to a small island and wraps her arms around a black boulder, treading water as she watches the line of them zigzag across the fjord. For the most part they swim so close to one another she fears they’ll hook antlers and drown each other. The formation begins to curve toward her so that she can make out the steam of their breath rising in the air, the snorts and grunts and splashing and the bobbing white tails, like rabbits. Most of the bulls are gray with black snouts, the females—cows, she remembers, not does—are pure, majestic white, unantlered, and there are calves, too, mostly swimming alongside the cows.
The heads of the herd are almost at the other side. She watches, breathless with a triumph for which she has no words, as the first bull reaches the shore, his tail twitching and his hooves stomping off the wet. The others gather behind, but he does not wait—the path is narrow and leads through the forest, and soon he disappears behind the pines.
The stragglers are cows with young calves. The distance between them and the herd grows by the second, and as she pushes off the boulder to swim closer, she hears a sound, a cry, that is at odds with the majesty of this scene. A child’s cry.
Her heart hammering, she sweeps her arms through the water and kicks her legs until she is only feet away from the last of the herd, the two dozen or so calves and cows that stray behind the rest. As one of the cows moves forward she sees something that makes her cry out, that makes her heart almost punch through her chest: Gaia is swimming there, her small blonde head foreign among the animals, her pale face ducking above and beneath the water.
“Mumma!” she calls out. “Mumma, help!”
“Gaia!”
Aurelia’s body floods with adrenaline as she surges forward. Already her mind is wheeling calculations. They’re about a quarter of a mile from shore, and her energy is ebbing. The water is cold and Gaia will not last long. She’ll take her back to the boulder, but when she glances behind to gauge the distance she