Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,1

Quiet was an odd name. Which was all right with me.

I myself was odd in many ways, and I liked other things that were odd. Questions worth answering. Like the ones that would soon lead me to Star Peak, to a boy who could make a knife sing, to a hag named Cate, and the other elses I came to know during that strange time. Some of them good. Some of them bad. All of them tied to the flame that burned more brightly than ever on the day when Quiet was born.

Chapter Two

Quiet’s grandmother, a sweet dog named Capricorn, had started her life as I had started mine—in a town where my father was a tailor and my mother a music teacher, before the stock market crash that made almost everyone poor and sent us to live on Echo Mountain.

“But who crashed?” I had asked my father when our own lives began to spin toward disaster.

My father told me that too many people had gambled with their money and then panicked when it looked like they might lose it . . . which, in fact, made them lose even more, and made them poor, and us along with them.

“I don’t understand.” I remember looking up at him, expecting a better explanation than that. “Did we gamble with our money?”

He shook his head.

“Then why did we lose ours, too?”

“Not ours, right off. But people who have no money don’t pay a tailor to make their clothes, and they don’t buy new clothes when the ones they have will do.”

My father was more than a fine tailor. His clothes fit us like second skins. And the vines and flowers he stitched into his hems and cuffs were more than beautiful. They were like signatures. Like signatures on paintings.

“But Mother is a teacher,” I said. “Do you mean that people are too poor now for school?”

He shook his head again. “No, I don’t mean that. Quite the contrary. More music right now would do everyone a world of good. But I’m afraid music is one of the first things to go when a school is in trouble. And we’re not the only ones leaving. Half the town has gone away, moved in with kin, or just . . . moved. To live on the road, in the rough, looking for work. Which means not so many children in the school anymore. And no need for all the teachers they once had.”

No need for my mother.

And so we lost his shop first. And then our house. And then the life we’d always known.

Which was when I understood the other name that people used when they talked about the crash. The Depression, they called it. The Great Depression. Which meant something dreadful and dark.

I didn’t need my father to tell me that. It was in my mother’s face. My sister’s face. Somewhere more distant than that, in my father’s eyes, but there all the same.

* * *

—

We took Capricorn with us when we left town, though we didn’t know how we’d feed ourselves, let alone a dog.

When we arrived at our little portion of mountain, we tied up our new cows, piled our belongings under a canvas to save them from the weather, and lived in a crooked tent while we built our cabin.

Poor Capricorn was baffled by our new life in the woods. She had always been happiest under the kitchen table while we ate or at the foot of a bed or in the garden we’d had before the crash. But we had no kitchen anymore, no kitchen table, no garden to give her comfort, so we took her into the tent each night, where she managed to give us some comfort instead.

It was Capricorn who growled warnings in the night when a bear came close, sending my father out with a torch to scare it away.

It was Capricorn who trembled and cried so hard when thunder came that we all felt brave in comparison.

And it was Capricorn who brought me the strangest gift I’d ever received: a tiny lamb, carved out of wood, tied with a bit of twine to her collar.

* * *

—

“What’s that?” I said when she came through the trees one morning, already skinny, learning to hunt for the first time in her life, much as my father was. But she had a choice between field mice or bean soup, so hunt she did.

I untied the little lamb and held it up to the light.

“Where did you get