Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,4

if I were being stretched east and west, my bones creaking and crying as they strained back toward one.

But hunger has a way of getting what it wants. And the hunger of a brother or a sister or a mother or a father is a very strong hunger indeed.

Before his accident, my father had provided plenty of meat, firewood, river fish, furs, and sometimes honey. But I was now the one who caught fish. And I snared rabbits. And if we grew hungry enough, I knew I would be the one to shoot a deer.

If I had to.

I hoped I wouldn’t have to.

One more reason for my father to wake up.

While he slept, we paid for our venison with cream and butter and things the other families didn’t grow: potatoes mostly, but carrots, too, and beets. Onions and turnips. Parsnips and rutabagas.

And my mother gave the best haircuts to be had. And she made soft shoes from deer hide lined with rabbit fur and traded them for things we needed from town: stove and pump parts, sewing needles, other things we couldn’t make for ourselves.

Since Esther and Samuel and I were the only children among the five families, my mother could not offer schooling in trade for meat or metal. And although she could sing like an April breeze and stun angels with her mandolin, she refused to think of those things as currency. “Music is not something you keep in a wallet,” she said. “I can’t just open my purse and pull it out.”

“People would trade anything to hear you,” I said soon after my father’s accident, when we were still learning how to pay our way without him.

But she had sung very seldom since coming to live in the woods. Not at all since my father had been hurt.

I was amazed that such a wild, beautiful thing could be silenced, especially in a place as wild as a mountain.

I missed that voice. That mother.

And other things, besides. When she stopped singing, she stopped teaching the three of us how to play her mandolin as well. In town, our lessons had been as much a part of our lives as church and school. But though she continued to teach us our letters and numbers, she left both prayer and music to us now, though we knew better than to touch the mandolin that my mother had set aside.

I missed Capricorn, too, who had died a year after we’d moved to the woods, soon after giving birth to a litter of four scrawny pups.

She had seemed to let go too easily, as if she were less afraid of dying than of living in the wild, and I had cried long and hard when she’d gone to her grave. And I had been the one to feed cow’s milk to her puppies until they were old enough to be traded away (which also broke my heart). And I had been the one to choose the pup we kept, though my father had decided she should be Esther’s dog, not mine.

“Maybe having a puppy will help her be happier,” my father had whispered when he took the little dog from my arms. “You and I are all right here. But Esther needs something more.”

So I had handed over the puppy I’d bottle-fed for weeks, watching sadly as my sister changed her name from Willow to Maisie and made her into a new doll of sorts, tying a strip of rag around her little neck like a ribbon, brushing her soft fur until it gleamed, and training her to sit. To stay.

Just as Esther and my mother tied their hair back, and polished their shoes, and did everything they could to keep Samuel, too, from growing up wild.

Chapter Five

By the time Quiet was born, I had found many more of the strange and marvelous gifts left by the stranger I’d glimpsed in the trees, each of them tiny, each of them enormous, like shooting stars.

One of them I found next to Maisie’s water bowl, in the yard near the cabin door.

It was a little dog, the spitting image of Maisie, right down to the perk in her tail, the tip of her head. So wonderfully done that I held it gently, as if it were made of sugar.

And then I looked up carefully. Turned slowly in all directions, as if I were a lazy clock, looking for a glimpse of who had left the tiny dog for me to find.

This time, I saw