Echo Mountain - Lauren Wolk Page 0,5

something move in a grove of birches. And I burst toward it like an arrow from a bow, straight and fast, intent on only one thing: to see more than a face this time.

But when I reached the birch grove, there was only a place where some twigs were freshly broken and, on the ground there, a few pale curls of wood, fresh from someone’s blade.

I was disappointed. But I was also worried that running into the woods like that might have ruined everything.

* * *

—

Sure enough, the next few days were empty ones: no new carvings, no glimpse of anyone among the trees, and I was sorry all over again that I’d been so impatient.

I told myself that I wouldn’t make the same mistake again. That I would wait, and be careful, and do what I could to prove that I was worth another chance.

But at the end of a long week of waiting and wondering, I decided that the next move would have to be mine.

So I left my jacket hanging from a branch as I had before and went into the cabin for the night.

I thought doing that might seem like an invitation. A sign of friendship. A bridge. But in the morning, when I went out to fetch my jacket, I found nothing in its pockets.

And I wondered whether perhaps the jacket had felt too much like a trap.

Or whether I had indeed ruined everything by running into the woods, like a hunter chasing her prey.

* * *

—

Finding another gift a month later was like a yellow sunrise after days of rain.

It was a full-moon face, left by the brook where I always went first thing to wash the night from my eyes.

This time, I didn’t even look around. I simply kissed the face of that moon, smiling, and hoped that someone was watching. That someone would see how much I loved such a beautiful gift.

And then I called out, “Thank you!” and “Whoever you are, thank you!” before I turned and went back toward the cabin again.

* * *

—

My church shoes weren’t big enough to hide more than the lamb and the snowdrop, so I had long since dusted off a high shelf in the woodshed and lined the carvings up at the back of it, where no one could see them without standing on a stool.

I couldn’t see them either as I traveled through my days, but I knew they were there, the way I knew the sun was in the sky. And I knew that the friend I had not yet met was close by, too.

If Maisie suddenly stood at attention and barked at the woods, I figured I was being watched, but all I ever saw was a shadow of a shadow. If she barked in the night, I lay in bed and thought about what I might find the next day when I searched the cowshed, the woodshed, the root cellar, the trail through the woods. All the places that anchored my days like the points of a compass.

I thought of those little gifts as clues because they told me things about the carver and myself, too. Whoever had made them was sweet and clever. And I was someone who noticed things that others missed. There was a reason I was the one who found the little creatures before anyone else did. Most eyes would have passed right over a little wooden treasure tucked among the leaves at the edge of the brook. But not mine.

And there was another clue, too. The most important one. Those gifts had been meant for me. I was sure of it. Which meant that whoever was making them knew me and understood that I was the kind of girl who would love finding them tucked in the corners of my world, all of them carved from good hardwood, all just short of alive: a milk cow with one ear up and one ear down; a hunchbacked inchworm; an acorn with a tiny feather in its cap; a chickadee as round and fat as a plum.

And then, soon after my father’s accident, I found another one.

This time, it was a carving of me.

I found it perched on the stump of the tree that had nearly killed him.

And I wondered whether there had been a witness to what had happened on that terrible day.

Whether I was not the only one who knew the truth of it.

Chapter Six

The months after my father’s accident were every kind of dark