The Shell in the Ferns
Sena carried the piece of shell down to the fern bank, turning it over as she walked. It was pale green, curved like a cupped palm, thin as a fingernail at its edge. Bram walked beside her with his broad striped face low, sniffing the warm ground. Rain had fallen in the night, and the valley smelled of wet stone and bruised leaves. Then, far off across the ferns, something made a low double note. Hoom-hoom. It rolled under the trees the way thunder rolls, only softer and friendlier. Sena stopped with her hand still in the air. "Listen — there it is again," she said. Bram sat down to wait. He was good at waiting, and he never hurried her.
The nest was where she had found the first piece: a low ring of packed mud and old ferns, wide as a cart wheel, tucked against a bank. Seasons of rain had worn the ring smooth and green. Sena knelt and set her piece in the middle of it, curve upward, like the start of something. The rest had to be lying somewhere close, she thought, pressed into moss where they had fallen long ago. "We could find the others," she said. Bram put his nose to the ring and snuffed along it slowly. Then he sat again, which was how he said yes. Sena began where the ferns grew thickest, lifting the leaves apart with two fingers, careful as someone sorting beads.
The second piece was under the fourth fern she checked, lying face down like a small dropped saucer. A beetle sat on it, green-backed and unbothered, warming itself in the wet light. Sena waited until the beetle walked off the edge and into the moss on its own. Then she lifted the shell and rubbed the dirt away with her thumb. It had the same faint ridges as the first, running in little rivers across the curve. She carried it back and laid it beside the other in the ring. Two pieces, not touching yet, but close. Bram leaned over to look, and his striped shadow fell across them both, and Sena found she was smiling.
The ground shook, gently, the way a table shakes when someone leans on it. Sena felt it through her knees before she heard anything. Then the trees at the valley edge moved apart, and a long grey neck came through them, high up, unhurried, with ferns hanging from a mouth that chewed and chewed. Hoom-hoom, said the great animal, to nobody in particular. "Listen — there it is again," Sena whispered. Bram's ears went forward. They watched the huge feet come down, one and then another, each print filling slowly with brown water. The animal passed the nest without looking at it and went on down the valley, and the ferns swung shut behind her like a curtain.
In the nearest footprint, half sunk, something pale caught the light. Sena rolled her sleeve past her elbow and reached in. The water was warm as bathwater and full of drifting silt, and her fingers found grit, a root, then a smooth curved edge. She drew the third piece out streaming. It was bigger than the others, nearly the size of her hand, and it had a chip missing from one corner that she knew she would never find. That was all right. She rinsed it, held it up, and let the water run off it in threads. Bram shook a splash off his nose. Three pieces now, resting together in the ring of old mud.
Bram found the fourth himself. He had been digging at the foot of a stump, not fast, just steady, moving earth aside with one paw and then the other. Sena heard the change in the sound — soft, soft, then a small dry click. She came and knelt beside him. A root as thick as her arm lay across the place. Bram set his shoulder under it and lifted, and the root came up easily, and he held it there without saying anything about how easy it was. Sena slid her hand into the gap and drew out a wedge of shell with pale roots threaded through it. She picked the roots away one at a time.
Later, a beaked animal came down to drink, wide and slow, with a crest like a folded leaf. She was taller than Bram and shorter than the ferns, and she did not mind them at all. Sena saw something stuck in the dried mud on her front foot: a flat scrap, pale green, ridged. She waited while the animal drank her fill. Then she crouched, laid two fingers against the warm foot, and worked the scrap loose. The animal lifted her head, blinked her slow eye, and went back up the bank without hurrying. Sena stood there holding the fifth piece, mud to her wrists, and Bram huffed once beside her, pleased about it.
In the ring she turned the five pieces this way and that. Edge met edge, ridge ran on into ridge, and slowly a shape came out of them — round at the bottom, opening wide at the top, like a bowl somebody had cracked and set down. She could see where each piece belonged. She could also see the gap: a space near the rim about the size of her thumb, with nothing to fill it. Sena searched the moss again. She searched under the ferns she had already searched. Bram walked a wide slow circle with his nose down and came back with nothing but a wet leaf on his head.
Sena sat back on her heels and let herself think. Rain had been falling on this bank for seasons and seasons, she thought, and rain always went the same way. It went downhill. She followed the slope with her eyes, past the stump, past the trampled ferns, to the thin channel of water that ran along the bottom, chuckling over pebbles. She walked down to it. Bram came after her. And there, caught against a stone where the water turned, half buried in grey grit, sat one small curved piece with a thumb-shaped edge. She lifted it out. It was cold from the stream, and it fitted her thumb exactly, and she laughed out loud.
She carried it back up the slope with both hands, as if it might spill. The last piece went in last. Sena pressed the edges together, easing them, turning them, and the shell became one round shell again with seams like faint rivers. She banked wet moss around the outside to hold it. When she took her hands away, it stayed. Rain began again, the warm soft kind that hardly wets you, and a drip came off a fern and landed inside the shell. Plink. Then another. Sena sat down beside it with her muddy arms around her knees, and Bram settled against her side, heavy and warm as a loaf from an oven.
The light went orange, then grey, then blue. The valley cooled. Ferns closed their new leaves the way hands close. And then, nearer than before, low under everything: hoom-hoom. Sena felt it in the ground and in her ribs at the same time. The trees moved apart again, and the long grey neck came down the slope toward them, careful of where she put her feet, stepping around the stump, stepping around the ring. The great animal stopped above the nest she had been born in. She lowered her head until it was level with Sena's head, and looked at the mended shell holding its little pool of rain.
Her breath came out slow and warm across Sena's face, smelling of ferns and green water. Sena did not move. Then the animal folded her legs, one side and then the other, and lay down along the bank with her neck curved around the old ring like an arm around a plate. Her side rose and fell, rose and fell. Bram padded over and leaned into the warmth of her, and after a moment Sena leaned too. "Listen — there it is again," she said, but quietly, because it was not a call now. It was only breathing. It came once, and then again, and then again, and it did not stop.
Sena lay down in the ferns with her back against Bram and her feet near the mended shell. Rain touched the leaves above her and did not reach her. Inside the shell the little pool held a piece of the sky. She watched the grey side beside her go up and come down, slow as a tide, and she found that her own breathing had gone slow to match it, without her deciding anything. Bram's chest moved under her shoulder in a rhythm of its own. Three breaths, close together in the warm dark, none of them hurrying. Hoom, went the valley, far away and half asleep. Sena breathed out. Sena breathed in. Sena slept.
