Stones in the Footprints
"Bram, what's over there, past the water?" Ada asked. Bram lifted his striped face out of the ferns. The rain had stopped an hour ago, and the whole valley smelled green and peppery, like crushed leaves in warm hands. Ada pushed a frond aside. Beyond the ferns the stream ran wide and slow, the colour of weak tea. On the far bank, tall horsetails stood in a row like green candles. Something big moved behind them, slow and unbothered. "I want to see," Ada said. Bram sat down beside her and looked too, and neither of them moved for a while.
The stream was not deep. Ada could tell, because reeds stood up straight in the middle of it. But the water was cloudy, and she could not see the bottom, and that was the part she did not like. "I'm a bit scared of the bit I can't see," she said. Bram nodded the way he did, slow and serious. He put one broad paw in the shallows and let it sit there. Mud curled around his claws. A warm smell rose up, like wet stone and mushrooms. "We can go slow," Ada said. "Slow is still going."
So they built. Ada gathered fallen branches from under the tree ferns, and Bram dragged a long one along in his teeth. They laid the branches across the water, end to end, and packed fern leaves on top for a floor. It looked like a bridge. It smelled like broken green stalks, sharp and sweet, and Ada was proud of it. She stepped on with one foot to test it. The branches rolled apart under her shoe. The fern floor folded, and half of it slid into the stream and floated off as a slow, untidy raft.
Ada sat down on the bank with wet socks. Bram sat down beside her with wet everything. He shook once, and warm drops flew in all directions, and Ada laughed until her stomach hurt. The raft of ferns turned a corner and was gone. "That was a bad bridge," Ada said. Bram made a small huffing sound that meant he agreed. A dragonfly the size of her hand hummed past and landed on a reed, and stayed. Above them the sky turned the colour of apricots. Ada wiped her face and looked at the water again, thinking.
Then she saw the footprints. A long-neck had come through in the night, and its feet had pressed deep round dishes into the mud, and every dish had filled with rain. They went in a line, right across the shallow part, like plates laid out for dinner. Between them lay flat grey stones the flood had left behind. Ada stood up. "Not sticks," she said. "Stones." She showed Bram with her hands: a stone in each footprint, pressed down flat, and a stone between, and a stone between that. "We can go slow," she said. "Slow is still going."
Bram was strong, and he knew it, and he never made a fuss about it. He rolled the heavy stones down the bank with his shoulder while Ada hunted for the small ones, the flat ones, the ones with dry tops. She set each stone into a footprint and pressed until it stopped rocking. If it rocked, she lifted it out and tried another. The mud smelled of rain and old leaves and something sweet underneath. It took a long time. When the last stone sat still under her hand, the first stars were out and the valley had gone quiet and blue.
Ada put one foot on the first stone. It held. She waited there, listening to the water going by underneath, and Bram waited on the bank without hurrying her at all. Then the second stone. Then the third. Halfway across she stopped and stood still in the middle of the stream, with frogs starting up around her and the warm green smell of the valley all over her. Bram came after, stone by stone, careful with his broad feet. On the far bank the horsetails parted, and there she was: the long-neck, chest-deep in ferns, chewing.
The long-neck looked at Ada the way a hill might look at you, slow and not worried by anything. Ada sat down in the ferns to watch her. Bram leaned against Ada's side, warm and heavy. The big animal breathed in, and the ferns bent toward her, and breathed out, and they bent away. In. Out. Ada's own breath went slow to match. "We can go slow," she whispered. "Slow is still going." The valley smelled of green rain. The stones stayed exactly where she had put them, and everything else went quiet, breathing.
