The Smell of Warm Rain
Vera carried her bundle of sweetgrass under one arm, the way she did every evening. It smelled like warm hay and honey, and it made her pillow soft. The ferns stood taller than her head, dripping already. She walked the narrow track between them, humming to herself. Then the air changed. It went heavy and green and very still. A fat drop landed on her wrist, and another landed on the bundle. Far off, thunder cleared its throat and rolled away again, friendly. Vera tucked the sweetgrass under her shirt to keep it dry. "Make room, the rain is coming," she said.
The valley began to shift around her. Two broad duckbills shuffled sideways under a fern the size of a roof. Beetles climbed the stems, one after another, out of the wet. A line of small striped hatchlings crossed the path, so Vera stepped back and let them pass. The rain came warm, not cold, the way it always did here. It pattered on leaves and filled the hollows and made the mud breathe. And the whole valley began to smell of something. Vera stopped walking. She knew that smell. She had been sleeping on it every night for as long as she could remember.
It was her pillow. The warm hay and honey smell, but huge now, rising off the whole wet slope at once. Vera had picked her sweetgrass from the same place since she was small. She had never once wondered who put it there. She stood in the rain with her hand over the bundle and sniffed again. The smell was stronger uphill. She turned and climbed, past the duckbills, past a fern full of sheltering beetles. Water ran down her arms. Her feet made small soft sounds in the mud. The smell pulled her on like a thread.
At the top of the slope the sweetgrass grew in a long line. Not a meadow. A line. Vera knelt and saw why. Each clump sat inside a footprint, deep and round and brimming with rain. Every print was its own little pond, and every pond was crowded with green. The rain filled them. The grass drank. The smell lifted off them in a slow warm cloud. Vera put her fingers in the nearest one. The water was warm as a bath. "Make room, the rain is coming," she said, quieter now, to nobody in particular.
Then the ridge trembled, gently, the way a floor does when someone walks across a room. Vera looked up. A long-neck came along the line in the rain, grey and slow, her head somewhere in the mist. Down came one foot, and a new round print pressed into the mud. The print began filling before the foot had even lifted. Seeds floated in from the grass and settled. Vera watched her pass, one patient step after another, making ponds she would never look back at. Vera's chest felt full and strange. She had been taking from this line for years.
She went along the footprints to see how they were doing. Most were fine. One was not. A slab of mud had slid in and buried it, and the grass underneath had gone pale and flat, with no water at all. Vera set her bundle down in the rain and dug. She scooped the mud out with both hands and piled it to one side. Water seeped back in, brown, then clear. The pale grass lifted a little, the way hair lifts in a bath. Her bundle was soaked through now. She did not mind as much as she expected.
So she kept going. She cleared leaves from three more prints. She broke open the rim of one so the rain could run in. Then she opened her wet bundle and shook the loose seeds from it into the empty new prints the long-neck had just made, a pinch in each. The rain thinned to a drizzle. Steam rose off the slope, and with it that smell, everywhere, almost too much of it. Vera sat back on her heels, muddy to the elbows, breathing it in properly for the first time. Behind her, something very large stopped walking.
The long-neck lowered her head until it rested on the grass beside Vera, close enough to feel her slow warm breath. Vera stood up. She climbed on, holding the wet ridge of her neck, and the ground went far away below. They went down the slope together at a walking pace. Ferns brushed Vera's ankles. The hatchlings were asleep in a heap under the biggest one. "Make room, the rain is coming," Vera murmured, though it had almost stopped. The long-neck set her down in the fern hollow. Vera lay back on her damp sweetgrass and smelled honey and hay, and slept.
