The Bow in the Footprint
"Where does the rain go when it stops?" Dara asked. River did not answer, because River was an otter, but he lifted his pale muzzle and sniffed the steam coming off the ferns. The warm rain had just quit. The whole valley was dripping. Dara walked barefoot through the fern beds, and the mud came up warm between her toes, soft as pudding, letting her go with a small sucking sound each time she lifted a foot. River slid ahead on his belly down a slick green slope. Every leaf she touched was furred with water. Every frond drew a wet stripe along her arm. Somewhere below them, something enormous was drinking, slowly, the way big animals do.
The footprints crossed the open mud in a long line, each one wide enough to sit in. Rain had filled them to the brim. Dara knelt at the biggest, where the clay rim was ridged and cool under her knees, and River poured himself into the water without a splash. Then the sun came out underneath the clouds, low and gold, and the steam above the pool turned into colours. A small bow lay flat in the air over the water, red at the top and green-blue beneath, close enough to put a hand through. Dara did not put a hand through. She counted eight breaths, and on the ninth the steam thinned and the colours went out of it.
She waited for it to come back. The pool went on being a pool. River climbed out and shook himself, and the drops that hit her arm were warm as bathwater. So Dara scooped up two handfuls and threw them into the light. The water came apart into fat drops, fell, and was only water. She tried again, harder. Only water. She wiped her hands down her shins, leaving two brown streaks, and looked at the sun, which had moved a finger's width lower in the sky. "One more try before the sun goes," she told River. River sat up in the mud with his whiskers dripping and his tail curled round his feet, which she decided meant yes.
Fat drops were wrong. The bow had come out of the fine stuff, the steam, the floating part of the rain. Dara slapped the pool flat-handed and made a sheet of spray, and for half a second there was something in it, a thinness of colour, gone before she could be sure she had seen it. Her palm stung pleasantly. She slapped again and got nothing but a face full of water and a mouthful of warm pond. River rolled onto his back in the shallows, delighted, paddling with all four feet. The ferns along the bank nodded whenever a drip landed on them, as though agreeing with something nobody had said.
Down the line of footprints, a hadrosaur was pulling horsetails out of the mud with her soft grey lips. She was bigger than a barn and entirely unbothered. Water stood in beads on her back. When she shook her head to clear her ears, the beads leapt off her in a cloud so fine it looked like breath, and inside that cloud, for a moment, there was a smear of green and pink. Dara stood up so fast her knees made a sound. Not throwing. Not slapping. Shaking. She looked at the fern beds, where ten thousand fronds were holding ten thousand drops each, and she started walking, and River ran ahead of her the whole way.
The first frond she picked was old and stiff, with a stem like a stick of celery. She dunked it in the footprint pool and swung it at the light. The water came off in three fat drops and a dribble down her elbow. She picked a bigger one. It flung a rope of water that landed on River, who did not mind. No colour. Her arm was aching in a good way now, the way it ached after swimming. The sun had gone another finger lower. The clay at the pool's edge was drying into little curling tiles that broke under her heel. "One more try before the sun goes," said Dara, and went back into the ferns for something softer.
The soft ones grew in the shade under the tree ferns, pale green and fuzzy, each leaflet covered in hairs so fine they held water in a grey fur instead of in drops. She ran one through her fingers and it squeaked. She soaked it. She shook it. The spray came off in a hiss, so fine she felt it on her face a second after she made it, and it hung in the air a moment before falling. But there was no colour in it at all. Dara turned the frond over, frowning, and River climbed her leg and sat on her hip like a wet bag of sand, watching her hands the way he watched fish.
She tried it eleven times. She counted, because counting made the trying feel like a thing she was building instead of a thing she was failing. Soak, shake, look. Soak, shake, look. Twice the spray drifted into her eyes. Once the frond slipped out of her hand and had to be fished from the pool, and River got it first and would not give it back for a while. Mud dried on her shins and cracked. Her hair stuck to her neck. Far off, two long-necked shapes moved along the treeline like slow clouds, and the warm air smelled of wet stone and crushed green stalks, and the sun went lower, and none of the eleven had any colour in them.
On the twelfth she had turned around to see where River had got to, and the spray went out in front of her instead of beside her, and there it was. A thread of pink. Just a thread, bending in the air for less than a breath. Dara stood absolutely still. The sun was behind her now. It had been off to her left all evening, the whole time, and she had been throwing water sideways across it like somebody trying to open a door by pushing the hinges. She put her back square to the light, soaked the fuzzy frond until it was heavy, held it up high, and shook it with both hands.
The bow came. It stood in the mist in front of her, no wider than her two arms, red curving over orange over green over a blue that was nearly the colour of the sky behind it. It hung there while the spray fell, and then it faded politely, like a candle being carried into another room. Dara made another. And another. River spun in the shallows and slapped the water with his tail, and the drops he threw up caught the colours too, so that for a while there were small bows all along the footprint and both of them were soaked to the skin and neither of them cared at all.
The sun slid down behind the ferns and the light went from gold to rose to a soft grey, and the bows stopped coming, because there was nothing left to make them out of. Dara stood with the wet frond hanging from her hand. The valley had begun its evening noises: deep hoots, somebody enormous settling into mud, insects testing the air. She crouched by the water and looked at the place where the colours had been. "One more try before the sun goes," she said, quietly, to River, and then, "tomorrow, though." She laid the fuzzy frond on the pool's edge where she would find it, and patted it flat, and left it there for the morning rain.
The hadrosaur was still working her way along the footprints, and she stopped beside them and lowered her great head to drink. Her skin was pebbled all over like a cobbled lane, warm from the whole day, and when Dara put a hand on her shoulder the hadrosaur did not move at all. Dara climbed. River went up her sleeve and over and settled in the hollow between the big animal's shoulders, which was exactly otter-shaped. The hadrosaur straightened, and the valley swung and dropped away below them, and then she began to walk, one slow foot and then another, towards the warm lights of the fern hollows where her herd was lying down.
Dara lay forward along the broad warm back with her cheek against the pebbled skin and her arm over River, who was already asleep, whiskers twitching, smelling of pond. Each step rocked her, left, then right, then left. Behind them the footprints filled quietly with the last of the rain, and the clay held the shape of her knees, and the fuzzy frond waited at the water's edge for somebody to pick it up again. The sky let out its first few stars. River made a small sound against her ribs. The slow feet went on through the ferns, carrying them both, and Dara closed her eyes somewhere between one step and the next.
