The Rain Pods
The rain came down warm and soft, and the ferns went pat, pat, pat. Juno stood under a leaf as wide as a door and listened. Beside her, Mo lifted his blue-grey head into the drips. Ahead of them, a footprint as big as a washtub had filled with water. Every raindrop that landed in it made one round sound. Plink. Plonk. Plink. Juno crouched at the edge and watched the rings spread out and meet. "The valley is playing something," she said. Mo blinked slowly, the way he did when he agreed. Juno looked up into the branches to see what else could sing.
High in the vines hung little brown pods, dry and fat as thumbs. Juno reached up and picked one. When she shook it, the seeds inside went shh-shh-shh, like rain in a cup. She tied it with a strip of fern to the low vine that leaned over the pool. The next drop hit the pod, and the pod answered. Plink. Plonk. Shh. "One more, and the rain can sing," Juno said. Mo paddled a slow half circle, looking pleased in his quiet way. There were pods everywhere, once she knew the shape of them. She went to find another.
The second pod came from a low branch she could reach on tiptoe. The third was down among the ferns, half hidden under a curl of moss. While she worked, a long grey shape moved through the mist beyond the trees. It was a hadrosaur, tall and slow, drinking with its wide soft mouth. It looked at Juno without hurry and went back to drinking. Rain ran off its back in little ropes. Juno tied her two pods to the vine and stepped back to listen. Plink. Plonk. Shh-shh. "One more, and the rain can sing," she said.
Mo found the fourth without meaning to. It was riding on his shell, stuck in the wet moss there. Juno lifted it off and thanked him twice. The fifth she had to wade for, ankle deep in warm brown water. The sixth hung out over the pool itself, and she leaned slowly, slowly, until her fingers closed around it. Six pods swung from the vine now, dark and round as little bells. Rain struck them one after another, and the sounds fell over each other. Juno counted the empty spaces left along the vine. One. There was one space left.
The last pod grew higher than the rest, past a fold of bark. Juno climbed two steps up the leaning trunk and worked it free with both hands. When she turned around, the vine was down. Six pods lay in the mud like spilled beans, and one had a crack running along its side. Mo stood very still in the middle of them. "I turned around," he said. "My shell caught the vine. I did that." Juno felt something hot and tight rise in her chest. She held the last pod against her jumper and said nothing for a moment.
The rain kept going. Plink. Plonk. Into the footprint pool, patient as ever. Juno breathed out. Then she knelt down in the mud beside Mo and began picking pods out of it, one at a time. She rinsed each one in the pool and dried it on her sleeve. Mo nosed a pod nearer to her hand, and she took that one and rinsed it too. The tight thing in her chest came loose and floated off somewhere. "You hold them," she said, and set them in a row along his broad olive shell. He carried them without wobbling.
The cracked pod she mended. There was sticky amber sap on the trunk she had climbed, so she smeared a bead of it along the split, then wound a fern strip around and around until it held. Juno lifted the vine back over the pool and tied both ends tight. One by one she took the pods from Mo's shell and hung them up. The mended one she hung in the middle, where the rain fell hardest. Then she put the last pod into the crook of his flipper and let him reach up with it. "One more, and the rain can sing," she said.
He reached. The pod caught the vine and stayed. The rain came down on all seven at once, and the pool went plink, plonk, and the pods went shh-shh-shh above it, over and over, the same and never quite the same. Juno lay back on the warm flat moss with her boots in the ferns. Mo settled beside her, close enough to lean on. The mist came up soft from the water. Somewhere out in the grey, the hadrosaur answered with one low note. Her eyes closed. Her hand found his flipper and stayed there, and the valley kept playing while they slept.
