A Sound Worth Writing
curious and listening
YY reached the brook before breakfast and heard the log before he saw it.
Hummmmm.
He froze with one paw in moss. The hollow log over the current was making a sound too steady to be a mistake. Minnows held under it as if the brook had invented a meeting place.
YY looked at the water. Then at the path to Mira's bend. Then at the water again.
"Fine," he told his stomach. "We are doing the useful thing first. Rude schedule, but fine."
He listened from the bank until he could repeat the sound without embarrassing himself too badly. Then he ran to Mira and tapped the rhythm on a dry strip of bark. Mira added the mark to the ledger: water-sound, small life gathering, brook-log.
Only after that did YY go back for the seed husks caught behind the log. They were still there. The brook, it turned out, could hold a note and breakfast at the same time.
That evening the ledger had its first non-sky entry. YY had less food than he would have had if he had eaten first, but the bend had a new kind of line in it, and the line was his to read tomorrow.
YY carried the brook hum to Mira as the ledger role widened from sky signs to local water signs, costing forage time while keeping the work practical.
state
YY brought the humming brook-log into Mira's ledger, then returned to forage from the eddy it revealed.