The Reading at the Dead Pine

YY woke up early because his ears noticed before his eyes did.

He lay still in the nest. The feather along his back rose with each breath and lay back down, calm. The woods were not silent. A finch was making its small busy morning noise. The brook was saying *shhh.* All the regular sounds were where they ought to be.

The sound that was missing was the one *over* them.

Korv had not first-called.

YY opened his eyes.

He sat up, slowly, the slow way the feather had taught him. He listened. He kept waiting for *late.* For *muffled.* For *just this once, started a little after.* The first-call did not come.

The morning was a different shape today.

YY came down the trunk in the slow walk.

He did not need to think about where to go. The squirrel who reads goes to the absence — that was the rule, even if it had only been the rule for one day, even if Mira had only written it down yesterday. He walked the slope the way he had walked the rocky shoulder two days ago: head up, spine flat, picking lifts, the feather riding quiet.

The dead pine stood on the upper ridge gray-white as always. The roost on the top was a dark cluster of sticks and feathers. It was empty.

YY's eyes followed the only line they could follow.

Korv was on the bare patch under the lowest branch. His foot was still curled where it had been holding the branch. His head was turned slightly to the side, the way a crow's head turns when something has interested it just before letting go.

YY did not approach. He sat down on his haunches at the proper distance and read.

*Foot-curl, intact.* No struggle, then. The body had not been moved.

*No fox-smell.* No marten-smell. No fight-smell.

*The feathers under his chest were not pressed flat.* He had not been hit by anything. He had simply let go.

*The branch above.* On the lowest branch — directly above where he had been — a single black primary feather was caught, swinging slow in the breeze. The feather had pulled loose when his foot had pulled loose. It had stayed; he had fallen.

YY looked at the feather for a long time.

The last time YY had looked at a feather like that, on the day this whole branch had begun, the feather had ended up on his back. The feather had reorganized his entire week. The feather had become — by Mira's hand and the slow walk and the kit-tuft on the ledge — a *role.*

This was a second feather. Larger. Blacker. Higher in the woods' regard than a heron's, in some ways — Korv had been the woods' clock for longer than any squirrel had been alive.

YY did not climb up.

He sat with his back flat and the heron feather riding quiet along his spine, and he understood without having to think it through that the squirrel who reads does not need to *carry* the second feather. The squirrel who reads needs to *read* it.

The feather was for Korv's people. They would come for it. It would be on Korv's branch when they came. That was the right shape of who got which thing, today.

YY came down the slope slow.

He did not stop at the warm patch. He did not stop at the brook. He did not stop at the rocky shoulder. He went down the bend and crossed it and climbed the small flat rock where Mira had been yesterday, and Mira was there, with her ledger open, the way Mira was always there when she needed to be.

She did not ask. She had heard the silence too.

YY sat down across from her.

"Korv," he said.

"Where."

"Dead pine. Base of it. Under the lowest branch."

"How."

"Old. Foot still curled. No fight."

Mira's charcoal moved.

"Anything else?"

YY hesitated, but only for a moment. "There's a primary on the lowest branch. Above him. It came loose when he came loose. I didn't take it."

Mira looked up at him then, for the first time. The look had no surprise in it; it had something else, something softer that she did not put into the ledger.

"Good," she said.

She wrote *Korv. Dead pine. Primary on lowest branch — left.*

Then, on the line under it, she wrote: *YY did not take it.*

She closed the ledger.

From the same fold of bark she had used yesterday, she took the second half of the apple-strip — the half he had given her in trade — and put it back in front of him.

"Today's reading is on the house," she said.

YY took the apple-strip carefully. He did not eat it on the rock. He did not feel like eating, and he did not feel like *not* eating; he felt like the day had not yet ended in the place it was supposed to end.

He carried the apple home.

He set it on the kitchen ledge next to the kit-tuft, and he sat on the windowsill and looked up at the upper ridge through the gap in the trees, where the dead pine was just visible.

The heron feather rode along his back. The black primary stayed on the lowest branch where Korv's people would find it. The morning, tomorrow, would have to start a different way, and the reading of how it started — that, by the look Mira had given him before she closed the ledger, was going to be his.