The Drop on the Leaf

YY climbed the slope at his usual hour and found the slope was not his alone today.

Tock was up ahead. A vole was further along, picking her way carefully between rocks. Two finches went over in a paired arc, the way finches go when they have somewhere to be. Up at the dead pine, Mira was already sitting at the base with her ledger open, and at the top of the dead pine three crows had landed — three actual crows, large, the kind YY had only ever seen at distance — looking down without speaking.

YY went up slow. He took a position at the back, behind Tock.

Nobody said anything for a long time.

Korv was where Korv had been yesterday. The primary feather was where it had been yesterday. The morning was where the morning had been every morning of YY's life — except for the missing first-call, which today was a *known* missing thing instead of a wrong-shaped surprise, and that was a different kind of missing.

Mira's charcoal moved on the ledger. She read names — quietly, just loud enough for the crows to hear. The crows nodded once when she finished. Then the lead crow came down off the top of the pine to the lowest branch, took the primary feather in his beak, and went back up. The other two came down to the body. They lifted Korv between them, slowly, the way you lift something you have been related to.

They took him over the ridge.

The air on the upper ridge changed when they were gone.

YY sat for a moment, looking at the bare patch under the dead pine. There was no Korv there now. There was just the patch, and the feather-shaped emptiness on the lowest branch, and a small dark something pressed into the bare earth where his foot had been — a single broken twig, nothing important, the kind of thing the woods would smooth over within the week.

"Well," said a voice behind YY, slow and warm. "*That* was something."

YY turned around.

Bramble was halfway up the slope, holding a comb of last fall's stored maple syrup in his enormous and gentle paws, and looking at the gathering with the slightly off-kilter expression of a bear who has just woken up and was not quite expecting *people.*

"You missed most of it," Tock told Bramble.

"I," said Bramble, with great dignity, "have been *asleep.*"

"For how long?"

Bramble considered the question. "A *while.*"

Tock looked at YY. YY looked at Tock. They did not laugh. The day was not a laughing day. But there is a kind of warmth that is not a laugh, and the slope had a little of it for a moment.

Bramble came up to the gathering at his slow bear-pace and stopped at the base of the dead pine. He did not say anything to Mira. He just looked at the bare patch where Korv had been, the way bears look at things — long and uncomplicated.

Then he turned to the small group still standing on the slope and held up the comb.

"I have been *saving* this," he said. "I think this is the right day for it."

The vole came up first. Bramble tipped a drop onto a flat sun-warmed stone. The vole drank, said *thank you, Bramble* in the small mouse-voice of a vole, and went back down to her route.

Tock got the next one. Bramble tipped a drop onto a curl of birch bark. Tock did the slow lick of a squirrel who had not had a sweet thing in months and intended to remember it.

Bramble looked at YY.

YY had a folded sourwood leaf in his paw, the way a squirrel has a leaf when a leaf is going to be useful. He held it out.

Bramble tipped a drop into the cup of the leaf. The drop sat there, golden, perfectly held.

"For tomorrow," Bramble told YY.

YY looked up at him.

"In case the new first-call," Bramble said carefully, "needs *help arriving.*"

"Bramble," said YY.

"Mm."

"That is *kind* of you."

"Well," said Bramble. "It is the right day for it."

He lumbered back down the slope, talking quietly to a pine on the way past. The pine did not appear to mind.

YY came down the ridge with the leaf cupped careful between his paws. He climbed his trunk one-pawed and set the leaf on the kitchen ledge — the back of it, where the air was steadier — and looked at the drop for a long moment in the slanting late-morning light.

The drop was small.

The drop was *gold.*

The drop would still be there tomorrow at first light, when the woods would try, by whatever shape they tried, to start the day.

YY went down the trunk and went to the warm patch and the brook eddy and the rocky shoulder, in that order, and brought home a single early dandelion crown and four soft acorn-bits the squirrels had passed over in the fall. None of it was much. All of it was something.

He ate the dandelion crown standing up at the kitchen ledge, looking out the door at the upper ridge.

The ridge looked the same.

It was not the same.

But it was a ridge that had been *attended to,* now, and there was a gold drop on a leaf next to him for whenever tomorrow needed it.