Then a flash of lamplight struck Nest full in the eyes as they crossed back toward Woodlawn, and she blinked in surprise, momentarily blinded.
“Nest!”
It was Gran calling. She blinked again.
“Nest! It’s time to come inside!”
She was sitting once more on the crossboard of her sandbox, staring out into the darkening stretch of her yard toward the park. Her hands were cupped before her, but they were empty. Pick was gone.
She didn’t tell Gran about him that night, wary by now of telling anyone anything about the park and its magic, even Gran. She waited instead to see if Pick would return. Two days later he did, appearing at midday while she poked along the hedgerow, sitting on a limb above her head, waving a skinny stick limb in greeting, telling her they had to hurry, there were things to do, places to go, and people to see. Then, when she did tell Gran about him, that very night, the old woman simply nodded, as if the sylvan’s appearance was the most natural thing in the world, and told her to pay close attention to what Pick had to say.
Pick was her closest friend after that, closer to her than her school friends, even those she had known all her life. She couldn’t explain why that was. After all, he was a forest creature, and for most people such creatures didn’t exist. On the surface of things, they had nothing in common. Besides being a sylvan, he was a hundred and fifty years old and a big grouch. He was fastidious and temperamental. He had no interest in the playthings she tried to share with him or in the games she favored.
What drew them together, she decided when she was older, what bonded them in a way nothing else could, was the park. The park with its feeders and its magic, its secrets and its history, was their special place, their private world, and even though it was public and open and everyone could come visit, it belonged only to them because no one else could appreciate it the way they could. Pick was its caretaker, and she became his apprentice. He taught her the importance of looking for damage to the woods and injury to the creatures that inhabited them. He explained to her the nature of the world’s magic, how it inhabited everything, why there was a balance to it, and what could be done on a small scale to help keep it in place. He instructed her on how to deal with the feeders when they threatened the safety of those who could not protect themselves. He enlisted her aid against them. He gave her an insight into the coexisting worlds of humans and forest creatures that changed her life.
He told her, eventually, that Gran and her mother and three generations of her mother’s side of the family before Gran had helped him care for the park.
She was thinking of this as she crossed the backyard that Saturday morning. She paused to give a sleeping Mr. Scratch a rub behind his grizzled ears and glanced about in vain for Miss Minx. The day was hot and”slow, and the air was damp and close. Her friends wanted to go swimming, but she hadn’t made up her mind whether to join them. She was still preoccupied with Two Bears and not yet ready to think of anything else. She squinted up at the sun, full and brilliant in a cloudless sky, brushed at a fly that flew into her face, and moved to the hedgerow and the park. The grass beneath her feet was brittle and dry and crunched softly. Questions pressed in about her. Would the spirits of the Sinnissippi appear tonight as Two, Bears believed? Would they reveal to her something of the future? Only to her? What would they say? How would she I respond? She brushed at her curly hair, ungluing a handful of strands from her forehead. Sweat was dampening her skin already, and a fresh mosquito bite had appeared on her forearm. She scratched at it ruefully. She had asked Pick repeatedly why it was that she was the only one who could see the feeders, or see him, or know about the magic in the park. Pick had told her the first time she asked that she wasn’t the only one, her grandmother could see the forest creatures and the feeders and knew more about the magic than Nest did, and there were others like her in other places. After that, when she narrowed the scope of the question so that it excluded Gran and people in other places, Pick brushed the matter aside by saying that she was lucky, was all, and she ought to be grateful and let it go at that. But Nest couldn’t let it go, not even now, after all these years | of living with it. It was what set her apart from everyone else. It was what defined her. She would not be satisfied until she understood the reasons behind it.