quizzed me on the proper number of days in each month, singing a familiar song to help me remember,
but we forgot about leap years, which would throw me off in time. From her pocket, she took three
round metal circles to demonstrate that if I wanted to keep track of time, all I would have to do would
be to move the disks to the next space on the calen-dar each morning, remembering to start over at the
end of the week and month.
Speck would often show me what proved to be the obvious answer, for which nobody else had the
clarity of imagination and creativity. At such mo-ments of insight, her eyes fixed on me, the tremor in her
voice disappeared. A single hair escaped now, bisecting her face. She gathered her mane with her two
rough red hands and pushed it behind her ears, smiling all the while at my stare. "If you ever forget,
Aniday, come find me." She walked away, moving through the forest, across the ridge and away from
camp, leaving me alone with my calendar. I spied her figure progressing among the trees until she
blended into the natural world. When she vanished, all I could think of was the date: February 20, 1950.
I had lost so much time.
Far below, the others in camp slumbered beneath a mat of stinking blan-kets and furs. By listening
to the traffic and following the noise to its source, I could be back among the people, and one of those
cars was bound to stop and take me home. The driver would see a boy standing by the side of the road
and pull off on the berm ahead of me. I would wait for her, the woman in the red coat, to come save me.
I would not run away, but wait there and try not to frighten her as before. She would lower herself to eye
level, sweeping her hair back from her face. "Who are you?" I would summon up the faces of my parents
and my little sister, tell the woman with the pale green eyes where I lived, how to get home. She would
bid me climb into her car. Sitting beside her, I'd tell her my tale, and she would put her hand around the
back of my head, saying everything would be all right. I'd jump from that car as we stopped before my
house, my mother hanging laundry on the clothesline, my sister waddling toward me in her yellow dress,
her arms aflutter. "I've found your boy," the woman would say, and my father would pull up in a red fire
engine. "We've been looking all over for you for a long time." Later, after fried chicken and biscuits, we'd
come back to the woods and rescue my friends Smaolach, Luchóg, and Speck, who could live with us
and go to school and come home warm, safe, and sound. All I had to do was to concentrate and follow
the sounds of civilization. I looked to the horizon as far as possible, but saw no sign. I listened, but heard
nothing. I tried to remember, but could not recall my name.
Pocketing my three tokens, I turned over the calendar and read the Shakespeare aloud to myself:
"But if the while I think on thee, dear friend ..." The people sleeping down below in the hollow were my
friends. I took out my pencil and began to write all I could remember. Many a year has passed between
then and now, and I have written this story more than once, but that was the beginning, alone atop the
ridge. My fingers stiffened in the cold. As I walked down to the camp, the bedcovers called out to me
with the promise of warm dreams.
Not long after Speck's valentine, another gift landed in my lap. Luchóg brought it back from one of
his pirating expeditions, unpacking his sack like Santa at the Christmas tree. "And this, little treasure, is
for you. The sum-all and be-all of your earthly desires. Enough space here for your every dream.
Miracle of miracles, and dry, too. Paper."
He handed me a bound black notebook, the kind schoolchildren use for their lessons, the pages
lined to ensure the proper placement of words and sen-tences. On the front was the name of the school
and the title RULED COMPO-SITION BOOK. On the back was a small box with this printed
warning: In the event of atomic attack: close the shades, lie down under your desk. Do not panic.
Inside, the author of the book, Thomas McInnes, had written his name on the flyleaf.
The weathered pages were filled with his virtually indecipherable penmanship, the ink a rusty
brown. As far as I could tell, it was a story, or part of a story, because on the last page, the writing ends
mid-sentence with the rather cryptic See Other Book written on the inside back cover. Over the years, I
tried to read it, but the point of the story eluded me. The beauty of the composition book for me
stemmed from McInnes's self-indulgence. He had written on only one side of the eighty-eight sheets of
paper. I turned the book upside-down and wrote my contrary story in the opposite direction. While that
journal is in ashes now with so much else, I can attest to its basic contents: a naturalist's journal recording