Delphine Fernside's Arc

Chapter 11 of 11

Della climbed back up to the patch with sticky hands and a hollow feeling. The crates were saved for now, but Grans and the cousins were somewhere in the forest, following Moe's directions, and Della had no way to wave them in. Moe had drawn the route on a folded scrap of parchment stained with berry juice. It would guide them from the old stone tower along Grampy's cairns. But the cairns stopped short of the patch. The last stretch through the ferns had no marker. If they walked past it, they would keep going into deep woods, and by the time they doubled back the ripe row would be finished. She stood at the edge of the patch and listened. Wind in the leaves. A woodpecker far off. No voices. She needed a signal loud enough to carry, or a runner fast enough to catch them before they missed the turn. She had neither. Then she looked down at her feet. A mouse sat between two strawberry plants, holding up a berry almost as big as its head. Another sat on a nearby stone with a cloth sack she recognized from the hollow, half full of fallen fruit. They had been quietly gleaning the ground berries all morning. Della crouched slowly. The mouse with the berry did not run. It watched her the way the beetle had watched her weeks ago, steady and unafraid. "I need help," she said. She pulled a ripe strawberry from the nearest plant and set it on the moss. "Take these to the path. Drop them where the ferns break. Make a line they can't miss." She did not know if the mice understood the words. She knew they understood the berries. She picked fast. She filled the vole's sack with the reddest fruit she could reach and tipped a handful into the smaller mouse's paws. Then she pointed toward the fern break where the moose had trampled through. The vole waddled off first, dragging the sack. The small mouse followed, berry lifted high. More mice slipped out from under the leaves and fell in behind them. Della watched the little parade disappear into the ferns and dropped a berry every few steps herself, marking the last stretch back toward the cairn line. She was setting the fourth berry down when she heard a wheel creak. Then a voice calling her name. Della ran. She burst through the ferns and there was Grans on the path, one hand on the rail of a big wooden cart, the berry-stained note open in her other hand. The cart was tall-sided and moss-streaked, its wheels worn smooth from years of hauling. Two cousins pushed from behind. "We nearly walked past," Grans said. "Then the ground turned red. Strawberries laid out like breadcrumbs. And a mouse sitting on top of the last one like it was waiting for us." She folded the note and tucked it into her apron. "Good directions, Della." They worked through the afternoon. Grampy came up from the hollow with the salvaged crates. The cousins picked the ripe row before the sun dropped. Grans packed the cart in flat layers, no stacking, moss between each course, the way Della should have done from the start. When the last crate slid in, the hauler was full to the top boards and the patch behind them stood cleaned of every red berry. Della walked beside the wheel on the way out. The mice trailed them a little way, then peeled off into the ferns with the fallen fruit that was theirs. Meadow Valley tasted the harvest that week. Grans set up a table at the edge of the garden and people came from every lane. They said they had never tasted a berry so sweet. Della gave a crate to