Delphine Fernside's Arc

Chapter 7 of 11

By early afternoon Della had three crates full and a fourth heap growing on the grass beside her. Grampy had not come back yet. The sun had climbed past the tree line and now poured straight down on the patch. She looked at the loose pile of berries on the cloth she had spread, and her stomach pinched. The fruit on top had gone soft and dark. Juice bled through the linen in pink blooms where the light struck hardest. She pressed one berry with her thumb and it caved in like wet paper. She stood up and shaded her eyes. The crates were full. She had nothing else to hold the rest, and nothing cool to keep any of it. If she sat here picking, the heap would turn to jam before Grampy returned. She needed shade, real shade, and she needed it now. She looked toward the torn path the moose had cut through the ferns. Cool air drifted out of it, the damp breath of deep woods. Della grabbed the corners of the linen sheet and bundled the loose berries into a sling. She carried it carefully along the moose track, past the trampled fronds, until the ferns closed over her head. The ground sloped down. Tree roots arched up out of the soil. Between two thick roots she saw a dark gap, half-curtained by ferns, hollowed where the earth had washed away. She knelt and reached in. The air inside was cold against her wrist. She cleared the floor of the hollow with her hand, sweeping out old leaves and a curl of bark. The walls were damp clay. A flat stone made a kind of shelf at the back. She started to set the bundle inside, then stopped. Something moved on the shelf. A salamander sat there, yellow blotches bright against dark skin, watching her with one round eye. He did not run. He had picked this place for the same reason she had. Della spoke softly to him and slid her bundle to the other side of the hollow, leaving him his corner. Then she ran back for the crates. She dragged each one along the moose path and tucked them deep under the fern curtain where the shade was thickest. For the last load she pulled handfuls of damp moss off a cluster of flat rocks nearby and packed the green pads over the top crate like a lid. The berries underneath went cool to the touch within a minute. She sat back on her heels at the mouth of the hollow. Every berry she had picked was off the sun. The patch behind her still hung heavy with fruit she had not yet touched, and now she had a place to put it. But the cool hollow was not hers. The salamander blinked at her from his shelf, and she understood she had borrowed a stranger's house, and that the stranger had neighbours she had not yet met.