George the Woolly Caterpillar's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

George the woolly caterpillar chewed the forty-eighth name into his bark and realized he could not read the forty-seventh. Rain had swollen the wood. The letters ran together like worms in wet dirt. He sat on a fern in the wild green valley and counted what he could still make out. Twenty-two clear names. The rest were smudges. Somewhere below him grew hundreds of plants he had promised to taste, one leaf each, because his older brother had dared him and then kept counting after George refused to stop. If George could not read his list, he would chew the same leaf twice and never know. He would never finish. He crawled down the fern and along a root until he reached a fallen log with a small round door. A woman knelt outside it, setting a flat stone by the entrance. Lannie Butterworth. George had seen her before, moving pill bugs off the path and writing things on laminated cards. She noticed him at once. "You're soaked," she said. "And your bark is finished." George waved his front legs at the door. Lannie studied the smeared list, then the log. "Inside," she said. "Dry shelf. I'll cut you fresh pieces." She opened the door with one finger. Warm lantern light spilled out over rows of tiny wooden slots, each one labeled in her small square handwriting. Lannie carried him to a shelf near the back and laid the ruined bark flat. She sliced thin strips from a dry branch and lined them up. "One plant per strip," she said. "You chew the name. I file it. Nothing gets lost." George started with the names he could still read. Nettle. Clover. Thistle. Mint. Lannie slotted each strip into its own slot as he finished. When he reached a smudge he could not recover, he left the strip blank and set it aside. By the time the lantern burned low, twenty-two plants sat filed and safe, and a small pile of blank strips waited beside them. George looked at the blanks. He did not know which plants they had been. He would have to taste them again to find out, and taste every plant he had not yet reached, and this time bring each name straight to the log before the rain could touch it. Lannie closed the door behind him as he crawled back toward the valley floor.