Juniper's Arc

Chapter 2 of 7

By morning Juniper had a list. The courts wanted proof a person had lived on the land and worked it across seasons. She had no birth record here, no tax stamp, no neighbor to swear for her. What she had was the valley itself, and the things she had built in it. She fed the brush-fox, checked the ridge for the gryphon cub, and started walking the ground like a clerk would. She began at the cottage she had raised her second summer here. The cobblestones came from the creek. The vines on the south wall had thickened four seasons running, and she could mark each year by the woody rings at their base. Inside, she pulled down a tin box and laid its contents on the table. Wax stubs from boundary seals, dated in her own hand. A ledger of every creature she had treated, with dates and weights. A clipping of fur from the brush-fox's first bandage. She wrapped it all in oilcloth. She walked to the stone trough next. She had cut it from a single block her first autumn and dragged it on rollers to the spring. Algae rimmed the lip in soft green bands, one band thicker than the next. A traveling magistrate would not know what the bands meant, but a court botanist would. The smooth drinking stones she had set around it were worn in the places small paws and hooves had stepped a thousand times. She sketched the trough on a clean page. She sketched the cottage. She wrote dates beside each line. Three days south she reached the court tree. It stood alone on a flat stone, its bark burned with the magistrate's seal, its roots gripping the base like fingers. A clerk sat at a folding desk in its shade. Juniper laid out the oilcloth bundle and spoke plainly. She named the seasons. She showed the ledger. The clerk turned each page, then closed the book. He told her sketches and wax were not evidence. The court required a sworn witness who had seen her on the land across years, or a structure recorded on the survey rolls. The valley appeared on no roll. She had no witness. He stamped her petition REJECTED and slid it back across the desk. Juniper walked into the trees before her face changed. She sat against a trunk and pressed the heel of her hand to her mouth. A small dark shape dropped from a branch and landed on the moss beside her, a moth-cat with split ears and wings folded like wet paper. It had followed her from the valley. It watched her without fear. She thought of the hunter who had turned around at her marker, the one who read terrain. He had stood on her land for two years and could name every season she had worked it. A sworn witness. She stood up, brushed the moss from her trousers, and turned north.