Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 4 of 4

Maple Jack loosened his grip a second time. Two more sparks broke from his bark and lifted into the street. Before they could find the sidewalk, a flat prairie wind came down hard from the west. It caught the sparks sideways. One tumbled over a fence and out across an empty lot. The other skidded low along the pavement and burned a thin black streak through the dry grass at the curb before it vanished. Maple Jack felt both stories tear out of him and go nowhere a child would ever hear. He held the rest back. Hundreds pressed against his bark, hot and impatient, but he would not release them into that wind. He had waited seven winters. He could not waste these stories on an empty lot. He looked south toward the yellow house and saw the wind bending the small trees along the sidewalk. The air between him and the day care had become a river running the wrong way. He turned his attention west, where the wind came from. A tall grain elevator stood at the edge of the field, its silo broad and its wooden housing braced on steel legs. It was the only thing for blocks that stood taller than he did. He studied the angle. If a spark left his trunk on the south side, the elevator's shadow would cover the first stretch of sidewalk. The wind would break against the silo and slide around it. The corridor behind it would be still. He tried one spark as a test. A small ember creature pulled itself free of his bark, a book clutched to its chest, its red glow flickering. Maple Jack aimed it low along his south side, into the lee of the elevator. The wind shoved at it once and missed. The spark wobbled, dipped, and then a thin tunnel of curling air formed in the calm pocket behind the silo, hollow as a sleeve. The spark slid inside it. The tunnel held the ember steady and pointed it down the block. It crossed the first sidewalk square. It crossed the second. It kept going, low and straight, toward the blue trim and the row of small coats. Maple Jack marked the path in his mind. He would send them this way, one at a time, behind the elevator's shoulder, through the still corridor the wind itself had built. He loosened his grip another notch and felt three more sparks rise to the bark, ready. But the wind was already shifting. The weathervane behind him creaked a quarter turn. The corridor that worked now might not work in an hour. He had found his route, and he had to use it before the prairie took it back.