Maple Jack's Arc

Chapter 8 of 14

The dead limb on Maple Jack's north side held one cradle of unripe sparks, and the cradle was failing. Three winters ago that branch had been his best holder. The wood had curved upward in a soft hook, perfect for cupping sparks while they ripened from yellow to red. Now the bark hung in strips, the wood inside was dry as ash, and the hook had cracked open along its underside. A few last red leaves still clung to the smaller twigs, bright against the gray, and they trembled with every shift of the young sparks inside. Maple Jack could feel the cradle giving way. He had to move what was inside it before the wood let go. He counted the unripe sparks in the broken cradle. Four of them, all yellow, all half-formed. One was further along than the others. It clutched a small book against its chest, and its glow had begun to deepen at the edges, though the center was still pale. The other three were softer, barely shaped, more light than form. None of them were ready for wind. He knew that. He had learned it when he lost two stories in the corridor behind the grain elevator. Yellow sparks did not survive open air. But the cradle was splitting, and if he did nothing, the sparks would fall on their own and scatter where he could not reach them. Maple Jack tried to draw the four sparks inward, down the limb toward his trunk, where the live wood could hold them. Three of them moved. The fourth, the one with the book, caught on a split in the bark and slipped the wrong way. It drifted off the end of the broken limb and into the open air above his roots. He reached after it with every twig he had on that side. The bark was too dead to answer. The little spark hung there a moment, book pressed to its chest, then lifted on a slow draft and floated past his reach. A second spark, smaller, jarred loose behind it. Then a third. They drifted out from the cracked hook in a loose, flickering group, each ember pale and wandering, and the wind carried them past his shadow into the bright space beyond his crown. Maple Jack saved one. The smallest. He pulled it down into his trunk and held it against the live wood, where it dimmed but did not go out. The broken limb above him was empty now. He looked at the curve of dead wood with its few red leaves and understood it could no longer cradle anything. Three sparks were gone. Sixteen had become thirteen, and the heavy red Yellowknife spark still waited alone in his upper branches for the next wind. He would have to send it from a living limb. The north side was finished.