Mara Pine had pinned notices to twenty-one doors before she understood the notices were not enough. She stood in the square at dusk with the box under her arm, the one she used to keep the warnings sorted by farm and family. Pale birch lined the compartments. Each slot held a folded page in her own blocky handwriting: sickness on the north farms, three families in one week, keep animals penned, do not touch anything that falls dead in the woods. She had walked the forest for fifteen years. She had never written a notice like this before. The problem was that paper on a door did nothing for a family alone at night. Old Hem's wife had opened her door that morning still holding the notice from two days back, asking Mara what she was supposed to do with it. Farms sat far apart. People were frightened and scattered. Mara had no room to gather them. The tavern keeper had said no. The chapel warden had said no. She had asked at the mill and been told to try again next week. She thought of the deer then. The one she had found standing upright against an oak, three days dead, no tracks in the soft ground around it, no bite, no blood. She had told no one the full of it. If she told them now, in their own kitchens, one at a time, they would think she was cracked. Together, in one place, they might listen. She needed one place. So she made one. She walked to the common ground between the town and the north road, where the grass was flat and any wagon could reach it. She spent the next day building. She cut two birch trunks and set them upright, then lashed a carved crossbeam between them with the leaf panels she had kept from an old commission. It made an archway a person could see from the bend in the road. Behind it she stacked stones into a squat pillar and fixed a polished mirror to the top so it caught the low sun and threw a hard bright spot visible from the far fields. A red-capped woodpecker hammered at the birch while she worked and did not leave when she shouted at it. She took that as fair company. By the second evening, eleven people stood inside her archway. The Hem family came first. Two of the north farmers came together in one cart. A widow walked in from the west road because she had seen the flash of the mirror from her yard. Mara opened the divider box and handed each household the notice meant for them, then told them, plainly, about the deer against the oak. No one laughed. One of the farmers said his dog had died the same way that morning, standing, against the fence post. The square went quiet. Mara had her gathering. Now she had to tell them what came next.