didn’t try to stick up for Ethan.” Well, we got no choice, an’ that’s a fact. The Rade has showed up, years before we ever done expected them, and yer about ten years shy o’ half-cooked, but we got no choice. There ain’t no time ta go looking for another champion. I guess ya’ll hafta do.”
“But what do you need me for?” Ethan said.
“What do ya think? To save us. To save the Birchwood.”
“What’s the Birchwood?”
The little chief rubbed slowly at chin with one tiny brown hand. It seemed to be a gesture of annoyance.
“This is the Birchwood. These trees – ain’t ya ever noticed them? They’re birch trees. Birch wood. These woods is our home. We live here.”
“And, excuse me, I’m sorry, ha, but, uh, save it from what, now?”
Cinquefoil gave Ringfinger Brown a hard look.
“Ta think that we done paid ya half our treasure fer this,” he said bitterly.
Ringfinger suddenly noticed a bit of fuzz on his lapel.
The ferisher chief turned to Ethan.
“From Coyote, o’ course,” he said. “Now that he done found us, he’s going ta try ta lop our gall. He does that, that’s the end o’ the Birchwood. And that’s the end o’ my mob.”
Ethan was lost, and embarrassed, too. If there was one thing he hated more than anything else in the world, it was being taken for stupid. His natural tendency in such situations was to pretend that he understood for as long as was necessary until he did understand. But whatever the ferisher was talking about – lop our gall? – it sounded too important for Ethan to fake. So he turned for help to Cutbelly.
“Who is Johnny Speakwater?” he said miserably.
“Johnny Speakwater is the local oracle in this part of the Western Summerlands,” the werefox said. “About ten years ago, he predicted that Coyote, or the Changer as he is also known, was going to find his way to the Birchwood. Listen, now, you remember I was telling you about the Tree – the Lodgepole, as these people call it.”
At these words, a groan went up from the assembled ferishers.
“He don’t even know about the Lodgepole!” Cinquefoil cried.
“Stop givin’ me the fisheye,” Ringfinger Brown snapped. “I done told you they was slim pickin’s.”
“Shrunken times, indeed,” the chief repeated, and all his mob nodded their heads. Ethan could see they were already very disappointed in him, and he hadn’t even done anything yet.
“Every so often,” Cutbelly went on patiently, “two branches of a tree will rub right up against each other. Have you ever seen that? Every time there’s a stiff enough wind. They do it so long, and so furious, that a raw place, a kind of wound, opens up in the bark on each limb where it’s been rubbing. And then, over time, the wound heals over with new bark, only now, the two limbs are joined together. Into one limb. That joining or weaving together of two parts of a tree is called pleaching. And the place where they are joined is called a gall.”
“I’ve seen that,” Ethan said. “I saw a tree in Florida one time that was like that.”
“Well, with a tree as old and as tangled-up as the Lodgepole, and with the Winds of Time blowing as stiff as they like to blow, you are bound to have some pleaching, here and there. By now it’s been going on so long that these galls are all over the place. Galls mark the spots where two worlds flow into each other. And they tend to be magical places. Sacred groves, haunted pools, and so forth. Your Summerland is just such a place.”
“So, OK, Summerland is in my world and this one,” Ethan said, to Cinquefoil as much as to Cutbelly, hoping to demonstrate that he was not totally hopeless. “At the same time. And that’s why it never rains there?”
“Never can tell what’s going to happen around a gall,” Cutbelly said. “All kinds of wonderful things. A dry sunny patch of green in a land of endless grey and drizzle is just one of the possibilities.”
“And now this Coyote wants to cut the worlds apart again?”
Cutbelly nodded.
“But why?” Ethan said.
“Because that’s what Coyote does, among a thousand other mad behaviours. He wanders around the Tree, with his Rade of followers, and wherever he finds the worlds pleached together he lops them right apart. But this local gall is tucked away in such a remote corner of the Worlds that he’s missed it until now.”
“OK,” Ethan said. “I get it. I mean, I sort of get it. But, I mean, you know, I sort of agree with the whole idea of how I’m a, well, a kid. Like, I don’t know how to use a, what, like a sword, or even ride a horse, or any of that stuff, if that’s what I’m supposed to do.”
Nobody said anything for a long time. It was as if they had all been hoping in spite of themselves that Ethan was going to rise to the occasion and come up with a plan for saving Summerland. Now that hope was gone. Then, from the edge of the meadow, there was a scornful laugh. They all turned in time to see a crow – the same great black bird, Ethan would have sworn, that he and Cutbelly had seen earlier – take to the sky. Some of the ferishers unslung their bows. They nocked arrows to their bowstrings and let fly. The arrows whistled into the sky. The black bird took no notice of them. Its wings beat slowly, lazily, with a kind of insolence, as if it thought it had all the time in the world. Its rough laughter caught the breeze and trailed behind it like a mocking streamer.
“Enough o’ this,” the chief said, at last, his face grim and his tone gruff and commanding. He tossed the tiny baseball to Ethan again. This time Ethan just managed to hold on to it as it came stinging into his palm. “Let’s go talk ta that crazy old clam.”
THEY TROOPED ACROSS the meadow, past the gleaming white ballpark, and down to the beach. Here in the Summerlands, in the Birchwood, there was no ruined hotel, no collapsed dance hall or pier. There was just the long dark stretch of muddy sand, with the ghostly trees on one side of it and the endless dark green water stretching away on the other. And, in the middle of it all, that big grey log of ancient driftwood, spiky and half-buried, on which he and his father had once sat and shared a lunch of chicken sandwiches and hot chicken soup from the thermos. Was it the same log, Ethan wondered? Could something really exist in two different worlds at the same time?
“That bristly old chunk of wood is the gall, some say,” Cutbelly told him.” The place where the worlds are jointed fast.”
They seemed in fact to be headed right towards it.
“But I thought you said the Tree was invisible, and untouchable,” Ethan said. “Immaterial.”
“Can you see love? Can you touch it?”
“Well,” Ethan said, hoping it was not a trick question. “No, love is invisible and untouchable, too.”
“And when your pap puts on that big Roosters jersey of his, and sits there watching you in the bleachers with the smile never leaving his face? And slaps palms with you after a game even though you struck out four times
