Somewhere in the distance, a vigilant cry of “Kweep!”jumped from point to point, as if it wasn’t different birds but one bird with the ability to teleport.
Corinthia had never heard this cry before.
She came upon a rack of walking staves in time to steady herself against the undersea sensation playing havoc with her sense of balance.She picked one up, gave it an experimental swing, then planted the narrower end in the sand and walked on.
This wasn’t so bad, she thought.She’d be done with the loop and back in the library in no time.And there would be a delicious lunch with Stevie on Friday.
But other, wordless thoughts settled to the bottom of her mind, restless and contradictory: a feeling of being both ill at ease and home at last.
Corinthia walked on, the staff thudding crisply into the sand.
Smaller white sand paths squiggled off into the underbrush.All the trails added up to turns in the maze, unidentifiable, nothing like the clearly marked trails on the map.While Corinthia tried to make sense of it, a bird called out from the left.
“Kweep!”it said, cheery and alert.
“Kweep!”said another, this time from straight ahead.
She couldn’t help but imagine that this was funny to them, to watch her blunder her way through their territory.Which way was the library?Which way was her house?On what side was the road that led from the library to her neighborhood?
Corinthia huffed up a small incline, disoriented.
At the top of the hill the elevation was enough to reveal great sweeps of the maze below her.Corinthia tried to take pictures, one after another, but as soon as the landscape was caught on her phone, it flattened into a dull, unremarkable scene.The sand no longer looked so white.The path didn’t swoop up and down.The trees, so strange in their tangled walls, could have been a heap of overgrown weeds.If you saw those pictures, you would have argued against the idea that there was anything even slightly special about it.It was as if the Refuge had its own camouflage.
Corinthia deleted all of the pictures and continued down the other side of the hill.
When she was once again submerged in the maze, niches appeared in the underbrush, revealing low cactuses with pink fruits and four-inch spines.Mint-green snowballs of moss covered the ground.Delicate white flowers bloomed on branches with sage-shaped leaves.
It was so pretty, in its alien way, that Corinthia had almost relaxed when a sandpapery whisper rose somewhere behind her.
Corinthia turned, shades of ancestral caution already quickening her heartbeat, hands suddenly slick with sweat and automatically re-gripping the staff in a defensive pose.
A silvery snake surged out of the brush.It stopped in the center of the path.It flicked its tongue at Corinthia, once, twice, its eyes round and shining like glass beads.
Corinthia turned and ran.Her body, so comfortable sitting at the circulation desk or rolling out the free book cart, suddenly didn’t seem to be properly designed for fleeing over soft sand, and especially not uphill.Her breath burned, her legs ached, and her feet seemed weighed down as if it were all a bad dream and unreality had an unfair advantage.
Suddenly the maze walls opened up, and there was a stand of full-sized pine trees and a completely improbable pond surrounded by low palmettos, as if a scrap of wetland had been cut-and-pasted into the maze.
Corinthia stopped.Tried to catch her breath.Tried to make sense of the pond.How could there be a pond in a place where water normally disappeared into the sand?The water in the ponds and lakes of Shadow Ridge usually looked like over-brewed black tea, but this pond was semi-transparent.Instead of being surrounded by a foot of muck and rot, the grass was dry right up to the edge of the water.It must have been recently rain-filled, Corinthia realized, and would probably disappear in a long dry spell.
Nearby, a collection of cut logs had been arranged.Corinthia made her way over to the logs and sat on a stump, then carefully set down the staff and looked at the map again.
The elevated pond was one of two ponds, one large and one small, both of which were markedEphemeral Wetland.The smaller pond had a spot next to it markedWoodland Theater.This, she realized, was her current location.She glanced down at the log she was sitting on.It was very firm, compared to most theater seats.
Now that she knew where she was, she had not gone as far as she thought.She had traveled less than a quarter of the distance that stretched between the library, at the north end of the Refuge, and her backyard, at the south end.The highest point in the Refuge still lay ahead.
A harsh, scolding cry sounded from the top of a tree at the edge of the miniature wetland, and a flash of blue and silver gave away the position of a bird standing sentry on a high branch.Attention, fellow birds!Here is a human intruder!
Corinthia knew, from Stevie, that this bird was endangered—that it was why the Refuge was considered special—but had never understood, until that moment, why Stevie or anyone else had been so affected by sighting one of the rare scrub jays.
Its feathers wereso blue.Like the Refuge itself, photos did not do it justice.Corinthia had never seen a blue like it.It wasn’t robin blue or peacock blue.It was the color of a swimming pool when she finally worked up the courage to jump off the diving board.Blue like the frosting swirls on her twelfth birthday cake.Blue like her first crush’s glittery eyeshadow.
Corinthia stood, pine straw crackling underfoot, and crept closer, one foot after another, slowly and carefully.
The scrub jay watched her approach with a jet-black eye—and then took off with an elegant glide.It swooped into the brush, lost to sight, and Corinthia was stood up like a prom date.
3
Thoughtherewasnosign of a snake on the walk back to the library, cries of “Kweep!”from unseen birds followed her all the way to the end of the trail.
