Page 25 of So Far Gone

—there was a train that flew off the tracks and crashed in the forest. Luckily, the people on the train weren’t hurt.

But there were bad chemicals on the train, and they spilled out and it wasn’t safe.

Firefighters evacuated houses and put fences around the crash site, but the humans spent days arguing over how to clean it up.

Was it a federal job? A state job? A train company job?

While they argued, animals came from miles around to sniff at the broken train, and the puddles of mysterious goo leaking out into the forest. Then, an especially smart, curious little rabbit named Bunathy tasted a bit of the goo and realized: it’s not safe!

She felt her body changing. She stood up on her back legs like a human creature, or like a bear creature, and she realized something else: she could now speak and understand the languages of every other animal!

“Back away!” she called to the porcupines and mule deer and coyotes who gathered to see if there was anything to eat in the spilled train cars.

She spoke to each animal—in perfect Porcupine, in fluent Coyote, even in the rare Mule Deer dialect.

“It’s not safe. Do not eat!” The animals all backed away.

Clouds were gathering then, and Bunathy could see it was going to rain, but the train wreck was deep in the forest, beneath the canopy of trees, so she gathered the beavers and spoke to them in passable Beaver: “I need you to clear the trees around the crash, so the rain can get in and soak the spoiled ground.” As beavers are famously hardworking, and love chewing trees, they dove right in.

And just as the beavers were chomping away and trees were falling, Bunathy gathered the smartest birds, the crows.

“I need you to fly to nearby farms and bring me tarps from the haystacks and blankets from the clotheslines.” Now, crows are notoriously uncooperative, so she had to make a deal with them.

“If you do this, I will show you where there is a bin of corn.” So, the crows flew off, and when she looked up in the sky a few minutes later, Bunathy saw blankets and tarps, like magic carpets, flying and fluttering into the woods in the clutched talons of swarms of crows.

“Cover the train,” Bunathy told the crows, and they did, draping the tarps and blankets over the train cars.

There was a curious black bear family and Bunathy asked them to get rocks to put over the tarps and blankets, to keep them from blowing away, and, as black bears are known to be playful, they made a game of it, Mother and Son Bear against Father and Daughter Bear, to see who could gather the most rocks, and when the rainstorm blew in, their perfectly placed rocks kept the blankets and tarps from flying away, and kept more chemicals from leaking out.

Meanwhile, the rain soaked the contaminated ground, and the chemicals were diluted until they were no longer dangerous.

And because Bunathy really did know where there was a big bin of corn—a farmer had filled his bin, but then he’d won a two-million-dollar Powerball and left his farm for Las Vegas—she brought all the animals to the secret bin for a big corn party, all except the squirrels, who hadn’t helped with the cleanup and were too fidgety anyway for parties.

By this time, the humans had stopped arguing over who had to clean up the derailed train, but when they came into the forest, they saw it had been done for them!

They stood there, amazed. And just before the chemical potion wore off, Bunathy hopped out of the woods, stood on her little hind legs, and spoke to the firefighters, train people, and government types in the elaborate but boring human language: “You still need to test nearby wells and aquifers for contaminants, and mitigate the existing damage,” Bunathy said.

She could feel herself changing. “And, please, from now on,” she said as the languages seeped out of her body, “be more,” she said, falling back onto four legs, and then, just before she hopped back into the forest, Bunathy the heroic bunny finished the last human sentence she would ever utter, “careful.”

“That’s a good story,” Leah said. A wide smile broke on her face. “Did Mom like it?”

She did, Kinnick thought, although, as he remembered it, no matter how happy he tried to make the endings to his magical news

stories, she always looked gravely concerned afterward.

“Bunathy died, didn’t she? From the chemicals?”

“No! I told you. It was temporary. She went back to being a regular bunny. Only now she had a hundred new friends because

of the corn party.”

But Bethany had just stared at him, with that same look, as if she were steeling herself for the trouble that lay ahead, as

if she already understood something harsh about the real world.

Or perhaps about him.

A shiver went through Kinnick as he remembered this.

It was as if, even then, Bethany sensed that he couldn’t protect her from all the dangers of the world, from the craziness and the instability.

That, in the end, he might not even be there for her at all.

(He recalled, again, Asher saying, Or maybe Dad killed her. .. )

Kinnick rubbed his face. He could feel the panic rising in his chest. If anything happened to his daughter—

“It’s gonna be okay,” Leah said.

“What?”

“You shouldn’t worry so much about Mom.” Leah gave a thin smile. “Asher doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Shane can be

a weirdo, and none of us really like this new church, but he would never do that . Mom is fine.”

How had she known that was what he was thinking? She was so perceptive, just like her mother. But there was something strange

in the way she’d said this. “Wait, how do you know?” Kinnick asked.

“What?”

“How do you know she’s okay?”

“I guess...” Leah shrugged with one shoulder. “I don’t?”

Kinnick recalled what she’d said on his porch yesterday—that Bethany had left the note in Leah’s snow boot. But it was almost

May. And she’d made fun of her little brother for wearing snow boots. So, why would Leah suddenly go looking in her snow boot?

Unless her mother had told her to look there. Unless her mother had told her that she was leaving. Kinnick pulled the truck over onto the shoulder, turned and faced his granddaughter. “Leah, do

you know where your mom is?”

She was staring up at him with Bethany’s eyes. With Celia’s eyes. She shrugged with the other shoulder. “I can’t say.”

“Leah, please.”

“Mom and I made a promise to each other.”

“Leah. If you know something, you need to tell me.”

***

Asher was super glad to be back at Joanie and Brian’s house. The sun was going down, the pellet stove was warm, the lazy dog

was nice, and Asher was happy to be on a stool at Joanie’s kitchen counter, about to get some dinner. Best of all, he was

out of the Rampart, even though his dad had wanted Leah and him to stay there, and not with Grandpa Rhys. But Asher didn’t

like being there without his dad. Everyone was so serious. Brother Dean and the AOL guys were kind of scary. And the Rampart

School was even more boring than home school. He liked Miss Charlotte fine, but he hated rereading the same old Bible stories,

which, in his opinion, weren’t even that good of stories!

( The worst one was Abraham almost sacrificing Isaac!

What was that even about? Like, God is a bully who does practical jokes?

) Pastor Gallen said that Bible literacy was the cornerstone of any education, but Miss Charlotte taught even less science

and math than their mother. What kind of education was that?

Joanie set sandwiches in front of the kids, and, as she poured them glasses of lemonade, Asher followed her eyes out the window,

where Brian and Grandpa Rhys were on the porch, talking about something.

Asher turned a half sandwich over in his hand. “What did Brian’s people eat?”

“Oh, they ate like kings,” Joanie said. “The rivers were so full of fish then they didn’t even need bridges. You just walked

across the salmon to get to the other side. Deer and elk would run up and demand to be cooked that very minute.”

Asher laughed. “Did they live in tepees?”

“Sometimes,” Joanie said. “But Brian is interior Salish. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“You should. We live in their country. Salish people lived from the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, from Oregon to Canada,” she said.

“Nobody owned the land, they just followed fish and game and dug roots, and they got together for powwows, potlaches, stuff like that. Hundreds of tribes and bands. Sometimes they lived in tepees, but sometimes they lived in lodges, and some nights, when they were out on a hunt, or on war parties, they slept under the stars.”

“I’ve slept outside,” Asher said. “In a sleeping bag. I like to look at the stars. I know most of the constellations.”

“You know Sagittarius?” Joanie asked. She glanced out the window, to where Brian and Grandpa Rhys talking, pointing, gesturing

with their hands. “That’s me. Loyal to a fault.”

Asher continued: “The funny thing about constellations is that when you’re little, you think the stars must be really close

together, but did you know they’re millions and millions of light-years apart?”

“That so?” Joanie was still staring outside.

“Yes. Did you know a light-year is how far light can travel in a year? It’s very far. The light we see left those stars millions

and millions of years ago. Those stars might not even be there now. They might have blown up back when there were dinosaurs!”

“Dinosaurs, huh?” Joanie said distractedly, still staring out the window.

“Our new church teaches that God hung the stars in the firmament, and that they move around the Earth, but Mom says it’s okay

if I don’t believe everything the church teaches, because that’s just what people used to think when they wrote the Bible, before there were telescopes and rockets and good scientists.”