Friar whined and wriggled himself next to Cadie in the water.
“It’s okay, boy.” The smell of wet dog comforted her.
She splashed the wound, rubbing the cut. If she could have bent her neck only two inches more, she would have sucked the poison out like snake venom. Cadie moved her jaw from left to right and straightened her back as she stood knee-high in the water.
Instead of trying to squeeze under the fence again, she picked up a stone and hurled it at the opening between the wires. The rock passed through without touching a single mangled wire. Kids made fun of Cadie’s knobby knees and her clumsiness, but she had perfect aim.
She turned her back to the fence.
The best berries grew on the far bank, flush with a water source, rich soil, and unobstructed morning light. Friar stopped as they approached the clearing where the blueberries grew and growled a low, deep warning. He stiffened his back and pricked his ears up. Cadie froze. She turned the plastic container over and beat on the bottom like a drum.
Bears.
“Come on, Friar. Home.” She edged backward. “‘Oh, I went down south for to see my Sal, singing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day,’” she sang and backed up, maintaining the steady, hollow rhythm on the plastic tub.
Friar darted toward the noise.
“Friar!” She inched backward. The bushes rustled and parted. “Friar!”
She curled her toes inside her sneakers and fought the urge to run. Never run from a bear. “‘For my Sal she is a spunky gal, singing Polly Wolly Doodle all the day.’” She matched her drum to every other beat of her pounding heart.
“Don’t stop singing because of me,” a voice called.
From behind the bushes stepped Daniela Garcia, a grade ahead of Cadie. They lived in the same small town, went to the same school, but they didn’t really know each other.
Daniela wasn’t a Girl Scout.
A hot blush slithered up Cadie’s neck, her ears, her face.
“You thought I was a bear, didn’t you?” Daniela said.
“No.” Cadie didn’t need another reason for the kids outside the 7-Eleven to laugh at her. Her flaming hair and giant freckles gave them invitation enough. Now she would be the girl who sang to bears in the woods.
Friar ran over to Daniela and jumped up on her, leaving muddy splotches on her shorts. Cadie’s stomach lurched.
“Down, Friar.” Cadie tried to pull him off Daniela. “Sorry.”
“Fryer? Like a fryer hen?”
“His real name is Friar Tuck, from Robin Hood.”
“You shouldn’t yell for him like that.”
“Why not?”
“I thought you were yelling fire,” Daniela said. “Not what you want to hear in the middle of the woods. I mean, geez. If you lived on a beach, would you name your dog Shark?”
Daniela dropped to her knees, allowing Friar to lick her face.
“You can call him Tuck if you want.”
“Nah, Friar’s cool. Why’d you sing anyway? I would’ve run if I saw a bear.”
“You don’t run from bears. You move slow and make noise. And never look them in the eyes.”
“You’re a pretty awful singer. Are you picking blueberries?”
“Yeah. My mom wants some.”
“Me too.” Daniela swept her arm toward the bushes. Cadie took it as an invitation.
Cadie wished she had braided her hair, which had dried into a red puffball. Her pink terry cloth shorts did not match her blue tank top. Daniela wore cutoff denim shorts and a button-down short-sleeved shirt made of red handkerchief fabric. Her black hair hung in a loose ponytail. Although Daniela’s parents spoke with thick accents, Daniela had no trace of an accent, unlike the other Mexican kids who transitioned in and out of her school. Other kids moved from farm to farm, there one school year, gone the next. But Daniela had always been there. Cadie often saw her on the porch of her father’s hardware store when she walked home from school.
“Why are you in my woods?” Cadie said.
Daniela raised her eyebrows in high, sweeping arches and put a hand on her hip. “Why are you in my woods?”
Cadie slapped her leg to call Friar closer.
“We just moved here,” Daniela said. “The cottage by the water off Woodside. It’s my woods.”
Although the two properties butted up against each other, their driveways connected to different streets. Cadie had never even seen the cottage, other than glimpses from out on the lake.
A slow grin spread across Daniela’s face as she looked Cadie up and down. “Did you fall in the creek?”
Cadie shrugged. Mud clung to her knees. She wiped away the blood on her arm.
“At least it’s warm out.” Daniela stepped aside to make room for Cadie. “It’s sunnier over here. You’ll dry off faster.”
Daniela paused from picking berries and pointed at the woven bracelet on Cadie’s wrist. “What’s this?”
“Paracord. The knots unwind to seven feet of rope for, you know, emergencies.”
“Are you guys survivalists or something?” Daniela asked.
“No. I just like it.”
“Cool.”
They picked berries quietly for ten minutes. Daniela surveyed each cluster before picking it, occasionally stepping away, tilting her head up, and swaying her back to look at the sky. She whistled a mournful song Cadie did not recognize. The soft edges of each note rose above the bushes as if they came from a perfectly tuned flute, not Daniela’s chapped lips. The drawn-out notes whispered of melancholy, but as Daniela swayed in rhythm with her own music, the corners of her mouth curled up and her eyebrows arched, convincing Cadie the song wasn’t meant to be sad.
Cadie paused several times to look through the bushes toward the lake, hoping to catch a flicker of yellow between the branches. Daniela turned and followed Cadie’s gaze. Her song drifted into a final note that left Cadie feeling unsatisfied, as if the melody asked a question Cadie could not answer.
“Are you still looking for bears?” Daniela said.
“No.” The warm flush crept up her neck as she twisted the bottom edge of her shirt around her finger. “Can you keep a secret?”
“Of course.”
“Follow me.” Cadie sprinted into the woods, Friar close at her heels.
“If it’s the patch of berries down by the water, I already found it,” Daniela called.
She heard Daniela running to catch up, but she didn’t slow down. The smell of damp pine and stagnant water intensified as they got closer to the lake. Water bugs skittered over pools of still rainwater. Chunks of granite, dropped by glaciers during the Ice Age, ranging in size from a softball to a pickup truck, littered the forest floor, forming crevices that could snap her ankle if she lost focus. She leapt from rock to moss-covered rock, to leaf-strewn patches of forest floor, holding her breath to duck through clouds of mosquitoes. The cheerful trill of a Bicknell’s thrush encouraged her to run faster.
As she approached the edge of the lake, she wriggled under a few low-hanging hemlock branches, dripping with the previous night’s rain, and stepped out onto a large slab of granite erupting from the woods toward the lake.
Tucked into the nook where the rock met the water, Cadie’s boat waited for her.