The Missing Chickens

The wind was coming off the ridge again when Priya came running across the field, and Milo knew before she said a word that something was wrong.

She had run all the way from the neighbour's farm, barefoot, her breath sawing. She bent over with her hands on her knees beside the sorting shed, where Milo and Spark were still cleaning up the last crates of yesterday's fruit.

Tara, who had been sorting pebbles into "yummy pebbles" and "yucky pebbles" on the shed floor, looked up with enormous eyes.

Milo looked at Spark. Spark had drifted out of the shed into the cool light, its single blue circle turning slowly toward the empty coop in the distance. The light pulsed — slow, even, thinking.

The blue light brightened, just a flicker — Spark's small click.

Spark turned its light from the coop, to Milo, to Priya.

Milo felt the old chill-thrill creep up the back of their neck. This was how Spark talked right before the world rearranged itself.

Tara raised her hand like she was in school.

...she said, with total confidence, and that was that.

So they became collectors.

For two whole days, Milo, Priya, and Tara watched the coops of the valley like little hawks. Every time a hen went missing — and they did keep going missing — they wrote it down in Milo's notebook. Not what they guessed. Just what they saw.

Tuesday. Brown hen, white tail. Last seen near the western coop. Late afternoon, when the shadows got long.

Wednesday morning. Speckled hen. Western coop again. Nobody saw her go.

Wednesday, almost dark. Two hens. Western coop. The wind was loud off the ridge.

It was slow. It was boring. Tara complained that watching chickens was less fun than she had been promised, and went off to teach a goat the alphabet instead. Priya kept saying "this is silly, we should just sit up all night and catch the fox." Milo's hand cramped from writing. And the whole time, that ridge-wind kept rising in the late afternoons, cool and steady, pushing the grass flat toward the hills.

But Spark would not let them guess. Every time someone said "it's obviously a—," Spark's light would pulse once, patiently.

On the evening of the second day, they spread it all out.

The sorting shed became their detective room. Milo had drawn a big map of the whole farm on a sheet of brown paper — the fields, the ridge, all the coops. Priya pinned every note onto the map, right where each hen had vanished, with the time written underneath.

And then they stepped back. And Milo felt the floor of the world tilt, the way it had the morning the fruit re-sorted itself three different ways before their eyes.

Because the notes were not scattered all over the map. They were clustered.

Priya read them aloud, and her voice slowed down as she heard it.

Milo's heart was thudding now.

They turned to the open side of the shed, where the long grass outside was bending flat toward the hills.

The blue light pulsed faster, the way it did when pieces were locking together.

They didn't even wait for morning.

The four of them — Milo, Priya, Tara, and Spark floating low over the grass like a little blue moon — marched straight out to the western coop in the last orange light. The ridge-wind pushed at their backs the whole way.

It was Tara who found it. Of course it was Tara. She was the only one small enough to crawl in behind the coop, into the long shadowed grass against the back fence, and her muffled voice came floating out:

There was a gap in the fence. Low and torn, the wire bent back, hidden behind the coop where no grown-up walking past would ever see it. And on the other side of the gap, in the neighbour's overgrown field, stood a wild berry bush, fat and dark with fruit.

And underneath the berry bush, calm as anything, pecking happily in the golden light, were the missing hens. All of them. Not eaten. Not stolen. Not unlucky.

Escaped.

Every late afternoon, when the ridge-wind rose and the grass lay flat and nobody was watching the back of the coop, the hens squeezed through the gap and went to feast on the berries. They were not vanishing at all. They were on holiday.

Priya started laughing — a great surprised whoop that scared a hen off the bush.

Milo turned, and there was the question rising up in them, the way the wind rises off the ridge.

That night, back in the shed, Milo did something new.

They took a fresh page and pasted the brown-paper chicken map into the front of an empty scrapbook — the first thing in it. Beside it, in careful pencil: The day patterns caught the chickens. Then, because it felt right, Milo set the little bruised guava from the sorting shed on top of the page, like a paperweight, like a charm.

Priya leaned in the doorway, watching, the night wind moving her hair. She was quiet for a moment.

Spark's light had drifted to the open side of the shed, turned out toward the dark fields, toward the ridge. The wind was still coming down off it, cool and steady and patient, the same as it had been all week.

Outside, the wind off the ridge bent the grass flat, and somewhere in the dark a perfectly happy, perfectly un-stolen chicken clucked under a berry bush.