I stand still, staring at the rock that’s so big I can’t see past it. I remember the way my dowsing stick pulled upward yesterday. Did the rock also come to me? Before I fell asleep last night, I read more about meteors and meteorites. I hoped the shadow I saw on the snow would be a space rock, maybe the size of the ones in my stone wall. I imagined picking it up and studying it. I didn’t imagine anything this size!

“GO, Henry.” Birdie wiggles her legs up and down.

There’s a shallow crater around the rock that makes it look like a giant upside-down teacup sitting in a huge egg-shaped saucer. Outside the crater is a jagged circle of melted snow, and the blades of grass near it are bright green. Even though it’s so cold out my face stings, the snow outside the crater is slushy under my boots.

“Hat,” Birdie chirps in my right ear. “Hat, hat, hat.”

The rock does have the shape of a hat—an enormous shiny-looking hat. As we get closer, I see that the surface is not as smooth as it looked from a distance. It has indentations on it that look like thumbprints. There are also specks of something as silver as the blade of my father’s sharpened axe.

“Touch.” Birdie pokes my chin. “Touch hat.”

When I don’t move, she pokes me harder.

My father’s nickname for Birdie is the Boss. “What does the Boss think about that?” he’ll ask Birdie. If there aren’t any people around to boss, Birdie tries to catch the dragonflies that crisscross the yard in the summer, or she calls to the big green luna moths to land on her finger.

“TOUCH!” Birdie shouts in my right ear. I let her down and we approach the giant boulder together.

I kneel down in the hollow that is the crater and touch the rock where it meets the ground. It’s very hard. I try to scrape off the shiny metal specks with a fingernail, but nothing happens. I press my thumbs into the rounded pits and run my hands down the ridges that can’t be smoothed out and the creases that can’t be straightened.

Careful not to let Birdie see, I lick it with the tip of my tongue. It has no taste I recognize. Maybe ashes, maybe very old wood. The metal is smooth, with a warmth that surprises me on this very cold day.

There’s a smell that comes to me from down there at the bottom of the rock. I’ve smelled it every year for ten years. Spring. But this time it’s two months early.

Birdie has both hands on the rock, as high up as she can reach. She pushes. Then pushes harder.