For coming from so far away.

For melting the snow.

For bringing the water.

For showing the colors.

For gathering the crowd.

For making so much happen without moving an inch.

I get to my feet with Birdie on my back.

“I’ll show you where it fell the night it lit up the sky,” I tell the crowd.

Chapter 9

Meteoritic metal responds to a magnet. If much metal is present, the magnet will cling to the rock.

—John T. Wasson, Meteorites: Their Record of Early Solar-System History

MY USUAL PATH to the big rock is more than muddy now. My footprints fill up with water that’s clear blue with flashes of green and yellow. The soggy terrain throws me off-balance. I expect it to be firm and yet it shifts under me, as if there’s an undertow moving below. Birdie bounces herself on my back to match my lopsided steps.

Mr. Ronnie comes up beside me and James and Birdie.

“I gotta see this rock for myself,” he says. “Have you folks put in for that reward yet?”

“No, we haven’t. I’m not sure we will.”

Mr. Ronnie says something, but I don’t hear it because just then the helicopter circles over us, round and round and round. Its blades make more noise than my father’s drilling rig in full throttle.

“WAVING ME,” Birdie shouts, pointing up at the helicopter. “WAVING ME.”

Birdie is right. One person in the helicopter shakes both hands back and forth in front of himself down toward the crowd. He doesn’t look happy.

Birdie holds on to my neck with one arm and waves back up at the helicopter.

The helicopter circles a few more times and flies off downhill, following the direction of the flooded road.

The big rock lies in its swampy crater. The ground near it is spongy and the stream starts just below, gushing out of the ground in waves. It looks like someone turned on a huge faucet deep underground.

Mom walks around and around the rock, studying it from all sides. She touches it gently with the tips of her fingers.

“What a beautiful thing you are, come from so far away,” she says to the meteorite.

“I’ve never seen rock like this.” Dad runs his hand over the shiny black surface. “I wonder if the bottom of it broke through into the aquifer. The water below it is pumping out like a vein of water from a flowing artesian well. The rock might be made of some kind of metal. But these things”—my father puts a finger in the rough, grooved thumbprints the way I did—“look like some kind of stone.”

The M encyclopedia tells what scientists find when they cut pieces off different meteorites and test them.

iron

nickel

magnetite

cobalt

carbon

olivine crystals

feldspar

black glass

trapped air

oxygen

extraterrestrial dust