Like here out in our field, I’m twenty percent wondering if dowsers are born with special hearing or smell senses that help them find water. I’ve only got seven more months, until I turn eleven, to figure out what makes someone a dowser. I’m thinking when I get back home, I’ll look in the encyclopedias my uncle Braggy gave me. Which volume would I look in? S for sense or H for hearing or W for water? Or maybe the Lowington library has a book about it. Before I know it, I am forty percent thinking about James and Birdie, and sixty percent thinking about the way dowsers find things.

“And me? How many percent for me?” I wanted to know when Dad said one hundred percent about James.

“You?” My father looked at me then like he was seeing me for the first time. I have my father’s straight black hair and long legs like all the Bowers except Uncle Braggy, and Birdie and I both have my mother’s mossy eyes. Mom calls them mossy because they’re the greenish brown, brownish green of the moss that grows on our stone walls.

“You are one hundred percent Henry,” he said.

Which is not exactly an answer. Who else could I be?

Birdie’s sled bumps into a hay bale right before the road, and I hold James’s dowsing stick out the way I’ve seen my father and Uncle Lincoln do a hundred times. Then a strange thing happens there on the frozen hill. For a second, I think I feel the forked branch pull upward toward the sky instead of down the way my father’s dowsing stick moves, but I can’t be sure if it’s the branch moving or my cold hands shaking.

Chapter 3

If you are a dowser and you pass over an underground water supply, the end of the stick will suddenly be pulled downward to a vertical position.

—Joseph Baum, The Beginner’s Handbook of Dowsing

OUR TOWN LIBRARY has two books about dowsing and one book about water. The brick building covered with vines is next to James’s school on Main Street in Lowington. The shelves go right up to the ceiling, and a metal ladder slides back and forth on a track. Mrs. Kay, the librarian, lets me climb for my books.

“Red book.” Birdie points to a book with red leather binding halfway up the wall. “Climb up.”

There’s a section in the corner of the library with children’s books that are easy to reach, but Birdie picks her books by their color or their size. She likes the biggest ones or the ones with red covers, and especially books that are big and red.