My own pack was filled with other things Cate had told us to bring, like bits cut from the upside-down garden hanging from the roof of her cabin. Things I couldn’t name. Not yet.

There were no bears or fisher cats or other wild creatures on the path this time, though I imagined that there would be some wildness in my mother’s face when we appeared at the cabin door.

I didn’t know where we would put Cate, what we would feed her, but I didn’t much care.

I would happily sleep with the dogs in the woodshed. Give up what jerky or eggs or bread were meant for me and eat, instead, what I could harvest from the forest floor: mushrooms and fiddleheads; lamb’s-quarters and dandelion leaves; chives and acorns; the taproots of wild carrots.

For I knew, with great clarity and certainty, that there was more I could do to help Cate. I just didn’t yet know what that might be.

Nor did I know what next to try for my father.

But I felt that helping one would help the other.

And that we would wake my father, Cate and I. What scared me now was what might come after the waking.

I imagined my father changed. Unable to walk. Confused by who we were.

And I didn’t think there was anything in Cate’s book that would bring him back from that.

But the closer we got to the cabin, the more I was able to see what the bear saw in the eye of the purple aster, what the crow saw from her topmost nest, what any untamed creature knew from the moment it first opened its eyes: that life is a matter of moments, strung together like rain. To try to touch just one drop at a time, to try to count them or order them or reckon their worth—each by each—was impossible.

To stand in the rain was the thing. To be in it.

Which I would do.

Which I would do to make my father well . . . and to learn him all over again if I had to.

And I wouldn’t move from that spot until I did.

There was a reason why I could feel the tree roots wince as we trod on them. Why I had been able to hear the cry of that tree as my father swung his ax, as it fell toward my sweet Samuel, just there, in its twisting shadow, chasing a rabbit across the cold ground.

There had to be.

All I had to do was find it.

Chapter Sixty-Three

We told Captan to stay outside by the cabin door, so he reluctantly lay down and put his head on his paws.

“When we come back, I’ll take you to see Maisie,” I told him. “And Quiet.”

He answered me by raising his eyebrows.

And then we helped Cate inside.