I took an empty jar from the shelf and went out into the yard, where I was surprised to see that the day was still just an ordinary spring day—night still waiting far beyond the curve of the world—that the trees were no taller than they’d been, that nothing much had changed while I was inside that cabin.

Such a lot had already happened on this one ordinary spring day—so much of it extraordinary—that I felt a little dizzy and unreal as I crossed the yard and went in search of the spring. And found it, just where she said it would be.

She was right—it wasn’t much of a spring. But when I pushed the jar flat in the moss where the water bubbled out of the rock, a pool rose and flowed into its mouth, as if the jar were the thirsty one.

The water was cold and clear and, as I sampled it, delicious. Like poured winter. Fresh. Perfect.

I carried the jar into the cabin.

“Good,” she said. “A girl who can tap a spring.”

“Any girl can do that.”

She looked at me for a long moment. “I know.”

With one hand, I cradled her head and lifted it high enough so she could drink from the jar without choking.

Her tears came back as she drank, as if the well of her had dried but was now full again. And I felt some light in her now, too, where all I had felt before was darkness.

“So good,” she said, sobbing a little, when it was all gone.

I laid her head back down and smoothed the hair off her hot forehead.

And asked her another of my hundred questions. “Did you carve that fawn? Or that squirrel?”

“Oh, child, if I could do that, I most certainly would. But I can’t. And I didn’t.”

“Then who did?” I said.

She looked at me for another long moment, as if trying to decide something. “If you’re lucky, he may come this way in time for you to see for yourself.”

He. So my carver was a he. I had thought maybe so. “Come this way from where?”

“From somewhere else,” she said, suddenly sharp.

So I asked something different. “Why do you have so many books?”

She squinted up at me. “Let me guess. You think an old woman living on a mountaintop can’t possibly read.”

I wasn’t surprised by the bitterness in her voice, but I didn’t much like it. “I don’t think that. I just don’t know anyone who has so many. Have you read them all?”

She looked past me at the books on their shelves. “Some of them many times. I don’t know if I could have stayed here otherwise.”