Whispering Alaska by Brendan Jones

Author:Brendan Jones [Jones, Brendan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House Children's Books
Published: 2021-10-26T00:00:00+00:00

When she opened her eyes again, she saw in front of her hundreds of the tallest, straightest, most beautiful trees she could have ever imagined. Clusters of ferns grew around their bases, the fronds dotted with raindrops. Mist shifted through the branches, furred with moss, making wreaths around the bark. Below, lush hills of moss rose and fell like waves between the behemoths.

Clete pointed toward a group of gray-trunked trees, growing upward like long waterfalls tumbling from the sky. “The Guardsmen,” he whispered.

A drop of rain fell on the back of her hand, sending the smallest of currents through her palm, up her wrist. She pushed a few curls, damp from the drizzle, behind her ears.

“They must be taller than skyscrapers,” she said. “I can’t even see the tops.”

“Shhh,” Clete said.

Nicky stood still, letting the kaleidoscope of trees resolve in front of her. One by one the trunks separated, as if introducing themselves. They took on individual characteristics—a crooked branch here, moss draped like a pair of pants drying over there. The trees grew on such a different scale from the black walnut, or even the Norway spruces, on Uncle Max’s farm.

Behind the Three Guardsmen, a wall of brown rose. Then her eyes put together the puzzle of moss-heavy branches, attaching them to the same trunk. It was one entire tree, she realized, thick as a rowhome in downtown Danville.

“That’s the Old Yellow Cedar,” Clete said. “Older than America. Probably older than the Renaissance.”

The needles were the color of the ocean, and sprayed out in feathery plumes. “It’s—amazing,” Nicky said.

“It will be one of the first trees to go, because it’s so valuable.”

Her ears picked out not only the rush of the creek, and the uneven warbling of a bird, but a faint hum rising from the soil. That green pieces of paper, or numbers on a computer screen, could be exchanged for these living pillars pushing up from the lush moss baffled her.

She lifted her chin, focusing on a raven hopping along a thick trunk that had fallen over the river. Water rushed beneath. She smelled something rich and sweet, similar to the mulch her mother poured into their window boxes in Danville. The smell of death and life blended together, the beginning and end captured in a single scent.

“Ready?” Clete said.

“For what?”

“To cross.”

Before she could respond he scrambled up the fallen log. The raven hopped in the other direction as Clete started toward the grove. Her head told her to stay put. She didn’t need to be part of this adventure. Her heart hammered in her chest.

Then her feet were moving through the moss, and she was setting her toes against knots in the tree. She climbed to the top, the river far beneath her.

It was too late to turn back. She had to meet these trees.

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