Echo Mountain

by Lauren Wolk

I myself was odd in many ways, and I liked other things that were odd. Questions worth answering.

Samuel was too small to help much, except by making us laugh and love him, which was plenty. Sometimes that’s all a person needs to do: be who they are.

If I’d learned anything from the mountain—and from my father—it was that I felt stronger and happier if I was able to do a hard thing and do it well.

he showed me how to strike the flint on his shovel to make sparks. “Fire,” he had said. “Few things more valuable in this world, and you can make all you’ll ever need if you know how. That’s the secret to everything. Knowing how.”

I could feel his loneliness as if it were mine. And, in that moment, my own loneliness doubled . . . and then receded down to less than what it had been. Which was when I learned that loneliness shared is loneliness halved.

There aren’t many hurts that a sky-meadow full of clean white blossoms can’t make at least a little better.

“Aristotle said, ‘For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.’”

My father had always told me I had a choice, when faced with a giant task that would do me good: bellyache about how long it would take or be glad it would last.

“The brain’s like the world. Every part of it has a way of doing things. But you won’t know what you know until you know it,”

It would take a lot of work to be a character in both stories without becoming two characters. Or one, split in half. But it was work I could do, so I would do it, even if I felt tangled and torn along the way.

For a long time, I’d thought that people simply were who they were and became who they became. But I didn’t think that anymore.

She was a small woman, which should have made me feel better, but she was like the centipedes that sometimes raced in a frenzy across the cabin floor, their legs like brittle hair, so fast and shivery that I’d leap in terror at the sight of them.

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. ...

“Quite a hag now. Oh, it’s all right,” she said at the look on my mother’s face. “No harm in calling me that. You weren’t wrong. It’s what I am. Nothing at all wrong with being a hag.” She gave me a look. “Nothing wrong with being smart that way. And anyone who thinks otherwise needs to think again.”

“Sometimes things seem to happen out of order, or in an order of their own, but they make perfect sense if you don’t worry too much about how they ought to line up.”

Cate huffed. “Tell me what true is.” I thought about that. “I know a million true things.” “As do I. And a million I can’t explain, though they’re real. And quite a few I can’t believe, though they happened. Whether they should have or not.”

“The sun never rises the way it did the day before. Not exactly. And it

won’t rise the same way tomorrow. But it’s still the sun,” she said. “And we’d all be just as cold without it.”