I started walking again, and the loon wailed once more. The sound my mother had chosen to calm me long ago was alive again, and the sound was deceptive. What the uninformed believed to be a peaceful birdsong was in fact a guardian’s war cry. The emitter that she’d used to play it sat on the table inside the camp, its power cord severed. So how was I hearing it? And I had never heard the grackles, not once. She said I needed both. Up and down, one to descend, one to rise. No. That wasn’t entirely right. She’d said “Nick has both.” Has. As if it had been hardwired, a permanent change, and all I
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