We lost our home and never went back. Trackers and dogs arrived first, poking about the camp, unc what we had left behind in our evacuation. Then men in black suits came to take photographs of the holes and our footprints left in the dirt. A helicopter hovered over the site, filming the oval perimeter arod pathways into the woods. Dozens of soldiers in green uniforms collected every discarded possession and carted them off in boxes and bags. A few souls shinnied underground, crawled through the work of burrows and emerged blinking at the sky as if they had beeh the sea. Weeks later, another crew arrived, their heavy maery rumbling up the hill, cutting a swath through the old trees to collapse the tunnels, dig them up, and bury them again, turning the earth over and over until the top ran e with thick wet clay. Then they doused the ring with gasoline ahe field afire. By the end of that summer, nothing remained but ashes and the blaed skeletons of a few trees.
Such destru did not temper the urge to return home. I could not sleep without the familiar pattern of stars and sky framed by branches overhead. Every night-sound—a swig or a woodrat scrabbling through the brush—disturbed my rest, and in the ms my head and neck ached. I heard, too, the others moaning in their dreams or straining behind the bushes to relieve the growing pressure in their guts. Smaolach looked over his shoulder a dozen times each hour. Onions chewed her nails and braided intricate s of grass. Each swell of restlessness was followed by a swale of listlessness. Knowing our home was gone, we kept looking for it still, as if hope alone could restore our lives. When hope faded, a morbid curiosity set in. We would go back time and again to worry over the bones.
Hidden iop of tall oaks or scattered in pockets along the ridge, wed witness and whisper among ourselves, desg the loss and ruin. The raspberries crushed uhe backhoe, the chokecherry felled by a bulldozer, the paths and lanes of our carousals and mad ecstasies erased as one might rub away a drawing or tear up a page. That campsite had existed sihe arrival of the first French fur traders, who had entered the tribes at their aral territory. Homesick, we drifted away, huddling in makeshift shelters, lost food.
We wandered rough try into early autumn. The influx of men, dogs, and maes made moving about difficult and unsafe, so we spent hard days and nights together, bored and hungry. Whenever someone roamed too far from the group, we ran into danger. Ragno and Zanzara were spotted by a surveyor when they crossed in front of his spyglass. The man hollered and gave chase, but my friends were too fast. Dump trucks brought in loads of gravel to lihe dirt road carved from the highway to our old clearing. Chavisory and Onions made a game of finding gems among the rubble; any unusual stone would do. By moonlight, they picked over eaewly spread load, until the night when they were discovered by a driver sleeping in his rig. He sneaked up on them and grabbed the girls by their collars. They would have been caught if Onions hadnt snapped free and bitten him hard enough to draw blood. That driver may be the only man alive with a faerys scars lined up like beads in the web of skiween his thumb and finger.
On the stru site where the men dug cellars, Luchóg spotted an open pack of cigarettes resting on the fro of ay truck. Quiet as a mouse, he skittered over, and as he reached io steal the smokes, his k the