The Pine Cone Trade

Part One · The Missing Spoon

The first thing to disappear was a teaspoon, which was not the kind of thing anybody noticed, and so nobody did. Nell noticed the second thing because it belonged to her. She had left her silver whistle on the window sill above the sink on the Tuesday night of apple week, and on the Wednesday morning there was a pine cone in its place, a small neat one, positioned exactly where the whistle had been. Her brother Jonah examined the pine cone and then examined her and said that was a very good trick. Nell said she had not done it. He said that was precisely what a person who had done it would say, and went out to the orchard with the ladder.

Aunt Lena's cabin stood at the top of a long dirt track in the mountains, a wooden house with a tin roof, a porch, and a woodpile taller than Nell. Below it was an orchard of forty elderly apple trees that had to be picked in a single week every October before the frost arrived. Nell and Jonah came up every year to help. Every year Aunt Lena said she could not possibly manage without them, and then picked three trees to their one. She was a tall, unhurried woman with a gray braid and a dog called Biscuit, who was neither tall nor unhurried. When Nell showed her the pine cone, she turned it over in her hand, said hm, and remarked that the cabin had always had a borrowing problem.

By Thursday the list ran to a teaspoon, the whistle, and Aunt Lena's reading glasses, which she swore she had left on the arm of the chair, and in whose place she discovered a smooth gray pebble. A brass key from the hook beside the door had been replaced by a bottle cap. Jonah's wristwatch, removed from the porch rail where he had set it while he washed, had been replaced by nothing at all, which Jonah said proved the thief was getting lazy. His first theory was that it was Nell. His second theory was that it was Biscuit. His third theory, delivered at supper with his mouth full, was that there was a very small burglar living in the mountains who was interested exclusively in spoons.

Biscuit was put on trial on Thursday night and found innocent, mostly because a dog that had hidden a wristwatch would not have been capable of leaving a pebble in its place, and also because he was asleep. Nell lay in the top bunk and listened to the cabin tick as it cooled. She wanted two things, and she wanted them badly. She wanted her whistle back, because her grandfather had given it to her, and she wanted Jonah to stop looking at her with that expression, the one that said he was being extremely patient with a known criminal. There was only one way to get both. She would have to catch the thief herself.

Her plan was simple, and she was proud of it. She would leave something shiny on the kitchen table, sit up in the dark with a flashlight, and wait. Jonah, who had decided to be helpful in the manner that was most annoying, offered his second watch as bait and then requested a receipt for it. Aunt Lena made cocoa and said she would be extremely interested in the results, and went to bed. Nell sat in the big chair with the flashlight in her lap and the dog across her feet, and the stove ticked, and the wind moved in the apple trees, and she was absolutely, completely awake until some time after eleven, when she was not.

Part Two · Flour on the Floor

She woke at six with a stiff neck, the flashlight dead, and the watch gone. In its place, in the center of the table, was a piece of foil folded into a tight silver square. Jonah came down, looked at the foil, looked at her, and said that he would be needing that receipt. But Nell was not listening to him, because she was examining the floor beneath the table, the dust that had drifted there from the woodpile, and a line of marks in it that were not the dog's. They were tiny, four toes in front and five behind, and between them ran a long, thin, dragging line, as if whatever had made them had been pulling a tail.

Aunt Lena's shelf held two kinds of books, cookbooks and books about things that lived outdoors, and Nell took down the fattest of the second kind and sat on the porch with it. It took her an hour. Not a mouse, which had a tail too thin to drag, and not a squirrel, which was asleep at night. She was nearly at the end of the rodents when she found it, a drawing of a round-eared animal with a soft gray coat, a bushy tail, and black eyes the size of currants. The pack rat, the book said, also called the wood rat, was nocturnal and built a large nest of sticks called a midden. It was known for carrying off small bright objects, and for leaving something behind in their place.

The book explained the trade, and Nell read the paragraph three times because she admired it so much. A pack rat returning home with a pine cone in its mouth would pass a teaspoon on the floor, and desire the teaspoon more, and drop the pine cone to collect it. It was not really a trade so much as a change of mind, because the rat had simply wanted something better and released the thing it already had. Nell thought that explained a great deal about her brother. She also thought, and this was the useful part, that an animal which could not resist a shiny object could be followed, if you could only see where it went. The trouble was that it went in the dark.

The second plan came from a different book, a thin one about tracking animals, which said that if you wanted to know where something walked at night, you dusted flour on the floor and read it in the morning. Aunt Lena surrendered a whole bag with an expression that said she was keeping count. Nell shook a thin white layer along the back wall of the kitchen, across the porch boards, and around the foot of the woodpile. She left Jonah's bottle cap in the center of the table as bait, with a note tied to it that said it was borrowed. Then she went to bed and, this time, actually slept.

In the morning the kitchen floor resembled the map of an extremely busy little city. The tracks entered under the back door, where a gap had been chewed at the corner, crossed to the table leg, went up it, and came down again. On the way out the dragging line of the tail was deeper, as though the animal had been carrying something heavy, and the bottle cap was gone. Across the porch the tracks ran in a straight line, with Biscuit's big prints wandering over them. They went down the steps and along the side of the woodpile, where they stopped at a gap between two logs just wide enough for Nell's fist.

She did not go in. She wanted to, badly, but the woodpile was four logs deep and a hundred logs long, and dismantling it would mean dismantling whatever was inside it. She had read the paragraph about the midden three times too. A pack rat's nest could be fifty years old, because a rat built on what its mother had built, and its mother before that, and the pile grew, and everything the family had ever carried home was still in it somewhere. Nell sat on the porch step with her chin on her knees and considered the gap between the logs. Then she went to find Aunt Lena, because some decisions are too big for one person on a step.

Part Three · The Trade

Aunt Lena listened to the whole thing without interrupting, which was one of the best things about her, and then she said that explained thirty years. She had lost a thimble in that cabin when she was Nell's age, and she had blamed her brother for it for most of a decade. She did not offer to tear down the woodpile. She said it was Nell's thief and Nell's whistle, and so it was Nell's decision, and that whatever Nell decided, the rat had been there first. Jonah, who had been listening from the doorway, said that he would like his watch back and did not care very much about the rat's feelings. Then he looked at Nell's face, and said that he could probably survive without the watch.

What they did in the end was this: Aunt Lena showed her how the woodpile was stacked, in rows, so that the logs at the back could be lifted out without the front collapsing. They removed six, one at a time, and set them on the grass, and behind them, in a hollow that the rat had excavated for itself against the cabin wall, was the midden. It was a mound of sticks and bark and apple twigs the size of a laundry basket, soft gray with age, and set into it, woven into it, pressed into the walls of it like stars in a ceiling, were the shiny things. Not just theirs. Everyone's.

There was the teaspoon, and the key, and the reading glasses, and the watch, both watches, and the bottle cap with the note still tied to it, and there was a thimble. There were buttons, forty or fifty buttons, and a tiny spoon from a doll's house, and a brass bell off a cat's collar, and the silver whistle with a pine cone wedged beside it, as if the rat had intended to go back for both. Nell took out what belonged to them. She took the thimble too, and gave it to Aunt Lena, who turned it over in her hand and did not say anything for a considerable while. Everything else they left. Then they replaced the six logs, carefully, in the correct order.

That night Aunt Lena nailed a strip of tin over the chewed corner of the door, which was the one thing she did about it, and the bottle caps and spoons went into a drawer that closed. Jonah fastened his watch on his wrist and kept it there. Nell washed the whistle in the sink until it shone, and blew it once on the porch, and listened to the sound travel out over the orchard and return off the hill. She thought about the rat, somewhere behind the woodpile, turning over its bottle cap in the dark and perhaps wondering what had happened to the kitchen. It had been an excellent kitchen, from a rat's point of view. It had been generous.

On the last morning, before the car was packed, Nell went out to the porch alone with a bottle cap she had saved from supper, a gold one, and set it on the bottom step beside the woodpile. It was not bait this time; it was a trade. She left it there, and went inside, and deliberately did not watch. When they carried the last box of apples out to the car at noon the cap was gone, and in its place, set exactly in the middle of the step where she had put it, was a pine cone, a small neat one. Jonah picked it up and looked at her and said that was a very good trick, and this time Nell said thank you, and put it in her pocket, and kept it.