Read an Excerpt
1
The Secret
Samantha Tabitha Smith hiked down to one of her favorite spots in her Field.
Beside the path in the middle of the grassland lay an ancient scatter of trash. A broken-down lawn mower. A few unrecognizable scraps of metal. And most importantly, a wooden door.
It lay flat, weeds tall around it. Like she did most days, she wedged her fingers underneath and lifted. The big board parted from the earth.
Jackpot.
On the furrowed soil lay the usual—earthworms, millipedes, pill bugs. But today, better than all those, a rare and beautiful find: a snake skin—and beside it, the snake itself.
Sammie was used to garter snakes. They were slender and dark green with black patterning and long yellow stripes from head to tail tip. She liked to catch them. They didn’t bite, usually—or if they tried, their toothless mouths closed so weakly around her finger that she always laughed. But if they twisted and rubbed their scales together, they could produce a nasty-smelling whitish cream that made her fingers smell like she’d dipped them in turpentine. She always held the snakes at the base of their head and the end of their tail, straight out, so they couldn’t rub.
But today’s snake was different in color and pattern—not a garter snake at all. She’d never seen one like it. It was pale, milky white, with brick-red markings in big ragged patches. It lay curled up and sleeping. She knew it was alive, because its body seemed to glow, shiny and sleek, not dull like the snake she’d once seen crushed by a car.
She didn’t touch it. She didn’t know if it might bite. Not far off lay the snake skin, coiled, fragile, and transparent. The snake was extra glossy because, she knew, it had just shed its old scales; now it would have space to grow bigger inside its new skin. Reverently, slowly, so as not to disturb the snake, she slid her fingers underneath the old skin and picked it up. It lay like crinkled rice paper in her palm. The whole head, body, and tail were unbroken. A perfect specimen.
She opened her pack and fished out her collecting case, a clear plastic box that wouldn’t break but showed the contents, and tucked the skin inside. It followed her personal rule: she could collect only dead things, never anything alive.
Then she pulled out her notebook, a spiral-bound black one with a hard cover. She recorded the date and the weather.
She sketched the snake, trying to capture every detail. Sammie had taught herself to draw just for this. She wasn’t very good at drawing, but she could at least make a snake look like a snake and a bird look like a bird. Later she would look it up in her field guides at home.
Sammie’s teachers always told her she would grow up to be a writer someday. One of her poems hung in a place of honor on the classroom wall. But Sammie liked bugs and birds and snakes and mammals. She wanted to be a scientist. A biologist, to be exact. Yet no one else besides her seemed to care. Science class was so short. The boys all teased her when she asked question after question.
Worse still, Sammie’s mother didn’t want her to come to the Field alone. The Field was hidden from the rest of the suburb by woodland. It might have been a farm or orchard once, but it had long since been abandoned and returned to nature. Squashed between Sammie’s subdivision and the commercial district of Split Road, it was a big swath of wilderness in this busy town.
“It’s so isolated and hidden, honey,” her mom said. “If anything happens to you, no one will be around to help.”
So every day now when Sammie’s bus dropped her at home and her parents were still at work, she came to the Field in secret.
When they’d lived in their old, more rural town, things had been different. Her mom used to pick her up at school in the afternoons, and they would walk together down the street to a conservation area with a little nature center. Sometimes they strolled the paths together, or her mom would retreat with a novel to a big armchair while Sammie explored. Sammie’s mom didn’t love science the way Sammie did—she mostly thought nature was pretty, like the birds at the feeder she kept just outside the kitchen window. But she’d encouraged Sammie to talk to the staff who worked at Buck Place. “It’s important to have a home base in nature, a place to know deeply,” one of them told her. “That’s how you become a naturalist: someone who understands how all things in nature are connected—from the plants to the animals to the weather and even the dirt.”
Sammie had decided then and there that someday she’d become a naturalist, too. Ever since her family had moved here last year, she’d felt comfortable only in her Field. Like the snake, safe under the door while shedding its skin, here she could hide away while she taught herself to be a scientist.
So Sammie had resolved to come here alone. She felt uncomfortable about it, but she pushed the guilt down. If her parents were never around, it seemed only fair to get to make her own decisions. Besides, it wasn’t like she was here just to have fun: she was learning new things every day. And she wasn’t afraid. If anyone suspicious turned up, she could disappear into the forest like a fawn melting into the underbrush.
And so today, like every day, Sammie had rushed home from the bus stop to her empty house—her parents wouldn’t be home from work until dinner. She’d dumped her schoolbag in the garage, strapped on her pack with her notebook and collection box already inside, and hopped on her bicycle to bike the mile to her secret place.
She’d pedaled to the neighborhood’s end, her blond hair streaming from under her bicycle helmet as she flew past neighbors’ lawns bursting with new grass and daffodils, pretty but tame. Fragrant New England air, warm enough to wear shorts for the first time this spring, washed her legs. After wheeling her bike in a tight circle, she’d dropped it in a hidden place among the bushes. She’d pushed back some branches she’d arranged herself to hike down a short, overgrown path between thick trees. Then the trees opened, and Sammie stood at the top of the Field.
She’d taken a great deep breath and lifted her arms like wings. She was free: of school, mean boys, stressed-out parents, and all the buildings, asphalt, vehicles, and rules that crowded her life.
Almost the only sign of civilization here was this wooden door. Now, still crouched beside it, she carefully closed her collecting box on the snake skin and glanced up through tall grasses waving in the May breeze. All around her she heard birds calling. A common yellowthroat piped a loud witchety-witchety—witchety-witch! And then, to her delight, she heard a bird she didn’t know. She smiled with excitement. She’d heard the call a few times this spring, but the birds lived so high in the trees at the edge of the meadow, she couldn’t spot one. The song rose, a climbing trill of notes like someone running a stick along a musical chain-link fence, welcoming her.
She’d never made a map of this place. Opening to the inside front cover of her notebook, she began to draw again. She sketched the narrow path descending south from the entry woods through a sloping expanse of grassland as big as three or four football fields, patches of shrubbery bunching up among tall grasses. Here where she stood in the very middle, the path turned a slight corner at the wooden door, then continued southward, where it crossed a stone wall into more woods. It took fifteen minutes to hike all the way to busy Split Road beyond. To the west, a shrub-filled decline led down to a pond, then woodland climbed beyond, toward the neighborhoods. To the east rose a steeper hill crested by a long line of pines. The Field was enclosed on all sides.
Only two things interrupted nature in all this space. One was this scrap heap. The other was a dirt track leading from Split Road to the only nearby house, which Sammie called the Junkyard House. Tucked close to the pine woods and half-hidden down the slope toward the pond, its backyard was a mess, full of rusted equipment and broken-down cars and piles of tires. She could sometimes hear a dog barking wildly, but she’d never seen the people who lived there.
Still, the house was way over in the southwest corner, and Sammie could stay away from it just fine.
This was her kingdom, and it made her powerful.
She finished her map by carefully labeling landmarks she cared about: the Hillock, the Pond, the Dead Tree where hawks liked to land. Then she smiled down at the snake still sleeping peacefully after the hard work of shedding its skin. “You’re beautiful, little snake,” she mouthed soundlessly so she wouldn’t startle it.
With utmost care, she shifted the door from where she’d moved it and placed it back where it belonged, making sure to set it down slowly and exactly as before, so she wouldn’t hurt the snake. Then she got up with a sigh of pleasure. She needed to get home before her mom did at five.
She rounded the bend and looked up the slope. Then she stopped.
She wasn’t alone.
