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“I’M going to chop wood,” said Jenkins one day. Once back, he kept sighing.
“What’s wrong, Grandpa?” asked Olivia.
“I lost the pocket watch your grandma gave me. I took off my coat while I was chopping wood and set it on a stump. By the time I looked, my pocket watch was gone.”
“Did someone steal it?”
“No. Not a human, anyway. There’s no way I wouldn’t notice someone coming that close to me. I was in a clearing. I looked everywhere nearby, but there was no sight of it.”
“I’m sorry, that’s terrible.”
That pocket watch had been a gift from Marguerite for Jenkins’s sixtieth birthday. Olivia had gone with her to help pick out which one they thought was best. It was a fairly high-quality item, and Jenkins cherished it. He cared for it every day and always carried it on him.
“It might’ve been a crow,” said Jenkins. “Oh well. I’ll just look around there whenever I’m in the area.”
Marguerite smiled and tried to cheer him up. “Losing a watch is better than being attacked by a wolf or a bear, don’t you think? I’ll buy you a new one for your next birthday.”
“No, don’t worry about it. I appreciate the thought, though.”
Starting the next day, Olivia went into the forest every day and asked each and every animal she encountered if they’d seen the pocket watch. She went around asking tits, jays, sparrows, squirrels, and rabbits as she called images of the watch to her mind. But they didn’t reply.
If they remembered seeing it, they would have responded. It seemed like none of them had.
“It’s no use…” said Olivia. She’d gone into the forest every day for two weeks, but she never encountered an animal that reacted to her mental images of the pocket watch.
One day, Olivia went a little deeper into the forest than normal. She asked a squirrel in a beech tree, Have you seen a pocket watch?
Seen, came a response, but it wasn’t the squirrel.
“Who is that? Where are you?” She quickly scanned the area and saw the fox she’d given the trout to. “Where did you see it?”
This way.
With that short answer, the fox turned around. That was enough to tell Olivia it wasn’t wary of her. She hurried after it.
“Hey, how far are we going? I can’t go too far into the forest. Wolves are scary,” she said, and the fox briefly turned to look at her. She had no idea if it understood her or not, but it just turned back and kept going.
“Oh no. I’m scared to go any further. Maybe I should give up,” she said, but thought, But if I can find the watch…
She kept following the fox.
Eventually, it stopped.
There, it said and looked up into an oak tree.
“Ah!” There was a tree hollow up high with a small piece of golden chain dangling from it. “How’d it get up there? A squirrel?”
The fox’s memories immediately flowed into her. A small, slender body. A marten. Foxes hunted martens.
The fox had chased the marten until it raced up the tree and into the hole. The fox looked up, watching the marten go with frustration. That’s when it saw the chain.
“Thank you for showing me,” said Olivia. “I want to give you a thank-you, but I only have a bit of bread. Is that good enough?”
She took the bread wrapped in cloth from her satchel and tossed it to the fox. It caught it in its mouth and instantly disappeared.
“Oh. Left already? Oh well. I guess you got what you came for. I should hurry home. I might get attacked if I’m all the way out here alone.”
She wanted to remember this location, but would she be able to by tomorrow? She wasn’t confident she could, since it was her first time here.
“Ah,” she said, pulling her knife from her bag. “I’ll leave marks on the trees with this on my way back. Then I can show Grandpa the way.”
She wanted to get home quickly, but she also wanted to make it so she could find the location of the pocket watch again, after having searched all this time. She hurried to cut chunks of bark off trees, not knowing when an animal might attack.
The forest was nearly dark. If she didn’t hurry, it would get so dark she wouldn’t even be able to see the ground she was walking on.
She worked hard at leaving marks on trees until she was back to a location she knew. By the time she got home, it was so late you couldn’t go walking outside without a lamp.
“Olivia! Where were you? We were looking everywhere for you!” said her grandmother.
“I found Grandpa’s pocket watch.”
“Really?”
“But it was high up in a tree. I couldn’t get it back. I can’t show you the way until the sun comes up again. I’ll show you the way tomorrow.”
Marguerite and Jenkins exchanged looks, their expressions frightened.
“Olivia, where exactly was it?” said her grandmother. “How far into the forest did you go?”
“Um… Quite far.”
“I thought I taught you not to go too far into the forest alone,” said her grandfather.
“…I’m sorry.”
“You’ve been going into the forest every day for a while now. Have you been going that far each time?”
“No. Today was the first day.”
“Then why’d you go that far today?” asked Marguerite, but Olivia couldn’t answer. She couldn’t very well say, “A fox told me it saw the pocket watch.” She looked down, looking sad.
“I think we’ve chided her enough, Marguerite,” said Jenkins. “It’s my carelessness that ended up with me losing the watch anyway. Thank you, Olivia. But next time, get me to come along with you when you want to go deep into the forest, all right?”
“All right. I’m sorry, Grandma, Grandpa.”
“Well, tomorrow we’ll go to find it together. Do you remember where it was?” asked Jenkins.
“Yeah. I left marks on the trees with my knife as I was coming back. That’s why it took so long.”
“Ah. I’m just happy you’re safe. But, Olivia, I want you to remember one thing: As much as I treasure that pocket watch, I treasure you more than a huge pile of a hundred pocket watches. If you got attacked by an animal just because of my pocket watch, well…I…”
“I’m sorry, Grandpa!”
“It’s all right, as long as you understand.” Jenkins went back to his usual smile and hugged Olivia.
The next day, Jenkins made preparations for climbing the tree, then Olivia showed him the way through the forest.
It was all this way? thought Jenkins. He had good reason to be surprised. The pocket watch was over a mile from where he lost it. And up high in a hole, on top of it.
This girl surprises me every now and again, he thought, but he didn’t say it. He threw a rope up into the tree and climbed while holding onto that. The pocket watch was undamaged, safe from the rain because it had been inside the hollow.
The hollow looked like it had, up until recently, been the home of a great spotted woodpecker. He recognized the white down spread across the nest, as well as the mottled black-and-white feathers next to red ones. The nest was empty even though it was too early for the chicks to have left the nest.
Did something eat the woodpecker’s chicks and bring the pocket watch in here?
He slipped the watch into his pocket and quickly slid down the tree.
“Thank you, Olivia. It’s thanks to you I got my watch back, and in good shape, too,” he said.
“I’m glad.”
“I wonder what was using the hollow as a home.”
“A marten. …I think.”
“Ah, a marten. They do like that sort of place. Did you see one?”
“I did. I guess.”
Jenkins was curious about her stammered answers but didn’t press her any further. He’d learned from experience that if he pushed her for the hows and the whys in this sort of situation, she would just look frightened and uneasy.
“All right, let’s head home. This isn’t the sort of place we should be hanging around for long. You’re not to come this far again on your own.”
“I won’t, Grandpa.”
That evening in his bedroom, Jenkins disassembled the watch and cleaned it, which was when he found several hairs tangled in the chain that did look quite a lot like marten fur. “It was a marten, after all,” he said. “Why’d it take my pocket watch?”
“Even wild animals can be full of curiosity,” said Marguerite. “There are all sorts of humans, after all. I’m sure there are all sorts of animals.”
Jenkins put every last tiny part of the watch back where it belonged, checked to make sure the hands were moving, then closed the lid with a snap.
“Marguerite. Normal methods don’t work when you’re raising a kid, do they? Olivia’s a good kid, but there are still some days where I feel like she’s going to give me a heart attack.”
“I know what you mean. If a girl like Olivia terrifies us this much, just imagine how much shorter our lives would be if we’d been given a mischievous child.”
“Far shorter. I guess God gave us Olivia knowing how old we are.”
“Probably. I was thinking the same. Raising Olivia makes me want to believe God is real.”
“Me too.”
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OLIVIA saw that fox again later when she was in the forest, but she remembered what Jenkins said and didn’t give it food. The fox waited for a while, but eventually left, likely deciding it wasn’t going to get food even if it stayed longer.
“This is for the best,” Olivia told herself. She couldn’t give food to the meat eaters of the forest. It would only make things more dangerous for them in the end.
“I’m sorry,” she murmured.
She watched it go like that on several occasions, and eventually it stopped coming to her.
Later, the fox would grow old and be unable to hunt for itself. Starving, it would come to Olivia’s home, where its actions would result in three lives being saved. But that wouldn’t happen for several more years.