Running away, tripping over the shingle, Mud’s heart was as noisy as rain on an old roof.  He’d been feeding the birds when one of them, an ungrateful lorikeet had nipped his hand. More sharply than she’d meant to, probably, but the blood had startled him and he’d fallen over in surprise. That was when he saw it. Lying there, half buried but not quite. A skull, smooth and white as the moon, curving to a peak. Bird’s bones, with empty eyes. He found the river soon enough. Deep and wide as the trees around it were dry and narrow. Mud washed his hand, gulping cold autumn air to slow his jammering mind. Of course birds died, he knew that, but to see it, left there like a heavy ghost. It frightened him. So suddenly as falling, you could see ghosts.

He followed the thread-like river. It wound its way around the hills, it dragged and caught in places was like the tune of a forgotten song. The fish in the river twisted in the current, following its pulse from the mountain to the sea.  Stretched across the land, Mud thought, there must be a great net of rivers and streams.  

What it must look like, from up in the sky where the lorikeet flew. Hidden in a cloak of cloud and forest. The crown in the land. Sweeping, high above the town, trees, river. Majestically snow capped and quietly proud. The mountain watched over them all, the seam between the sea and sky.   As he sat, watching the river flow downstream towards the town, he looked closer at the stones. The stones were spread out in waves around the river, mountain dust made smooth by the tide. Turning one in his hand, he realised that they were not all alike. There was something half-hidden in the stone. A secret he had found. Curled in the surface of the stone, as if it was in the middle of a long sleep, was a small sea shell. The arches of the shell rose out of the stone, waiting to be discovered. Ancient bones, nestled in the shadows of long-dead sea weed, all as it had been thousands of years ago. Buried in earth, then stone it had become part of the land.

Curling up above the river, the hill was too steep for running. Long grass, tangy with pollen knotted in his hands as he made his journey towards the tree. It had an aged look which gave it a sense of majesty, at the top of the world or so he liked to think. Where light caught in the gaps in the bark under its broad branches would be the place to keep a gift from the past. Hidden, for the wonderment of others on another day.