Trickster s Girl - By Hilari Bell Page 0,3

almost sorry when she reached the willow-lined creek that flowed through this part of Springville, a tiny strip of brush and weeds in the midst of the urban world. If you got off the rubbercrete pathway, you could see the tracks of magpies, cottontail rabbits, coyotes, and even deer in the mud of the meandering streambed.

It was her father who had taken her off the path, who'd taught her to identify both tracks and scat. This scrap of undeveloped land wasn't the vast, open wilderness he'd loved, but it was their favorite city hike - as close to rightness as Kelsa could get.

She walked for twenty minutes, crossed the footbridge, and then cut off the pavement onto a dirt trail the local kids, and possibly coyotes and deer, had beaten upstream to the place where the queen cottonwood loomed over a shallow bend.

Leaves rustled a welcome. Kelsa dropped her pack and pressed her palms together as if in prayer, then swept them up into a wide circle that ended with her hands folded at her waist. She bowed, finishing the whimsical homage to trees her father had taught her.

"Greetings, your majesty."

Kelsa had always had a sense of the presence that lived in trees. Not aware, exactly, but old and patient and very alive. The bioplague that had wiped out so much of the South American rain forests hadn't even begun to come this far north. Its first traces were only now appearing in Mexico, and reporters on the holovid, and in the online papers and magazines, were certain it wouldn't spread outside the tropics. Of course, five years ago they'd been certain it would never spread out of the small corner of the Amazon where it had been released. Certain that even the trees there would fight it off eventually.

The scientists who published in scholarly journals, which her father had allowed her to read despite her mother's protests, were a lot more worried. Her father had gone to the Amazon to study the plague himself, as soon as the infected zone had been declared safe for humans. Sometimes Kelsa felt that his cancer, diagnosed over a year later, was an extension of the bioplague - as if he'd caught it from the trees.

But that was impossible, and her mind knew it. It was her heart she couldn't convince.

She set the point of the posthole digger against the earth and turned it. She'd never used this tool before, but it was easy to master. The dry clay near the roots was hard going, but about four inches down it grew damp and began to soften. Soon every few twists of the handle allowed her to lift out a scoop of earth, which she shook onto the growing pile.

Eventually, the handles brushed the ground. Kelsa emptied the last scoop, laid the digger aside, and reached into the hole. Cold dirt grated against her arm, but her stretching fingers couldn't find the bottom. It was deep enough. And so much better, truer, than the manicured grass and lifeless stone of the cemetery. This place, where foxes and raccoons still left their tracks, where the remains of his body might lend a bit of strength to the towering ancient whose leaves whispered in the moonlight - this was what her father would have wanted.

She hadn't been able to let him die the way he wanted to, but at least she could bury him that way.

Trying not to think, because if she started to think she'd start crying - again - Kelsa pulled out the plastic bag and ran the slider down the seal. The ashes thumped into the bottom of the hole. She felt odd about throwing the bag in the trash with traces of ash still clinging to it, so Kelsa went down to the stream and captured some water in the bag, which she then poured into the hole as well.

"Here lies Johnny Phillipini," she said defiantly, "who took back his great-to-the-fifth-great-grandfather's name when he was in college, even if he never did get around to changing it legally."

His wife had preferred Phillips, despite the awkwardness of Dad's colleagues and students asking for Professor Phillipini when they called the house.

He'd been a good teacher. A good husband. Such a good father.

There was nothing more to say and she was crying. Again. She should be used to it by now.

Kelsa dropped to her knees and pushed dirt back into the narrow hole, the muddy clay cold and soft on her bare palms. She