Writings

Megan Carrel

 Strength in Numbers

            There is nothing Annie would rather do on a hot July afternoon than climb into the shade of the forest and prowl among the rocks and trees. When she is alone, she remembers spending time here with Dad. 

Annie is going to the forest today, but she isn’t alone.

“Are we there yet?” Tyler asks a few footsteps behind her. Tyler is the little kid that Annie’s mom baby sits. He is only eight, but he thinks he can do everything twelve-year-old Annie can.

“We’re not there. Not even halfway,” Annie says. It was Mom’s idea to let Tyler tag along in the first place. Annie hadn’t wanted him slowing her down, asking her questions.

“Why don’t you take Tyler with you to the forest today?” Mom asked that afternoon. “I think he’d enjoy that.” Mom stacked the lunch dishes in the sink and spread a pile of bills on the table. “You could teach Tyler how to find a rat’s nest, like Dad taught you.”

Annie didn’t want to show Tyler the place Dad had shown her. It was like a secret box where she stored all of the memories she had of Dad before he died in a mining accident last year. But Mom was wearing the narrow glasses she only wore when her eyes were tired. They made her look old and wise, like the eyes of a barred owl Annie had seen in the forest, surrounded with white feathers. So Annie took Tyler with her when she left the house.

Little puffs of dust surround Annie’s boots as she kicks at pebbles on the road.

The live trap she carries bounces against her leg, the metal door jingling. Tyler carries a bag of oatmeal and peanut butter rolled into balls. When Annie looks over her shoulder, she sees him take a bite from one of the balls. “Stop eating the bait, Tyler.”

“It tastes like cookie dough,” Tyler says. Two pieces of oatmeal stick to his cheek, blending in with the freckles that cross his nose. “What’re we going to catch with that Havahart trap, anyway?”

“It’s not a Havahart. It’s a Tomahawk 102. And I don’t know what we’ll catch. Maybe a rat like Winkle.”

Winkle is an Allegheny woodrat that Annie and Dad caught in a trap two years ago. Annie remembers how Dad used to set traps in the forest and teach her about the animals he caught.

On the day they caught Winkle, Annie saw a ball of fur with a hairy gray tail huddled in the back of the trap. When Dad lifted it down from the rock ledge, Annie saw two bright eyes as round as raindrops. The rat’s Bullwinkle nose, drooping past the tip of his jaw, quivered as he sniffed the human smell of Annie and Dad. One ear, as round as a dime, stood straight on his head. The other was torn. Annie saw the blood all over his face and one of his front paws.

“Looks like this little fellow was in a fight,” Dad said. A smile wrinkled the corners of his mouth. “I’d hate to see the other guy.”

Annie knew that male woodrats travel through the forest to find females during breeding season. It is a dangerous trip because woodrats make tasty snacks for hungry snakes and foxes, crouched in the darkness of the forest. As if that isn’t bad enough, they

have to fight other male woodrats to win the love of lady rats. Evidently this rat lost.

Dad reached into the trap and cupped his hand around the rat. “This rat doesn’t have a chance in the forest,” he said. “We’ll take him home and care for him.”

The rat struggled, pressing his paws against Dad’s palm and trying to back up.

“Will he bite?” Annie asked.

“I don’t think so,” Dad said. “Woodrats are usually gentle. Here, you carry the trap.” He put the trap in Annie’s arms and his John Deere ball cap on her head.

Annie wore Dad’s hat all the way down the mountain.

Every day, Winkle sat on the scuffed knees of Annie’s jeans and ate sunflower seeds until there were just thin, white scars where the blood used to be. Annie and Dad carried Winkle back up to the rock in the forest and let him go. He scampered up the rock like a mountain climber and disappeared into a crevice. Annie missed the feeling of his warm, buff fur in her hands.

“If we find a rat like Winkle, can I keep him?” Tyler asks. Tyler likes to look at the picture of Winkle stuck on the refrigerator door.

“Wild animals should stay in the forest,” Annie says. “If you want a rat, go get one of those Norway rats at the pet store.” Norway rats have vicious, pointed faces. They aren’t round and calm like Allegheny woodrats.

Tyler starts to whine, but Annie doesn’t pay any attention. She is listening to the rumble of a truck coming down the road. She hears gravel crunching under the tires and a belt whining in the engine.

“Truck’s coming, Tyler. Move off the road.”

“It’s not fair,” Tyler says. “You had a rat. Why can’t I?”

Annie stands in the ditch, the slender stems of day lilies poking up her jeans. She

watches the coal truck swing around the curve and into view, black exhaust billowing from its stack. She sees the corners of the gray tarp that covers the load flapping in the wind. The unlit headlights look like the eyes of a blind monster on a mad chase. She imagines their reflection in the lenses of Tyler’s glasses.

 “Tyler, move!” Annie screams. She drops the trap and runs toward Tyler like a hawk swooping down on a mouse. They hit the gravel and roll into the ditch.

The brakes of the truck squeal. When it skids to a stop, the driver’s door pops open and a man jumps out. He has a big belly, as if all of his fat settles there while he bounces down the road. Annie hears his breath wheezing in his throat when he reaches them. “What the heck are you kids doing in the middle of the road?”

Tyler wiggles underneath her. Annie stands up and brushes the gravel from the knees of her jeans. “We’re just taking a walk,” she says. Diesel fumes still hover over the road.

“You kids need to stay off the road,” the man says. “Do you want to get hurt?”

Annie doesn’t like the way the man talks, loud and bossy.  “If you don’t want us to get hurt, you shouldn’t drive so fast.”

The man’s black eyebrows dip down toward his nose. “Look here, kid, how I drive is none of your business.”

“It is if it kills one of my friends,” Annie says.

Annie remembers when Billy Foster was killed on the road earlier this year. He was driving home from his job at the Dollar Store when a coal truck came around a curve

and ran into his car.

            “What the heck are you talking about?” the man asks.

Annie went to Billy’s funeral with her mom. His coffin was closed, but a big picture of him sat on top. In the picture, Billy’s 16-year-old face was grinning. His blue eyes were crinkled in the corners just like they always were when Annie went into the Dollar Store to buy Gummy Bears.

Mom cried when she saw the picture. “How many lives will it take?” Annie heard her say, and Annie knew she was thinking about Dad.

Billy’s mom was crying, too. “Them coal people don’t even care,” she said. “They think we’re throwaway people.” 

That’s when Annie learned how dangerous a coal truck can be.

It isn’t this man’s fault that Billy died, Annie tells herself, but if he keeps driving fast he might kill someone else. Like Tyler. Annie looks at his angry eyes. “I’m talking about how you fill your trucks too full,” she says. “You fill them so full of coal that they tear up the roads. Sometimes they run into people and kill them.”

Annie knows about coal companies filling their trucks too full. Each truck is only supposed to carry sixty tons of coal, but many of the trucks carry twice that much.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about,” the man says. A vein in his neck begins to pulsate. “Now I’m telling you kids for the last time. Stay off the road. You got that?” He turns around and walks toward his truck.

Annie hears the door slam and the engine rumble.

Tyler is still sitting in the ditch, his glasses slipping down to the end of his nose. “My dad drives a coal truck,” he says.

“I know.” Annie grabs Tyler’s hands and pulls him to his feet.

“Does that make him a bad guy?”

Annie doesn’t know. “Your dad isn’t the one who decides to put too much coal in the truck,” she says. “He just does what the company tells him too.”

Annie finds the trap in a patch of day lilies. The bag of bait was hit by the truck. The plastic is torn and the balls are smashed.

“Are they ruined?” Tyler asks.

“No, we’ll roll them into balls again.” Annie ducks under the low branch of a maple sapling and steps into the forest. “We’re climbing straight to the top. Stick close.” Annie bets the only time Tyler has ever been this close to nature is when he watches the Discovery Channel.

The forest stretches before them straight up the mountainside. Underneath the leaf litter, the ground is soggy. Water seeps around Annie’s boots and makes her slip. She grabs the thin trunks of trees as she climbs.

“Watch out for hairy vines with shiny leaves,” she tells Tyler. “They’re poison ivy. They’ll give you an itchy red rash.”

“Like this?” Tyler holds up a shiny leaf.

“Tyler! Don’t touch it!” Annie can’t believe what she’s seeing. “That’s how you get the rash!”

Tyler drops the leaf.

The log of a fallen walnut tree blocks the path. Annie scrambles over it, the trap clattering against the wood. Pink fungus grows from the rotten wood like coral in the ocean.

“Can I eat this?” Tyler asks.

Annie turns around and sees a mushroom on the ground. It is white and soft, like a marshmallow. “Don’t you dare,” Annie says. “It’s called the Angel of Death.”

Tyler stomps on the mushroom, squishing it into white mush under his boot.

Annie keeps climbing. A ravine off to her right is spanned by a fallen maple, forming a natural bridge for animals. Higher up, the ravine is an ephemeral stream, filled with water when it rains. Christmas ferns dot the ground. Annie can see the tiny boot shape on the bottom of each leaf. The ground is concave, like a bowl full of trees.

Wild hydrangeas are in bloom, umbrella flowers made up of tiny white blossoms. Annie remembers how Mom likes hydrangeas. She decides to pick some on the way back down the mountain. Mom needs something to cheer her up.

A few days ago, a truck pulled into Annie’s yard. It was green with white letters on the door that said “MountainTop Mining Co.” A man told them that the mining company was going to mine the hills near their house, not to be alarmed by the sounds of equipment and explosions.

Annie felt fear grip her stomach like an owl’s talons gripping a mouse. “The mining company can’t do that,” Annie said when he left. “They don’t own the mountain.”

Annie knows that a mining company can’t mine within three hundred feet of a house. She also knows that a mining company can’t mine land without the owner’s permission.

Annie remembers when Mom told her about a law called the broad form deed. It allowed coal companies to mine land without the owner’s permission. The coal company just had to own the mineral rights, the right to the coal underground. Groups of mountain people worked together to fight the coal companies. When Annie was little, Mom told her the story of Bessie Smith and the group of women who tried to stop the mining in 1972 by spending a whole day at a mine. Annie has seen the picture of Bessie Smith standing in front of a coal truck, her back to the camera, her arms outspread. Because of people like Bessie Smith, the law changed in 1989. Now coal companies can’t mine land unless the owner says it’s okay.

 “The company’s buying the mountain,” Mom said. “Some of our neighbors have already agreed to sell. The Millers, the Joneses…”

Annie imagined the mountain where she spent so much time with Dad turned into a mining site, rocks and dirt pushed into the streams, the hillside sliced like a birthday cake. It felt like someone has busted her memory box and stomped on her memories.

Mom sighed. “Now we’ll have to worry about our drinking water on top of everything else.”

Annie knew that “everything else” meant money problems. Even though Mom babysat Tyler every day and they got a little bit of money from the mining company since Dad died, Mom had to buy off-brands at the supermarket and Annie’s school clothes came from Salvation Army.

.Annie remembered the last time a coal company truck had been in their yard. It was the day Dad died. A man from the mine site came to tell them that a piece of equipment broke and fell on Dad, crushing him to death.

Dad’s coffin was closed too, like Billy’s, and Annie never got the chance to say goodbye.

Suddenly Tyler screams. Annie’s heart hops into her throat like a frightened

rabbit. She slides in the wet leaves as she runs down to him. “What’s wrong?”

“A snake!” Tyler says. “I almost stepped on it!”

Annie wants to laugh until she sees the snake. The brown diamonds on its skinny body blend in with the forest floor, but the pointed head is lifted, watching them. Annie grabs Tyler’s shirt. “Move back, Tyler. It’s a copperhead.” 

Annie knows that most snakes are scared of people. They won’t even bite unless a person threatens them. But Annie also knows what would happen if Tyler got bitten by a copperhead. He would get very sick. He might even die.

 “See how its pupils are narrow?” Annie asks. “That’s how you know it’s poisonous. In Kentucky, harmless snakes have round pupils.”

The copperhead slithers over a rock, moving away. Tyler doesn’t look scared anymore. “Its head is copper. Is that why it’s called a copperhead?”

Annie doesn’t think that question is worth answering. She keeps hiking.

The higher Annie climbs, the ground becomes convex. Now it is like a bowl turned upside-down. The dirt is dry like powder. Annie touches the whitish grooves in the bark of oak trees.

A patch of loosestrife grows on the hillside, its yellow flowers hanging upside down from the green stems. Annie picks a flower and sticks it in her ponytail.

A box turtle sits on a rock, its brown and yellow shell blending in with the leaves of a blackberry bramble. It turns its head to watch her pass. Annie knows it is a female because its eyes are brown. Males have red eyes.

When Annie’s boot dislodges a rock, she turns around to watch it roll down the hill. A ways down the hill, she sees Tyler fanning himself with a leaf he tore from a big leaf magnolia tree. He walks through the forest like a blue heron walks through water, lifting his feet as high as his knees. Annie shakes her head.

Briars snag her clothes. When Annie jerks away, her shirt tears. A Northern parula warbles the sound in a tree above her. “R-i-i-i-p.”

Sweat trickles down Annie’s back. Her heartbeat pounds in her ears, steady and fast like the bill of a pileated woodpecker tapping a tree. She grabs the branch of a yellow poplar sapling and notices the leaves that look like the three fingered hands of monsters. She thinks to tell Tyler that the yellow poplar is Kentucky’s state tree, but he’s too far behind.

The capstone is just ahead. Annie can see it towering above her with spindly maples and black gums growing from its crevices. Pushing aside the shiny, tear-drop mountain laurel leaves, she climbs on one of the rocks. She sits down cross-legged on the top, looking back down the mountain. Moss as soft as Christmas corduroy cushions her seat.

Tyler isn’t in sight. “Yoo-hoo, Tyler!” she yells.

No answer except from an ovenbird, angry that she has invaded its territory. “Tyler! Tyler!” it seems to shriek overhead.

“Can you hear me?” Annie calls. “If you can hear my voice, you’re halfway there!”

A stick cracks below. He’s more than halfway, Annie knows, but she wants to make it hard on him. Maybe he’ll give up and go home.

The warm breeze dries Annie’s damp skin, leaving her sticky with salt. Wasps buzz around her head like planes circling a landing strip. Mosquitoes hum in her ears. If Tyler hadn’t come, she would sit here quietly and watch the wildlife creep around her. Ringneck snakes would slither from crevices and sun themselves on the tops of rocks. Scarlet tanagers would flitter through the leaves with a flash of red. Squirrels would chatter from the treetops, and chipmunks would scurry behind logs. Maybe a bobcat would slink past, its footsteps muffled by the pads on its paws.

But Tyler is here now, and Annie is sure he’ll scare away all the animals. He crawls up behind her on the rock. “Look what I’ve got!”

Between his hands is a red-spotted newt. It looks like a tiny salamander about four inches long. “It likes me, see? It doesn’t bite or anything!”

The newt wiggles its legs and blinks at Annie. “You’d better not touch your eyes or put your hands in your mouth,” Annie says. “Newts are toxic. See how bright he is? That’s how he tells you he isn’t safe.”

Tyler sets the newt down and rubs his hands on his shirt. The newt shuffles onto a patch of green moss, looking like the bright orange flower of butterfly milkweed in the middle of a patch of bluegrass.

Tyler sits down beside her and picks at the crunchy lichen that plasters the rough spots on the rock like dry, green play dough.

Annie listens to her heart beat slow. “Let’s set the trap.”

The boulders that form the capstone are stacked into piles. Where they lean against each other, they form cracks and crevices. Annie climbs from one to another, the trap swinging from her hand. Tyler scrambles behind.

Annie kneels down in front of a deep crevice that stretches along the face of a rock. She remembers finding a rat’s nest here with Dad. He showed her a piece of foil that the rat had dragged home to its nest made of sticks. “Woodrats are kind of like pack rats,” Dad said. “They like to find stuff and carry it home with them. Like your mother when she goes shopping.” Annie and Dad laughed, their voices bouncing back at them from the rocks and making the happiness double.

The nest is still there, but the grass around it is faded brown. Some chewed hickory nuts and old droppings surround the nest. An empty shotgun shell is tucked behind.

“That’s the rat’s treasure. They like shiny stuff.” Annie remembers finding shiny bottle caps and paper clips in the box where Winkle slept.

Tyler reaches into the crevice and touches the shotgun shell with one finger.

 Annie looks around the crevice, trying to find a place to set the trap. Dad always said that if there weren’t any green leaves or fresh droppings in a nest, a rat didn’t live there anymore. Annie doesn’t think it will hurt to set the trap anyway. She rolls the bait into balls and puts one in the back of the trap. “Stick your hand in there and see what happens,” Annie tells Tyler.

“No way,” Tyler says. “The door will shut.”

So he isn’t totally dumb after all. Annie climbs off the rock and sprinkles the rest of the bait around a tree. She hopes the raccoons will go to the decoy and leave her trap alone.

“We’ll check the trap in the morning,” Annie says. “Let’s go.”

An explosion over the ridge shakes the mountaintop. Leaves quiver and pebbles clatter loose from the capstones. Annie grabs the trunk of a beech tree. Tyler stumbles, and she feels his hands on her back.

“What was that?” Tyler’s voice sounds quiet. Annie isn’t sure if he’s scared or if the explosion deafened her. She turns around and sees the white skin under his freckles. He’s scared.

“Mining,” Annie says, and her voice is quiet, too. “Let’s go see.”

Her knees shake a little as she takes a step toward the ridge, as if the mountain is made of jelly. Tyler keeps one hand on the back of her shirt.

The ridgeline is long and narrow, like the backbone of an old horse. When they start down the other side, the forest is lighter. Sunlight pours through gaps in the trees. In a few feet, the forest ends. Annie and Tyler peek out from behind the leaves of the last laurel.

A mine site stretches below them. From where they stand, the mountain is stripped of its trees and topsoil, as if a barber has given it a too-close shave. The next hillside over is cut half away and the valley is filled, leveling the land. In the smooth stone face of the remaining half, Annie can see the coal vein. It cuts through the sliced

mountain like a black crayon mark on a piece of gray paper.

Mustard yellow pieces of earth moving equipment crawl along the rock ledges. Clouds of dust in the hazy air follow the trail of coal trucks on the bumpy roads. Annie can hear the rumble of their motors and the distant crash of rocks falling into a truck bed. A backup signal beeps monotonously. Annie can taste the dust in the air, like grit between her teeth.

 “Wow!” Tyler says.

Annie looks down and sees that his eyes are as big and round as his glasses.

“This is awesome!” Tyler steps past the laurel down the stubbly hill. “Just like the

Wild West!”

Tyler’s dad can afford to take him vacation every year. Annie has never been out West, but she has seen pictures. She runs to catch up with Tyler. “That’s just the problem!” she says. “This isn’t the Wild West. It’s Eastern Kentucky. There’s supposed to be mountains here and trees and birds and woodrats like Winkle.” Suddenly Annie knows why the rat nest back in the rock crevice is empty. The mining has scared the woodrats away. Woodrats need mountaintops covered with trees and rocks to live in. Mining chops off mountaintops and throws the rocks into the valley. When the male woodrats go looking for lady rats, they have nowhere to go.

Tyler stops and looks back at her from the edge of a dusty road. “Where’d the mountain go?”

Annie looks at the desert in front of her. “The coal company tore it up.”

“They can’t just tear up a mountain,” Tyler says.

            “Oh yes they can.” Annie knows that years ago miners would dig holes under mountains with handpicks and carry the coal out in carts. They didn’t tear up mountaintops. But mining coal by hand took forever, so someone figured out how to do it faster. “First, they cut down all the trees. Then they use bulldozers to move all the rocks. They put the rocks in trucks and dump them in the valley. Then they blow up the mountain so they can take the coal. You remember that explosion we heard?”

            Tyler nods. “But don’t the trees and animals come back when they’re done?”

            “It’s never the same again,” Annie says. “If you want to see the Wild West, Tyler, you should go to Nevada.”

A pickup truck creeps up the hill. Underneath the dust it is forest green, the color of the trees that are gone, and white letters say “Mountaintop Mining Co.” on the driver’s door. The truck rolls to a stop, and a man steps out. He wears jeans and a plaid shirt with sleeves rolled up to his elbows. A white hard hat sits on top of his head. “Hey! What are you kids doing up here?” he asks.

Annie thinks the hard hat makes him look like a soldier going to war. “We were just in the forest,” she says. “We came to see where all the noise was coming from.”

“This is a mine site,” the man says, and Annie thinks, duh! “We’re blasting up here and no civilians are supposed to be around. It’s dangerous. You kids better go home.”

“What’s a civilian?” Tyler asks. He stands right next to Annie.

“Civilians are ordinary people, like us,” Annie says. She can feel her heart beat faster, and it isn’t from walking downhill. “They don’t want ordinary people around to watch them murder a mountain.”

 “Murder a mountain?” the man says. Now his eyes are big like Tyler’s.  “Wait a minute, now, nobody’s murdering anything. We’re just mining coal.”

“Oh, yeah?” Annie asks. “What about the hickory trees that used to grow here and the fox that used to live here and the fish that used to swim in the stream?”

The man looks puzzled. “What about them? They’ll come back when we’re done mining. We’ll plant new grass and new trees. Animals will live here again.”

Annie remembers beech trees in the forest so big around that when she hugs them, her arms don’t reach. She remembers watersheds that filter downhill through mossy stones and dead leaves until they reach the rock bed of the creek. She remembers the thick layer of dirt and moss and leaves on the forest floor where worms slither and insects crawl and roots thrive.

“You can’t just rebuild a mountain,” she says.

“We don’t need a mountain,” the man says. “We need coal.”

“Maybe you don’t need a mountain,” Tyler says. He has been so quiet that Annie has almost forgotten he is here. “But what about the animals? Today Annie and me saw a snake and a newt and a turtle. What will they do with no place to live?”

Annie stands a little straighter. She feels proud that Tyler is sticking up for her and the mountain.

The man looks at the empty land behind him. When he turns back around, he sighs. “Look, kids, I feel bad about the animals, I really do. But I can’t do anything about it. If you want to help the animals, talk to the Humane Society. Now you’d better get home because it’s dangerous for you to be here.”

The man climbs back in his truck and Annie and Tyler climb back into the forest. The shiny leaves of the mountain laurel hide them from view.

A red-eyed vireo calls to them from the edge of the forest. “How are you?” Annie doesn’t say anything, so the vireo answers its own question. “I’m fine!”

Annie doesn’t feel fine. She thinks about the mountain getting torn up where she walked with Dad, and she wonders about all the creatures that live there: the insects that crawl under hickory bark, the masked raccoon that fishes in the moonlight, the gray fox that slips through a grove of short ironwood trees like a ghost, the scarlet tanager that lives on the ridge top, the woodrats that carry shiny treasures to their nests in rock crevices. Annie knows dinner is waiting for her at home, but she wonders what all the other animals will eat when the mountain is turned inside out by the mining company. She knows the trap on the rock ledge will still be empty tomorrow.

Annie watches the bulldozers creeping along the next hillside like giant yellow snails. Annie wonders what would happen if she ran across the mine site and stood in front of the bulldozer like Bessie Smith. The bulldozer would probably stop in its snail’s pace, but then the miners would move Annie out of the way, and the bulldozer would keep moving. Nothing would really change.

Annie remembers earlier in the afternoon when she stood in the ditch and told the coal truck driver that overloaded coal trucks killed people. He didn’t believe her. He told her to get out of his way. Nothing changed.

Annie thinks back to Bessie Smith’s group of women. They wanted the mining to stop so their water wouldn’t be polluted from mountaintops being dumped into streams, so the foundations of their houses wouldn’t crack from the mining explosions, so their land with its trees and wildlife would be left alone. They worked as a group. They all wanted the same thing.

Annie looks back across the mine site at the bulldozer. From this far away it looks like it has barely moved. Now she wonders what would happen if Tyler stood with her in front of the bulldozer, and Mom and Tyler’s dad and the Millers and the Joneses and the whole community. She wishes Dad was still alive to be there, too.

Annie remembers the look on the man’s face when Tyler stood beside her and told him that mountains were important to animals. It made a difference to have Tyler with her. It would make even more of a difference if the whole community stood with her.

Annie looks down at the mine again and sees the dust stirred up by the trucks. She thinks of Tyler’s dad and the good money he makes driving overloaded coal trucks up and down the narrow roads. Some people may be hard to convince that they need to fight the coal company.

She thinks of Mom, with her money from the mining company instead of a husband, and Billie’s mom who cried at his funeral. Other people might be glad to stand up against mining. Annie thinks she can start with her friends and then her friends’ parents. She knows that not everyone will agree with her, but some will. What matters is that she won’t be alone. Other people will be working with her. They can ask people not to sell their land to coal companies and not to let them mine. They can try to stop mining that turns mountains inside out.

There was a law that stopped the broad form deed in 1989. Why can’t there be a new law that bans strip-mining altogether?

Sunlight dapples the ground through the laurel leaves. A wood thrush whistles like a flute.

Annie squats down on the edge of the mine site and uses her finger to trace in the dust on the ground. She traces a droopy nose, two round eyes and one round ear.

“What are you doing?” Tyler squats beside her.

Annie traces a fat body and a long hairy tail.

“It’s Winkle!” Tyler says.

“It’s a picture for a poster I’m going to make,” Annie says. “I want to tell everyone about the mountains that are going to die, and all the trees and animals that will die, too.”

Tyler pushes his glasses up on his nose and bends over the picture. “It needs whiskers.”

Annie slides her finger through the dust to make whiskers.

“Can I help you?” Tyler asks. “Can I help you tell people about how mining hurts mountains?”

 Earlier today Annie didn’t want Tyler around. Now she’s glad he’s here.

“Okay,” Annie says.