The days after the first thaw slipped by like water through open fingers. Morning after morning the brook's voice grew bolder, its ice-cracked song rising from a whisper to a rushing hymn. The air smelled of wet cedar and the iron tang of old snow, and each night the stars seemed to burn closer to the earth, as if the sky itself were leaning down to listen.
Blue Fire had discovered the joy of mud. It began with a single pawprint near the creek - a wide smear of brown. By midday she was streaked nose to tail in earthy swirls, her feathered fur dulled by the forest's thawing skin. I tried to scold her and failed. Her delighted chirps, high and musical, cut through the gray air like the first birds of spring.
That evening, while she slept by the hearth, head tucked beneath her little forearm, I worked at patching a loose seam in the canvas roof. The old tent-cabin creaked gently in the night wind. My hands moved by memory, yet my thoughts wandered, pulled toward the hush beyond the pines. There was a restlessness in the forest that matched the slow stirring in my own chest.
Something was changing.
Two mornings later, the sky lowered into a curtain of soft snow. It was the kind that drifts rather than falls, each flake a slow spiral, as though winter, reluctant to leave, wished to lay one more quiet blessing upon the world. Blue Fire bounded through it with the quicksilver energy of youth, leaping for each flake as if it were prey. Her bright flame mark painted the white air with faint trails of cobalt light.
I followed the familiar trail west of the brook, a path I rarely took in the deep cold. The thicket there had been impassable for months, but now the branches bowed under only a thin crust of ice, and a narrow corridor of dark earth showed where deer had passed. We moved in silence, my boots sank into damp moss and the air hummed faintly with meltwater. Then Blue Fire stopped so suddenly that slush sprayed from her claws. Her head tilted, ears pricked, nostrils flaring toward the wind. A low rumble, almost a purr, vibrated in her chest.
"What is it, girl?" My voice came out softer than I intended. She answered with a single sharp chirr and bounded ahead, I followed, heart quickening. The deer path curved into a hollow I had never noticed, a shallow basin ringed by alder and half-hidden beneath a fallen pine. There, at the center, the snow had melted in a perfect circle no wider than my arms outstretched.
Blue Fire crouched at its edge, tail-tip flicking. Her hazy emerald eyes fixed on something pale in the dark soil. I stepped closer. At first it looked like a lump of frost-rimed stone, but when I brushed aside a curtain of damp leaves, my fingertips met the unmistakable curve of a shell, smooth and faintly warm despite the winter air. The egg was larger than the one I had found months ago, its surface a creamy colored shell with light spots all over. A faint tremor pulsed beneath my palm - steady, insistent, alive.
I drew in a breath that tasted of pine and wet earth… another land crocodile.
The memory of smoke and shattered nests flashed behind my eyes - the poachers' clearing, the crushed ferns, the broken shells like scattered stars. Had this one been carried off and dropped? Or hidden? Perhaps the parents had fled and never returned.
I stepped back and looked around closely for any tracks or disturbance in the ground to hint at any one who would return for the egg. Blue Fire gave a soft, questioning trill. She nosed the egg gently, then looked up at me, her gaze unblinking, almost solemn.
"I know," I whispered. The words were more a sigh than speech, "I feel it too." I eased the egg from the earth, surprised at its weight and the faint heat that pulsed through the shell. It fit against my chest like a heartbeat I had known all my life but forgotten until now. Snowflakes drifted through the hollow. Blue Fire leaned close, the blue flame on her neck flickering low, as if to warm the life I held.
"This one is farther along," I murmured, half to her, half to the quiet woods, "it won't be long."
The forest answered with a slow creak of ice loosening in the trees. Somewhere in the distance a woodpecker tapped, its rhythm like a second pulse beneath my own. We walked back home in near silence, the only sounds the squelch of melting snow and the occasional whistle of wind through bare branches. Blue Fire trotted close to my side, every so often brushing her flank against my leg, as though she too guarded the fragile weight I carried.
By the time we reached the tent-cabin, twilight had settled, a deep blue that blurred the edges of earth and sky. I banked the hearth fire high until the canvas walls glowed amber. Blue Fire curled beside me, her eyes never leaving the bundle in my arms.
I laid the cream egg in a man-made nest using blankets, some moss and leaves, just as I had once set hers. The scent of old pine and ash rose like a blessing. The egg gave a faint shiver, and a sound, so quiet I might have imagined it, whispered from within.
A single, tentative tap. Blue Fire leaned in, her breath a soft hiss of steam. The tiny flame at the nape of her neck burned suddenly bright, throwing long blue shadows across the wooden planks, something I had not witnessed before with her. I touched the shell with both palms and felt the faint answering beat.
"Welcome, little one," I said, my voice barely more than a breath, "the forest seems to keep its secrets well, but not from us." Outside, the snow had stopped, the moon, nearly full, rose through the black pines and poured silver light across the clearing. It caught on the egg's spotted surface and turned it, for a moment, into a piece of the night sky itself - something both ancient and new, fragile and eternal.
Blue Fire crooned low, a sound of promise and recognition. And in that quiet, I felt the world tilt again, toward change, toward something larger than the solitude I had once thought unbreakable.
A few months later…
The wind had lost the sharp bite of winter, but it still held a hidden strength, enough to tug at my hood as we left the shelter of the pines. Blue Fire padded ahead with her tail held high, the tip swishing like a banner. Moon stayed closer, nose down, tasting every patch of thawing soil with tiny huffs of steam.
I paused at the forest's edge. From here the world seemed to tilt outward, open grasslands rolling away in golden-brown waves, their edges silvered with the last snowmelt. Beyond, the river gleamed like a ribbon of polished glass, swollen with spring runoff. For months, the forest had been our world. Its damp hush, its stitched canopy of pine and cedar, the quiet certainty of its paths, stepping out felt like unmooring a boat.
Blue Fire glanced back, pupils narrowing against the brightness. A throaty chirp escaped him, impatient and encouraging all at once. Moon pressed his flank to my boot, an unspoken question in his dark eyes. "All right," I murmured, and stepped forward.
The ground here was soft with the first shoots of wild grass, slick with the memory of snow. Every step released the scent of earth waking from sleep, rich and sharp, like overturned moss. The croc' claws left delicate crescents behind us.
A meadowlark lifted into the sky, its call a ripple of liquid notes. Blue Fire twitched her head to follow its arc, eyes bright. Moon's ears, little bunny-like forward facing ones, quivered, but he stayed close to my leg. He was still new to the vastness; it pressed on him as much as it did on me. I knelt to run my hand through the new growth. The shoots bent and sprang back, the color of young copper. "This land belongs to someone else," I whispered, half to the young crocs, half to the breeze, "we are only visitors today."
The grass whispered back as the wind changed.
By midday the sun had shaken off the morning haze, laying bands of gold across the plain. We reached the river just as the sky deepened to a hard, clean blue. Its current carried shards of ice, spinning like tiny mirrors.
Blue Fire darted forward and planted both feet at the river's edge, tail stiff with excitement. She chirped once, then dipped her muzzle to drink. "Careful," I warned, though she barely flicked an ear. Moon hung back, his nose wrinkling at the scent of cold water and fish. The river's voice was a low roar, when I crouched, spray touched my face, icy and sweet. I cupped my hands and drank, letting the chill slide through me. The taste of distant mountains lingered on my tongue.
A shadow passed over us - an elk, broad-shouldered and ghost-pale in the sunlight, stepping with the grace of something carved from the wild itself. It lowered its head to drink upstream. Blue Fire stilled, her muscles tight while Moon stood frozen against my knee with wide eyes.
We held our breath. The elk's ears flicked, but it neither startled nor approached. It simply drank, water darkening the fur of its muzzle, then lifted its head and moved on, silent as drifting snow.
Moon exhaled with a soft trill. Blue Fire tilted her head, watching until the elk vanished among distant reeds. "Not everything here is a threat," I said, though I kept my own voice low, as if the land itself required gentleness. We followed the river east as afternoon burned toward evening. The land swelled into low hills streaked with last year's wildflowers, dried stems rattling in the wind. In a hollow where the earth dipped, we found a stand of alder trees, their bark silvered and smooth. I spread a blanket beneath them, Moon curled immediately against my side, small enough that his weight felt like a warm stone. Blue Fire lingered at the edge of the clearing, eyes on the horizon as the sky began its slow collapse into color, rose, then ember, then a bruised indigo.
My thoughts wandered to the forest behind us. For months it had been the boundary of everything I dared call home. But as the day stretched, I felt the quiet shift inside me, home could be more than a cluster of pines and a ring of snow. Moon gave a sleepy chirp, burrowing deeper. Blue Fire finally settled, tail curling around us like a drawn bow.
"Tomorrow," I whispered, "we'll see how far the grasslands reach."
The wind moved through the alders, leaves trembling with a sound like distant applause. Night gathered without hurry, and for the first time in many seasons, I did not feel the weight of the forest at my back, but the pull of a wider world ahead.