She brings down a field guide from a high shelf. On the very first page she shows him, there’s Trustyfriend, hovering with a mouse clamped in his left foot. In the next photo, there he is again: standing in a snag overlooking a snowy meadow.

Seymour’s heart catapults.

“Great grey owl,” she reads. “World’s largest species of owl by length. Also called sooty owl, bearded owl, spectral owl, Phantom of the North.” She smiles at him from inside her sandstorm of freckles. “Says here that their wingspans can exceed five feet. They can hear the heartbeats of voles under six feet of snowpack. Their big facial disk helps them by collecting sounds, like cupping your hands to your ears.”

She sets her palms beside her ears. Seymour takes off his muffs and does the same.

* * *

Every day that summer, as soon as Bunny leaves for the Aspen Leaf, Seymour pours Cheerios into a baggie, heads out the sliding door, passes the egg-shaped boulder, and slips under the wire.

He makes Frisbees from plates of bark, pole-vaults over puddles, rolls rocks down slopes, befriends a pileated woodpecker. There’s a living ponderosa in those woods as big as a school bus stood on end with an osprey nest at the very top, and an aspen grove whose leaves sound like rain on water. And every second or third day, Trustyfriend is there, on his branch in his skeleton tree, blinking out at his dominion like a benevolent god, listening as hard as any creature has ever listened.

Inside the pellets the owl coughs into the needles the boy discovers squirrel mandibles and mouse vertebrae and astonishing quantities of vole skulls. A section of plastic twine. Greenish pieces of eggshell. Once: the foot of a duck. On the workbench in Pawpaw’s shed he assembles chimerical skeletons: three-headed zombie voles, eight-legged spider-chipmunks.

Bunny finds ticks on his T-shirts, mud on the carpet, burrs in his hair; she fills the tub and says, “Someone is going to have me arrested,” and Seymour pours water from one Pepsi bottle into another and Bunny sings a Woody Guthrie song before falling asleep on the bathmat in her Pig N’ Pancake shirt and big black Reeboks.

* * *

Second grade. He walks from school to the library, settles his ear defenders around his neck, and sits at the little table beside Audiobooks. Owl puzzles, owl coloring books, owl games on the computer. When the freckled librarian, whose name is Marian, has a free minute, she reads to him, explaining things along the way.

Nonfiction 598.27:

Ideal habitats for great greys are forests bordered by open areas with high vantage points and large populations of voles.

Journal of Contemporary Ornithology:

Great greys are so elusive and easily spooked that we still know very little about them. We are learning, though, that they serve as threads in a meshwork of relationships between rodents, trees, grasses, and even fungal spores that is so intricate and multidimensional that researchers are only beginning to comprehend a fraction of it.

Nonfiction 598.95:

Only about one in fifteen great grey eggs hatch and make it to adulthood. Hatchlings get eaten by ravens, martens, black bears, and great horned owls; nestlings often starve. Because they require such extensive hunting grounds, great greys are particularly vulnerable to habitat loss: cattle trample meadows, decimating prey numbers; wildfires incinerate nesting areas; the owls eat rodents that have eaten poison, die in vehicle collisions, and fly into utility wires.

“Let’s see, this site estimates the current number of great greys in the U.S. at eleven thousand one hundred.” Marian retrieves her big desk calculator. “Say, three hundred million Americans, give or take. Hit the three, now eight zeroes; good, Seymour. Remember the division sign? One, one, one. There you go.”

27,027.

Both of them stare at the number, absorbing it. For every 27,027 Americans, one great grey owl. For every 27,027 Seymours, one Trustyfriend.

At the table beside Audiobooks he tries to draw it. An oval with two eyes in the center—that’s Trustyfriend. Now to make 27,027 dots in rings around it—the people. He makes it to somewhere around seven hundred before his hand is throbbing and his pencil is dull and it’s time to go.

* * *

Third grade. He gets a ninety-three percent on a decimals assignment. He accepts Slim Jims, saltines, and macaroni-and-cheese into his diet. Marian gives him one of her Diet Cokes. Bunny says, “You’re doing so well, Possum,” and the moisture in her eyes reflects the lights of the Magnavox.

* * *

Walking home one October afternoon, ear defenders on, Seymour turns right onto Arcady Lane. Where this morning there was nothing, now stands a double-posted four-by-five-foot oval sign. EDEN’S GATE, it reads,

COMING SOON

CUSTOM TOWNHOMES AND COTTAGES

PREMIER HOMESITES AVAILABLE

In the illustration, a ten-point buck drinks from a misty pool. Beyond the sign, the road home looks the same: a dusty strip of potholes flanked on both sides by huckleberry bushes, their leaves flaring autumn red.

A woodpecker dips across the road in a low parabola and disappears. A pine marten chatters somewhere. The tamaracks sway. He looks at the sign. Back at the road. Inside his chest rises a first black tendril of panic.

FOUR

THESSALY, LAND OF MAGIC

* * *

Cloud Cuckoo Land by Antonius Diogenes, Folio Δ

Tales of a comic hero who travels to a distant place seeking magic show up in virtually every folklore in virtually every culture. Though several folios of the manuscript that may have narrated Aethon’s journey to Thessaly are lost, it’s evident that by Folio Δ, he has arrived. Translation by Zeno Ninis.

… eager to find evidence of sorcery, I headed straight for the town square. Were the doves on that awning wizards in feathered disguise? Would centaurs stride between the market stalls and deliver speeches? I stopped three maids carrying baskets and asked where I might find a powerful witch who could turn me into a bird: a brave eagle, possibly, or a bright strong owl.

One said, “Well, Canidia here, she can extract sunbeams from melons, turn stones into boars, and pluck stars from the sky, but she can’t make you an owl.” The other two tittered.

She continued, “And, Meroë here, she can stop rivers from running, turn mountains to dust, and rip the gods from their thrones, but she can’t make you an eagle either,” and all three of their bodies split with laughter.

Undeterred, I went to the inn. After dark, Palaestra, the innkeeper’s maid, called me into the kitchen. She whispered that the wife of the innkeeper kept a bedchamber at the top of the house stocked with all sorts of equipment for the practice of magic, bird claws and fish hearts and even bits of corpse flesh. “At midnight,” she said, “if you crouch at the keyhole outside the door of that room, you might find what you seek…”

THE ARGOS

MISSION YEARS 55–58

Konstance

She’s four. Inside Compartment 17, an arm’s reach away, Mother walks on her Perambulator, the gold band of her Vizer sealed over her eyes.

“Mother.”

Konstance taps Mother’s knee. Tugs the fabric of her worksuit. No response.