The Mite

Maud Poole

“Don’t let her out of your sight! Even for a minute,” Mama, held me by the shoulders, looked straight into my eyes. “Watch her! Guard her!” Mama ordered about my five-year old sister. The little thing often did follow me but with a superior air of removal. I hadn’t paid much attention to her whereabouts. Now the leash-job was to be my summer’s mission.

“Don’t lose her! I’m depending on you,” Mama continued, “You know how she can suddenly disappear.”

Now stuck with this child, like a shadow on a sunny day, I figured I’d make the best of the challenge. My parents would see that I was worthy of more responsibility, rather than just the girlie job of baby-sitting a little kid. After all, I was nine. I wanted to be handed a spirit level or a crowbar, tools for muscle-building work.

I’m not sure Mama thought much more about her two daughters after that. She was duty-focused and over-worked. Mama was a list maker, the backs of envelopes her main tablets. Tasks crossed off by stubby pencil lines as they were finished. She was also only months from delivering a November baby who would be my father’s only son. This was our first summer in a rundown farmhouse on a mountain in New Hampshire.

Little sister, like the pet she seemed, dogged my heels. She obeyed my orders after a fashion, assuming the role of semi-slave. She did some of what she was told, but with subtle disdain. Asked to wash her hands or stop hopping, she tilted her head to the side, blinked a few times, turned and crawled under the nearest piece of furniture or unpruned juniper. Unsettled by the scale of activity of vast renovation of our house, her nose dripped greenish streams, but she never cried.

“Bone-frail,” visitors said, “Poor mite,” right in front of her, as though she were not only delicate, but deaf. Since her blond hair was sparse, Daddy called her Baldy Sours, a pet name to which she never responded. I favored one-syllable names and tried out several related to her diminutive size: Sprig, Ant, Wren, Nut, and then Mite. She responded to Mite—she’d heard herself called that—not that she said, “Yes,” but she looked up, so the name stuck. In fact, I never heard this child say either “yes” or “no.” Most acknowledgment was in the form of body language of her own invention, a little hip sway or fanny wiggle.

Yet Mite heard everything, her hearing hyper-acute, most of which, at least when it came from humans, she chose to ignore. When someone spoke to her, she might turn in the opposite direction, her eyes squeezed tight, her little mouth fisted. She appeared preoccupied, even tranced. Because she was ethereal looking, a “fairy child,” it was said, adults put up with her walk-away rude insurrections. Knock-kneed but nimble, with almost freakishly small feet and hands, she appeared to step on air. She would hold her hands as far out in front of her as she could reach or above her head, flutter her fingers like wings of a butterfly or hummingbird in some sign-communication with the unseen. An invisible friend, an alien from another planet, an animal spirit, the heartbeat of an oak? If she wished to be left alone, she lifted her right hand in a traffic-cop-at-school-crossing mode, her face twisted into a mini-mask of fierce emotion, veins firing red.

It often took gymnastics to catch her attention. Then when she turned, her eyes shimmered watery-blue, like that glacial lake at the foot of the mountain. Mite’s eyes did not invite. Yet from an outsider’s vantage point one wondered at secrets in their recesses.

I was the rare human who could alter her focus. The key? Mite loved words. To catch her attention, I learned to offer strange ones, like cryptozoology, blatherskite, famulus, Brobdingnagian, from my Strange Word collection jotted in the back of my notebook. She’d listen, extend her cupped hands as though the meaning of the word was a physical object in a cabinet of curiosities. I’d tell her, “The search for and study of animals whose existence can’t be proven,” or “a chatterbox who makes no sense.” She’d listen, hands still open in front, then snap them closed as though she had caught a lightening bug, spin and walk away.

Mite never complained, nor did she hunger. We practically had to force feed her at family meals. Mostly, she stared straight at the mountains through the newly installed picture window or looked into the bowl of a spoon, holding it mirror-like before one eye. Once when a rainbow arched over the valley, she pointed, held her arm out straight for long minutes, a physical feat of determination.

When Daddy read the Bible verse-by-verse during our after-dinner devotional hour, she’d rise-up abruptly on her chair, stand in silent salutation of word or name, like Armageddon, Naphtali, or Gabbatha. She’d stroke the wooden butter tub, saying, “firkin,” climb on my mother’s lap, stroke Mama’s face and say, “Materfamilias,” enunciating each syllable slowly, as though analyzing etymology. Did she have some rare gift of past divination, where she could hear the word in general usage in another linguistic era? While I was not yet an authority on the lives of souls, I was aware of the expression, especially as it might apply to Mite, of old soul.

Rather than the employment of sentences, Mite preferred to express herself by use of a single word, mostly musical nouns, not always accurate to the object before her. “Sassafras,” she’d say pointing at the wood-burning stove, inventing connection between two seemingly disparate objects, yet finding something in common between them. Did not a wood-stove burn wood? Then she’d put her hand on her heart checking, counting? Accelerated beats, her excitement pulsing. I think she loved words so much, she feared wasting them. She rarely posed a question, but on occasion we would hear something scooped from her memory like: “Is there a child so small she has no place in your prayer?”

One night when we sat, she cross-legged on the floor rocking a birch log like a baby, I on a rustic bench, looking into the fire, she turned to me, quoted, “All the firstborn of my children I redeem.”

Sometimes, calmed with an inner peace, she pointed toward something only she knew was there. You could look in the direction of her finger and have no concept of what she was seeing. She would walk up to a tree, stroke its bark, press her ears to the trunk and close her eyes as though listening to a voice from within. She squished her forehead, chin, cheeks into the bark then turned, bark-marks denting her delicate features, and take a pose miming the tree’s gesture as though she were its twin.

Early in that summer of 1947 our family of four moved to the wreck of a farmhouse high up Bridgewater Mountain, one of New Hampshire’s lesser hills, smack in the middle of the state’s more glorious ranges. Our abandoned Little Red House, once a sugaring-off shack, was located in a pocket three miles of the winding dirt road closer to Newfound Lake, where summer residents swam on languid afternoons. Renovated on a financial shoestring and hard labor, Little Red had been our family’s vacation refuge since I was an infant. Little Red could have fit into the living room of the new old farmhouse.

Where Little Red snuggled into the mostly sugar maple forest, Hillwinds, the 1860’s farmhouse inherited name, perched where three pastures met and spread like a pigeon’s foot, facing the White Mountains. These fields were grown over with thistle, sedge, milkweed; the outlining rock-boundary walls that had contained cows had long since fallen and a tractor barn roof had collapsed into itself like an old man too tired to rise in the morning. The property included 350 almost impenetrable acres, grown dense with native hardwoods, ash, beech, cherry, chestnut, oak, sycamore, American elm, and shad. But the site was magical. No human had occupied the Sleeping Beauty house for 30 years, nor had any inhabitant maintained, or perhaps, even entered, the second growth forest that wrapped the steep, enclosing hills.

I don’t remember what made my parents drive up to the radiantly spooky, dead-end location that day. But Mama recalled the moment by saying, “We were inspired.” Which meant they believed God personally directed them on that fate-filled visit. Not having a realtor nor any means of access to the house’s interior, the young couple, two little girls in tow, skirted it peeking through dirt-stained windows (most were boarded up) where they could. Leaving his “three girls” sitting on a granite doorstep, Daddy walked to the forest edge, peered into its unwelcoming mass, intoned a litany of Latin names of trees, particularly the oaks, as though their very nomenclature were from a Holy Writ, or that they were minor gods themselves with whom he wished to establish some spiritual communication. He addressed, “Quercus alba, Quercus macrocarpa, Quercus coccinea, Quercus rubra.”

He made it clear that we were in the presence of majesty. We knelt in a small circle to pray for God’s approval. When we stood up, Daddy said, “We are going to buy this house today. Let’s move on it. Or someone else will.”

It was a nippy, late-April Saturday afternoon. We drove straight to Concord where Daddy convinced a banker to return to his office to do the paperwork. We sat in front of the bank until the man appeared, unlocked the door. We followed him into the dark bank. Switch flicked, the whole interior of the bank lit stage-set bright. The banker, big as a lumberjack, swept his arms out in welcome. Daddy was a known figure, a minister with a radio personality; the thick-necked, broad-girthed man seemed pleased to do him service, even on a Saturday night. (As it happened, Daddy’s prescience accurate, a friend of his offered a larger sum to the owners on the following Monday morning but Daddy’s deal held.) We owned Hillwinds and we would become caretakers, Daddy’s term, of a rundown house and a magnificent forest. 

Throughout that first summer of our custodianship (for Daddy instructed us not use the word ownership about land) bare-chested men climbed to the roof of the house, stripped it to the rafters, hammered new forest-green shingles in place. Women, wives of carpenters and roofers, spread avenues of bluebird, spiral-swept wallpaper, stirred mustard-hued floor paint, crawled from room to room with brushes in their hands, prepared the next meal on an Atlantic Princess wood stove in the big kitchen. A crew of boys from our church’s Collegiate Club, brandishing shiny, new hatchets and crosscut saws about which they knew little, cut the scruffy field trees that obscured the view of our future East Pasture. By late-July Mt. Washington became visible from the roof, setting off war whoops from the roofers, whom my mother had Biblically dubbed Boys Above.

The house was summer’s star. Its progress documented from the torn off roof, swapped rafters, shored up chimney, replaced broken window glass. In the album Mama made over those months I remain absent. No one took pictures of me or the tiny pale sister at my side. If some busy woman noticed me, I was posted to degrading tasks: hang laundry, washed by hand, as we had no electricity until the third summer—men’s work shirts and socks—tote potato peelings and other mush-grey vegetarian hash to the mulch pile behind the crumbled woodshed, a cellar hole of some long gone building; empty Grannymama’s chamber pot, carry gallons of water pumped from the well to thirsty men.

While I’d never asked for a sibling—I liked my five years as an only child—I respected Mite’s techniques—her instincts of when to play fragile, remote, untouchable and when to exert spine-straight grit a stance equally inviolable. I accepted the responsibility of this sister partly out of guilt. (The story went that when they brought Mite home from the hospital to her bassinet, I put a pillow over her face, for she, too, was a girl. Perhaps it was to spare her a life of indignity. The truth was I didn’t want her.)

But stuck with her, I’d make the best it. Maybe, I could broach the subject of being paid for these labors once I proved myself invaluable. I’d seen a pair of beaded moccasins in the window of the General Store in Plymouth, now at the top of my Covet List. They would make me stealth-silent in the forest, I was convinced.

I tired of hovering around the women, half hearing their murmuring conversations about their spiritual lives, infant care, ambitions to be artists or anthropologists (this from the carpenter’s wife) or wandering out to check on male action. Watching Mite was consuming, but one-dimensional. I craved adventure. I was intrigued by the uncharted, somewhat menacing, forest.

“I’m not Daddy’s daughter for nothing!” I turned to Mite and said, “Let’s build our own cabin at the top of this mountain. Up there, through those oaks and pines. It will be a quiet place. No men. No boys. No noise.”

On the early August self-appointed morning of our home-hunt expedition, I woke in jittery anticipation, eager to get started, but had to force myself through the early morning routines of the household and work crew. By 9:15 we were free. We wore long pants, elastics at the ankles to keep any insects from crawling up our legs, high thick socks, sneakers, brimmed hats. I tied our sweaters around our waists. I had washed our hair in the lake the day before, plaited mine, and smoothed Mite’s crown of fuzz. Like a kitten, she seemed soothed by having her head stroked, especially behind her tiny, doll-like ears. I believed I’d thought of everything. Not wanting to sound an alarm, I left a note pinned to my pillow:

I’m marrying Mite.
We’ve gone to build a cabin of our own.
We packed provisions. 
We’ll come back in September for school.
xxoo,
Your Two Girls 

The sun was high and warm. No paths to welcome us, we entered the forest where a small opening invited. At first, we could walk upright, but quickly hunched like dwarves, dead pine branches poking into our passage. The world darkened, air thickened with scents of growth and decay. Light patches flickered down through the dense canopy highlighting specific trees, illuminating portions of trunks, crowns of understory dogwood, serviceberry, sumac, as if at the opening scene of a Brother’s Grimm play. I thought of Hansel and Gretel; laughed at how ill-prepared that twosome was at their story’s start.

We headed in my targeted direction, ducking, dodging, sometimes crawling distances beneath shrubby walls of undergrowth and dead branches. It was not what I expected; this was slow going. Then we’d come upon a small clearing, where a grassy patch, a granite outcropping, a young spruce would glow in sudden warmth and we would walk upright, a relief to our backs and morale. Every few minutes I jotted compass bearings in my notebook. Compass, Swiss Army Knife and flashlight swung from gimp thongs around my neck. Our supplies, harnessed to my back in my green school bag, included my birthday hammer, pruning saw in a leather (stolen) scabbard, roof nails, iodine, Band-Aids, water flask, foodstuffs. I was good with tools, not a bad storyteller, either, but I’d brought along Kipling’s Jungle Book—I considered myself New Hampshire’s Mowgli—and the Farmer’s Almanac to keep us informed about the month’s weather.

We were forced to take our time climbing. I was patient. The turtle and the hare: Mite turtled her way up that steep incline at a slow, unsteady pace. She stopped to look. She touched. She had a lingering finger. Once on a wood fern leaf, a blade of carex, it remained, as though by maintaining connection some vibration between child and plant occurred. It would have been impossible to press Mite forward. She did everything as though observing herself conducting an act on her mental stage. Pulling up her pants after peeing was a ritual, like one of those slow-motion flower films, where buds unfurl in slinky dance.

I made notes of fallen logs, particularly those with coverlets of quilt-patterned moss in shades from chartreuse to chamo-brown and boggy spots with tell-tale liverworts, leatherleaf, white beak-rush, that might herald natural springs. I knew we’d need water—one can slurp dawn dew, gathered with a sponge, or suck on leaves only so long. Mid-morning we rested on a granite outcropping. Mite placed her thumb on some lichen, moved it round and round in an ever growing spiral; an ant walked across her nail, paused, turned around and circled her tiny pink, playground again.

I thought about feeding Mite but decided to parse our supplies guardedly. After all, I’d made blueberry pancakes for breakfast that morning. (For the whole crew!) Not that I feared running out. I knew the woods; I’d studied plants, made notes of edibles, in the forest around Little Red. Here, we were just on the other side of the mountain, if seemingly much wilder. It’s exhilarating to believe you are the only human to be in a spot possibly ever! Or at least back to the era when Native Americans hunted in these hills leaving no trace of their presence, except for six arrowheads we had found near the crumpled barn. Berries we could eat: wild blackberries, raspberries, dewberries, wineberries, blueberries, huckle, elder, black cherries, chokecherries, service, strawberries, bunch, wintergreen and snow. My method for recall was to create a little sing-song sayings.

 “Acorns taste like almonds; snake like chicken.”
“Toss a salad: burdock, purslane, dandelion, clover.”

I’d read up on cattails, lily tubers, brought mint leaves picked from the weedy bed beneath my bedroom window for our fragile tummies. I wasn’t a hundred percent on mushrooms yet, those little devils still in research mode. But I knew a chanterelle from a honey mushroom, or a bolete from an earthball. I could catch a frog, but frog legs had no appeal (I’d seen them on a menu in Paris, then on a plate, along with a poached calf’s head.) Pine Needle Soup? Recipe memorized. I brought a tiny pot and matches. I had yet to master the two-twig-rub approach to starting fire, nor was I confident about the magnifying glass method, but with one match and a scratch box I could set a blaze.

Our hiking was more accurately inching. Undergrowth thick, brambly, supplies weighing heavily on my back. Mite slowed down even more. On the car radio earlier that week, as we returned from the weekly Plymouth food-shopping spree, I’d heard Marilyn Monroe say, “All little girls should be told they are pretty, even if they aren’t.”

To encourage Mite, I mimicked the MM’s husky voice, “Come along, Mite, you look pretty, so pretty.”

Okay, we needed a food jump-start. I untied my red bandana, spread it on some moss: chipped beef and Saltines. Mite picked at her lunch like an English lady at tea. Before a bite of a cracker, she raised her pinky, then chewed slowly, sometimes stopping, moving food into her cheek, letting it rest there as though squirreling away something for her future. Then she remembered, finished chewing and swallowed. Finally, we plodded on. It became late afternoon. I’d noted possible cabin sites, a level spot beneath a stand-alone white oak to which all other growth seemed to bow; another with a blister of granite flattened in the center, its own castle-like wall. Mite in rite-like attendance pressed her face, her ear, her nose to the trunks of hemlock, mountain ash, birch, larch, tupelo. She listened, moved her lips in response. What information did trees impart to her? The mountain loomed higher, premium site still to be found. 

No drama, no wail, but I felt something. I turned: Mite had crumpled, her legs splayed behind her like limp overcooked noodles. She looked up with those lake-blue eyes. She didn’t try to move, just stared. I tried the pretty-girl-ploy, “You look pretty, Mite. Let’s get up, Rosy Cheeks.”

Nothing. No gesture, nor response. I slid back down the steep incline, tucked my hands under her armpits and lifted. Dead weight. Finally, I shored her upright against my chest, straightening her dangling, puppet-like legs. I jiggled her until her feet faced forward.

  “Now, I’m going to let you go, Mite. Stand on your own.”

  I slowly released her; she slipped out of my grasp, her legs useless. Challenged, I repeated this process twice. Each time she remained where she fell, her arms like two legs of a tripod, her body the third. She concentrated on a mica-embedded rock by her left hand.

“Okay, Mite, this is a predicament. I have to think for a minute.”

I sat beside her, joined her in looking at the mica emerging from rock. Silvery flakes. We pealed a few, laid them side by side. They glittered like the forest diamonds, fairy fingernails. Then, I knew: Mite had polio. Her legs were paralyzed; she couldn’t move from the waist down. Daddy had survived polio, but his had attacked his throat—he could not preach for a year. And, just the week before, the son of a friend of Daddy’s had been flown to Boston from an Island in Maine; that little boy’s legs had given out, the same as Mite’s. I had overheard an intense conversation between my parents. Fear dropped the register of their voices, Mama whispered, “We are all in danger. It’s a plague. It could spread around the world.”

Darkness approached. I had dallied seeking the perfect site. I had to get Mite on an airplane like the boy in Maine. I had to get her off the mountain. Carry her. I’d seen pictures of soldiers hauling the wounded to safety. Mite’s condition had placed us in a wartime mode. Across their shoulders these men had rescued their brethren, I thought, but couldn’t quite recall the details. 

“Okay, Mite, I’ve got to carry you to an airplane. You have polio; you must cooperate.”

She looked up from the mica, and said, “Apocalypse,” in her small, bell-like voice. I stopped for a few seconds, so lovely was the sound of that unexpected word.

“You’re on the right track, Mite.” 

I struggled to hoist her on my shoulders. For a little thing, she was cumbersome, even heavy, heavier than my book bag. It seemed she refused to help. When a body deliberately goes limp, it gains the weight of that intention. As was often the case with her in unusual circumstances, Mite appeared to enjoy challenge. She savored peculiarities. She observed responses. We skid down the incline tangled, my hands bleeding from trying to break our fall. Neither of us cried; we sat where we landed with no mica to look at. Then I thought, “I’ll lighten her weight.”

I stripped her, except for her panties, which were plain white. Mite would not wear panties—or anything—patterned with flowers, animals, even stripes or dots. She’d only permit absence of hue or true, solid colors: red, green, blue, especially purple or yellow. If you dressed her in anything else, she’d stand there raising her arms or lifting her feet obligingly. When you finished, she’d carefully remove each piece and place it in a neat pile. She might wait naked for you to bring her something comfortable to her plain taste, or if a blue shirt lay nearby, she would conduct a performance piece by putting it on.

She was lighter without her clothes, but still unwieldy. I couldn’t hoist her over my shoulders without her slipping off to one side or the other.

“Mite, I have to leave you here, go for help,” I said. “I’m going to prepare you a bed, make you ready for the night, in case we don’t make it back here until morning. Don’t be scared. The doctors will help you. But we must get you to the hospital! You be a brave girl, okay?”

I gathered a clump of moss, dragged her to a flat spot close to a white oak, as a location landmark, as I’d started to believe Mite had some sort of otherworldly relationship with trees. The oak would be her guardian. I could feel it hovering in protection. I made Mite a moss pillow, redressed her, put her sweater on, tucked mine around her legs. The air had chilled, a different fall in temperature than happens when there are open fields around. I put the book bag beside her. Gave her the water, more beef, Saltines. I opened The Jungle Book to the picture of Shere Khan, the Royal Bengal Tiger. I set up the flashlight, placing it close to her chest, reminding her how the switch worked.

“Do not use it unless you hear crackling leaves and twigs around you, unless you sense an animal closing in. Or you hear us coming to get you. Then, listen, Mite, listen closely: immediately turn it skyward, arcing it like we’ve seen spotlights in the night sky outside Woolworth’s.”

Here’s the part I struggle to admit. I was exhilarated. Here was the surprise. Here was the unplanned event. At this crisis moment I was high on the mountain, far from parents, far from their God, far from the Be-a-Good-Girl Plague. Here is the terrible truth: I was sick of toting Mite, sick of sistering, sick of the silly idea of marrying, sick of caring for her. I tasted the state of being alone, I wanted to continue the adventure solo. I wanted to sleep under the cloud-soupy moon with no one at my side. Just the mountain, the starry night sky and me. Not that Mite hadn’t been a good sport on our trip, she had—until now. Was her collapse real or an inspired act?

I wasted precious minutes. It had been easy to disappear that morning. No one noticed our exit into the woods. A daring, fearsome thought came over me. Sweat oozed around my nose, yet the evening cool reached up from the forest floor. I could lose Mite.  Now my legs felt shaky at the boldness of the thought. Mite couldn’t move if the limp legs were really lame. I looked down at her. She was already asleep. It would be easy to pick up the book bag, the flashlight, even remove my sweater from her legs. I leaned against the Locator Oak. I felt it shudder. I took another deep breath. Allowed myself to follow this path of thought, permitted it, no, invited it to show its grim face. Then I knew the thought had been lying in wait all day. This was the adventure. Go ahead, I dared ask myself, “What would this mean?” The covering darkness closed in around us, dark, blacker than the coal room in our basement. One of us could easily tumble down an embankment, bump her head, sprain an ankle. Didn’t they always warn us against almost every move on sleds, skates, water skis: “Be careful, you’ll break your neck.” I told myself a hundred stories with a thousand outcomes in seconds, even that it might be a kind act: polio was at best a deadly killer, at worst a lifetime of paralysis. Wheelchairs, nasty nurses, white tile rooms with beeping machines. Mite would have to communicate by blinking once for yes, twice for no. Back and forth; lose her, keep her; save her, let her die?

This was the moment in my life when I felt closest to the power—a delirious attraction.  I didn’t flee from the thought instantly, not at all. I wrapped myself deeply in all its royal grandeur. I could commit this act and get away with it, as who would expect a nine-year-old girl of deliberate carnage. I would be beside myself with grief, and I would be comforted by the grieving. The loss would be something my family would have to bear—for as long as we could remain a family. Daddy, I thought, tolerated me. First born and not a boy. He, a kindly, distant man was never cruel, but he essentially ignored me, patient in his waiting for five years to see what gender the next child would be. A girl again, but so smart, he loved her despite her sex. This strange, small creature might, weaker sex that she was, “do something.” 

I headed down the mountain, slowly at first. Solemn in newly discovered knowledge. I questioned myself. Deep down, was I a bad seed? Then I took off. I suppose the trip downhill took me about an hour. The undergrowth being so thick, it seemed to close in, chastise; now I was careless about being scratched. The compass helped: north/northeast. I came out on the dirt road, a stone’s throw from our house. I sprinted the rest of the way.

There were many more cars, pick-up trucks, helter-skelter on the scruffy lawn than when we left that morning. Hollering, yelling when they saw me with my bleeding cheeks. I had trouble breathing in crowds. Immediately my throat constricted.

“Where’s your sister?”  Daddy held both my arms, lifted me off the ground, his blue eyes, our family’s Dutch heritage, inches from mine. 

“Up on the mountain,” I managed to say, “She has polio, can’t walk.”

Daddy maintained his cool. An army of men headed north in the dark: at least twenty spread in a broad line. I knew I could find her, showed them the direction on the compass, which impressed them. Then one bearded bear-like farmer tossed me up on his shoulders. The men waved searchlights, compasses. Another shouted into a megaphone. A couple of big, black dogs, Labradors, strained on leashes. A third, loose and much larger, frenzied through brush, and crushing branches, stopped only to howl. I hoped these beasts wouldn’t reach Mite first. Even fearless Mite might react badly to their bared teeth and liquid, green-yellow eyes in the dark.

Thrashing with their machetes cutting swaths, men bellowed to each other as this fan-shaped phalanx hiked higher and higher. I held my tongue, didn’t beg them to be careful not to trample birch saplings; there was nothing sacred on this night. In such bedlam any beasts searching for supper fled, Mite no longer a tasty bite for a boar. I thought of telling these men to quiet down so as not to frighten her, but held that back, too. I still harbored a certain wicked lust, didn’t I? The outcome of this saga yet unknown. I confess, I felt fear, I bet I began to stink of it. If there had been a hungry animal close by, I’d be its supper, not Mite. 

Instead of heading straight up my compass’s designated path, the men swooped back and forth, like unruly elephants swinging their trunks. Every dell or broken branch had to be analyzed, even though I, exasperated, said, “No, not there.”

Finally, we found her, just where I said, stretched out on the moss, sound asleep. Her legs now bare and akimbo, my sweater kicked off, were motionless. Eerie stalks, like newly harvested white asparagus, in the concentrated beams of light. The great guardian oak a silent presence above.

Daddy, at the far end of one line, wasn’t the first to pick Mite up. She looked at the husky roofer, a man used to hoisting rafters, who lifted her from her dreams, and said, “Antichrist,” startling him.

Mite was passed to Daddy, and we headed down. No problem finding our way back; these men had swathed a boulevard. My forest must have looked like this when stomping dinosaurs foraged for their suppers.

Back at the house, all blurred. Come first light, my father sped Mite off to the single runway airport in Laconia to fly her to Children’s Hospital in Boston. Mite was spared polio. The doctors’ diagnosis: severe exhaustion, malnutrition and, they declared (incorrectly) terror. This child was never scared. Did she calculate the whole event?  

Mite walked out of the hospital in new red Keds; somehow her sneakers had been lost on the mountain. And that’s how I was (creatively) punished: my allowance docked for five ninety-five—the price of Mite’s new Keds—making me dead poor for the rest of the summer. Her lost sneakers had been navy blue; these bright red ones thrilled her. She minced up and down stairs, goose-stepped back and forth across the veranda, looking down at her feet, smiling. Raised her arms, clapped her hands over her head.

People milked The Little Mite on the Mountain story; our glorified heroine’s pictures made page one of the Boston Globe—above the fold.