Sugar Birds Read online

  PRAISE FOR SUGAR BIRDS

  “Bostrom’s prose is propulsive and detailed. … Aggie is a wonderfully magnetic character: a scrappy, stubborn preteen whose father has taught her to survive off the land. … The supporting characters are equally strong, including the teenager’s bird biologist grandmother and Aggie’s autistic brother, Burnaby … The story is a true page-turner all the way to the end. An engrossing tale of survival and redemption in the Pacific Northwest.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Bostrom takes her readers gently by the hand and plunges them into an immersive tale straight from page one. Sugar Birds is a powerful coming-of-age story of betrayal and loss, rebellion and anger, friendship, forgiveness and redemption, all woven into a testament to the wondrous natural world … packed into one heart-pounding read. Highly recommended!”

  —CHANTICLEER REVIEWS

  “Suspenseful. Lyrical. Redemptive. Bostrom’s voice reminds me of Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing and Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I loved this coming-of-age tale.”

  —TARYN R. HUTCHISON, award-winning writer and author of One Degree of Freedom

  “Exquisite setting, unique characters, and a gripping plot blend with complex family storylines to make Sugar Birds a page-turner that stays embedded in your soul for a welcomed long while.”

  —SARA EASTERLY, award-winning author of Searching for Mom

  “A riveting, redemptive story! I couldn’t put it down. Bostrom drew me into souls of beautifully drawn characters and planted me in farmlands and forests where those characters fail, suffer, grow and love. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.”

  —SY GARTE, PHD; award-winning author of The Works of

  His Hands: A Scientist’s Journey from Atheism to Faith

  “Since her first books over two decades ago, I’ve longed to see how Cheryl Bostrom’s gift of scientific, elegant thought and language would shape her fiction. Stirring, intelligent, and lyrical, Sugar Birds was so worth the wait.”

  —MONA STUART, author of Raising Children at Promise

  “Cheryl Bostrom’s hard-to-put-down Sugar Birds reminds me of the classic, My Side of the Mountain—one of those rare books that appeal to every age; full of depth, pages that turn quickly, and most of all, ebullient truth.”

  —KATHERINE JAMES, award-winning novelist; author of the memoir A Prayer for Orion

  “A new heroine is born! Ten-year-old Aggie’s voice is innocent, fresh, and compelling. Bostrom’s deft language, deep reverence for the natural world, and keen understanding of the human condition merge in this enduring novel of forgiveness and hope.”

  —ASHLEY E. SWEENEY, award-winning author of Answer Creek

  “This novel illustrates truth I know in my bones—that there is a great mending for all of my life-gashes and deep aches. Sugar Birds is the best book I have read in ages, and is a book for all ages.”

  —DONNA VANDERGRIEND, former chaplain; author of Out of the Mouths of Grandbabes

  “Sugar Birds is a tour de force, with protagonist Agate as uniquely powerful as The Hunger Games’s Katniss. This story will take readers where they’ve never been before. I plumbed my own depths as I followed Aggie and Celia through physical and emotional hinterlands of spirituality, pain, guilt, and redemption. … An incredibly good book.”

  —DR. LYNNE CURRY, columnist for Anchorage Daily News and author of Beating the Workplace Bully

  “What an adventure! Cheryl Bostrom skillfully intertwines compelling storylines of two girls lost in wilderness of their own making—who find rescue and freedom through gifts of trust, healing of deep hurts, and forgiveness. It’s a book of hope restored.”

  —EMILY POLIS GIBSON, M.D. and poet, photographer, and essayist at Barnstorming.blog

  “Captivating … Compelling … An intuitive understanding of people as a part of wild nature has been almost entirely lost in modern society. This book brings a glimpse of the importance of the outdoors to children’s development and indeed, to their very souls … Highly recommended!”

  —KAREN STEENSMA, biology professor & farmer

  Copyright © 2021 Cheryl Grey Bostrom

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, digital scanning, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, please address She Writes Press.

  Published 2021

  Printed in the United States of America

  Print ISBN: 978-1-64742-068-0

  E-ISBN: 978-1-64742-069-7

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2021904334

  For information, address:

  She Writes Press

  1569 Solano Ave #546

  Berkeley, CA 94707

  Interior design by Tabitha Lahr

  She Writes Press is a division of SparkPoint Studio, LLC.

  All company and/or product names may be trade names, logos, trademarks, and/or registered trademarks and are the property of their respective owners.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  For my Gwynie,

  with love

  Oh, I took a little boat,

  such a pretty little boat,

  just as the day was dawning.

  And I took a little oar,

  and I pulled away from shore,

  so very, very, early in the morning.

  —TRADITIONAL LULLABY, CIRCA 1890

  “Consider the birds …”

  —MATTHEW 6:26

  CONTENTS

  CHAPTER 1 ~ Aggie: Mama

  CHAPTER 2 ~ Aggie: Rubble

  CHAPTER 3 ~ Celia: Detour

  CHAPTER 4 ~ Aggie: Flight

  CHAPTER 5 ~ Celia: Hawk

  CHAPTER 6 ~ Aggie: Hunger

  CHAPTER 7 ~ Celia: Hooks

  CHAPTER 8 ~ Aggie: Search

  CHAPTER 9 ~ Celia: Burnaby

  CHAPTER 10 ~ Aggie: Secret

  CHAPTER 11 ~ Celia: Bones

  CHAPTER 12 ~ Aggie: Shotgun

  CHAPTER 13 ~ Celia: Paint

  CHAPTER 14 ~ Aggie: Prowler

  CHAPTER 15 ~ Celia: Hoe

  CHAPTER 16 ~ Aggie: Poultice

  CHAPTER 17 ~ Celia: Ants

  CHAPTER 18 ~ Aggie: Itch

  CHAPTER 19 ~ Celia: Kiss

  CHAPTER 20 ~ Aggie: Hounds

  CHAPTER 21 ~ Celia: Playground

  CHAPTER 22 ~ Celia: Blanket

  CHAPTER 23 ~ Aggie: Friend

  CHAPTER 24 ~ Celia: Color

  CHAPTER 25 ~ Aggie: Pi

  CHAPTER 26 ~ Celia: Cabin

  CHAPTER 27 ~ Aggie: Cache

  CHAPTER 28 ~ Aggie: Lie

  CHAPTER 29 ~ Celia: Speed

  CHAPTER 30 ~ Celia: Mother

  CHAPTER 31 ~ Aggie: Contact

  CHAPTER 32 ~ Celia: Casket

  CHAPTER 33 ~ Aggie: Bait

  CHAPTER 34 ~ Celia: Funeral

  CHAPTER 35 ~ Aggie: Surprise

  CHAPTER 36 ~ Celia: Drive-By

  CHAPTER 37 ~ Aggie: News

  CHAPTER 38 ~ Celia: Eagle

  CHAPTER 39 ~ Aggie: Junkyard

  CHAPTER 40 ~ Aggie: Wolf

  CHAPTER 41 ~ Aggie: Game

  CHAPTER 42 ~ Celia: Creature

  CHAPTER 43 ~ Aggie: Help

  CHAPTER 44 ~ Celia: Reunion

  CHAPTER 45 ~ Aggie: Scars

  CHAPTER 46 ~ Celia: Dreams

 
CHAPTER 47 ~ Celia: Millie

  Northwest Washington State, 1985

  CHAPTER 1 ~ AGGIE

  Mama

  “You stay on the ground, Agate!”

  Aggie scowled as her mother shouted across thirty rows of foot-high corn. Teeth clamped, the girl slammed her gloves into a bucket, then lengthened her stride until she reached the four-wheeler beside the barn. The words lay sharp against her spine. Mama must have seen her eye the crow’s nest near the alders they cut that morning. Of course she did.

  Without looking back, the girl cranked the engine and revved the throttle. The tires skidded sideways, spewing gravel behind her before they caught and fishtailed into the pasture in a streak of crushed grass. The machine bucked uphill across uneven ground—too fast, she knew—but the engine’s whine would drown out anything else Mama might yell.

  When she crested the rise, she dropped the throttle into an idle and ran her eyes along the ridges of the North Cascades, their slopes blue beneath the snowline. Then she shifted sideways in her seat to look back toward her family’s log house, the cupola-topped cedar barn, and the garden. Shrunken in the distance, her parents bent over baby onions in the June afternoon sunshine, weeding. Beyond them, sprinklers irrigated the tree seedlings Aggie had been hoeing since lunch. She clenched her arms and felt the ache in them, thankful that Dad called her off the job to retrieve the chainsaw he’d left in the woods.

  She drove down the back side of the hill, nosed the vehicle alongside a pile of firewood rounds, and clicked off the ignition. As if dismounting a horse, she swung her leg behind her and jumped to the ground, then trotted toward the Douglas fir that held the nest. Mama expected her to find Dad’s saw and return right away. Nothing else. No climbing.

  But her mother would never know. Aggie could make it up and down the tree in under five minutes and be home with the saw before either parent missed her.

  Her eyes crawled up the old fir to a dark cluster of twigs, where a sharp-beaked silhouette brooded her eggs. The male crow watched Aggie from an adjacent tree and bobbed to his mate, who waddled from the nest and hopped to a nearby branch. Aggie tilted her head at them and pressed her finger to her lips. “Nothing to worry about,” she whispered. “I just want to see ’em.” The fir was an easy one; the nest only the height of a telephone pole. She had scaled trees like this, what, a hundred times? Five hundred?

  With no sign of Mama, she entered the tree, her feet and hands deliberate as she climbed, her movements brisk. Boughs heavy with needles offered a quick ladder. The silent crows watched, squatting, wings poised, their necks stretched low.

  Halfway up, the foliage grew sparser, and her heart raced at her high visibility. If Mama had followed, she would spot her for sure. Aggie picked up her pace, planting her foot on a limb the diameter of her wrist and, without testing its strength, pulled her full fifty-five pounds onto it.

  The limb snapped. A flailing arm snagged a branch and she dangled, scrambling for toeholds. Both birds squawked and took to the sky, spreading the alarm. Startled sparrows launched from the grass below as the crows circled and dove. Aggie found her footing and braced against the onslaught. When a beak speared her shoulder, she pawed the air behind her, intercepted a crow across its breast and flung it sideways. Both birds arced skyward, protesting as she hoisted herself to the bowl of the nest and peered inside.

  There, arranged in a circle like the petals of a flower, the olive-green eggs’ narrow tips touched at the center. “Five,” she said to the raucous, hovering birds—and stuck her thumb in the air.

  A thrill surged through her. In two weeks she’d begin to visit daily. Though the crows were sure to jab her a few more times, they’d get used to her, like they all did. When she watched their first egg hatch, she’d memorize it and draw the cracked shell and emerging beak. She’d record every hatchling in her book, just like Dad taught her.

  Now, though, she had to move fast, and the fir’s twiggy branches slowed her descent. A young birch, skinny and limbless as a fire pole, intersected a bough below her. Yes. The birch would give her a straight shot to the ground. She sidestepped along a horizontal limb until it narrowed dangerously, then leaned into the thin tree, caught the trunk and swung her weedy body over. With a bear cub’s grip, she shinnied lower—until a shriek ricocheted through the woods.

  “Aggie!”

  The crows vanished into the trees. Still clamped around the trunk, Aggie arched backwards as her mother appeared. Even upside down, she saw fright scrape across Mama’s face, and it lodged like a stone in Aggie’s chest. She jumped the last few feet out of the tree and stood on one leg like a heron, her eyes locked on her mother’s knees.

  Mama gripped Aggie’s chin. “How many times have I told you not to climb so high? After yesterday, I thought you understood. Tsch. Ten years old. Still can’t trust you.” She jerked Aggie’s jaw higher, her eyes blazing. “No more. Starting tomorrow, you will either stay within visible range of me or you will help Aunt Nora at the dairy while your dad and I are working. Someone has to keep an eye on you.”

  Aggie eased away from Mama and studied the ground. Her aunt rarely left her airless house and never opened her curtains. She would have to do their dishes. Clean those dingy rooms. And who knew when Uncle Loomis would sneak up on her and yell if she messed up. She wondered how her brother could stand to milk for him.

  The alternative was no better. Tethered to Mama, she’d feel like a mouse with an owl overhead. And her parents would fight about her.

  “But Mama. I wasn’t—”

  “You are going to break your neck. Or worse.”

  Aggie’s face burned hot with something more than Mama’s fear. She felt like spitting. Spitting at her mother who was trying to steal her joy over eggs, her joy at running up a tree into the sky. She crossed her arms and turned sideways to Mama, who again reached for her, more gently this time.

  Aggie dodged her. From now on, she would climb only when she and Dad worked on the far edge of their eighty acres. Or when her mother kneaded bread dough or bought groceries or shipped seeds. Aggie would chart nests deeper in the woods than ever before, or along the Hawley River—where Mama wouldn’t look. And if Mama came after her? She would be a squirrel and skitter through the trees like one. Way higher than before.

  Her father approached over the hill, and Aggie ducked behind a fat, leaning alder. She did not want him to witness her anger, this awful feeling that made her mouth pinch and her head hurt above her ears.

  Mama watched her hide, then turned toward her dad. “Harris!”

  “I saw her.”

  “How many times will you see her and do nothing? Wasn’t yesterday enough? From now on, that girl stays out of trees.”

  Yesterday. Big whoop. Aggie had found a nest of red-shafted flickers, only twenty-five feet up. Dad didn’t worry at all.

  “I always look after her, Bree.”

  “How can you look after her when she’s on a branch as high as our house?”

  Aggie pictured their two-story log home, with its steep gables. She had never considered the size of her trees in comparison.

  “Like you did better keeping her at the barn with you? How’d that work for you?”

  Exactly, Dad. Mama really overreacted that time. Hadn’t she pulled herself into the cupola with a strong rope, over the cushy straw in the haymow? Baby stuff. So safe.

  And she’d found six barn swallow eggs in that flawless mud cup.

  Her mother’s cheeks flushed. “You are her father. You can’t let her win.”

  “This isn’t about winning. You’re strangling the girl. If you keep treating her like she’s five, she’ll never grow up.”

  “She won’t be doing any growing if she lands on her head.”

  Aggie strained to listen as he lowered his voice. “… hardly growing now. Doctor charts don’t lie.” He stroked his stubbled chin. “Look, Bree. What if we send her back to school in the fall? She hasn’t been around anyone her age in a year. Maybe this time she’
ll—”

  Mama threw her hands in the air, then spun away from him and strode fast toward the house.

  … make some friends. Aggie finished her father’s sentence, mouthing the words and stretching out f-r-i-e-n-d-s. She didn’t like the boys at school. James Marking had called her a freak when she picked up those baby possums crawling on their roadkilled mama in front of the gym. So what if she put them in her sweatshirt pouch and took them to class. So what if she pretended to be a marsupial until she got them home. They’d have died otherwise.

  She didn’t like the girls, either—especially big Trina Boonsma, who had flunked fourth grade twice and scared Aggie on the playground. Trina stalked her at church, too. Good thing Aggie was quick, or, she suspected, Trina would have kept pinching her privates in that hallway behind the sanctuary. Aggie had shown Mama the bruises Trina left on her chest, but she never expected her mother to block Trina and Mrs. Boonsma right there in the foyer after the service.

  “Tell that cow of yours to keep her hands to herself !” Mama had waved the church bulletin in Mrs. Boonsma’s face.

  Twenty heads snapped toward her. Mrs. Boonsma pulled Trina close.

  Dad reached Mama through the crowd, caught her arm, and extracted the tube from her hand. “Terribly sorry.” He tipped his head at Mrs. Boonsma, then Trina. “Bree hasn’t been herself lately.”

  “No way I—” Her mother wrenched, but Dad’s grip held.

  “Not the time or place, love. Let’s go.” He spun Mama— almost like he did when they danced in the barn to the radio—and hurried her outside. By the time Aggie and her brother got to the car, Mama was shouting, smacking the dashboard with Dad’s worn leather Bible. “We’re done with church.” Whack. “Done, done, done.” Whack. “Can’t keep my children safe anywhere.” Her father had flinched with every swat.

  No school and no more town church meant no more Trina. Aggie was relieved. Mama’s erratic behavior was worry enough. Besides, kitchen church was way better. And short, usually; she and her brother recited the week’s memory work from the catechism, Dad read Scripture. Aggie would sing from their Psalter Hymnal while Dad jazzed it up with a Celtic riff or two on his fiddle. Sometimes she even danced on the linoleum, where her feet clacked out the rhythm.