Maybe if I put sticks over the hole and grass over the sticks, the grass will not fall. But maybe a hare will not fall either.
Master wants me to use the cord. I untie it from my waist and squat in the long grass and think. The knot Master ties is different than the knot in my pants. It moves up and down and makes a circle that goes bigger and smaller. When it goes smaller, the long end goes longer. I put my arm in the circle and move the knot. The circle goes small around my arm. I pull the long end and the knot moves. The circle goes so small it bites my skin.
O-ho!
To understand a thing all at once is like when there is a storm at night and everything is black and I cannot see anything and then lightning comes and waah! White bright lightning and I can see everything, everything in its place.
Oh, but then it goes and there is dark again, and I cannot remember where everything is.
If you’re cleverer than a hare, you ought to be able to find a way to make use of this to catch one, Master says. Only mind that it doesn’t something ere you’ve a chance to something it.
I pull the long end of the cord harder and the little circle bites harder into my skin, making it wrinkly-crinkly. My thoughts make a line between Master’s something and something. I am to use the circle to catch a hare, only the circle must not be so small the hare dies before I free it.
I wait until there is a hare. I creepity-creep through the long grass. The hare sits up and looks. I throw the circle at its head, but I do not catch it. The hare runs away, jumping, jumping on its long hind legs.
No more hares come today.
But Master is not angry yet. I think it is because Master can summon a hare if he wants; but he wants me to catch it.
I say what I do with the cord and he nods his head up and down. “You’re on the right path, lad. Only think, how might you set the cord to catch a hare without your hand upon it?”
That is all he says.
At night I think and do not sleep. I go outside to think. Now I am alone under the night sky. There is wind and the moon is bright. I count clouds going over the moon, one, two, three, four, five.
I climb the wall of the garden outside Miranda’s chamber. Inside Miranda is sleeping. I think about Miranda sleeping. The wind makes my hair move. How is hair like a hare? I do not understand why it is the same word. Miranda says it is made of different letters so it is not the same.
And Master says to use the cord to catch a hare without my hands. How-oh-how-oh-how? I am not the wind to make things move without hands. A big wind comes like it is laughing, ha-ha, no you are not, Caliban! It makes the long branches of the tree beside me move. And I think … o-ho! I pull a branch down and let it go. It jumps like a hare, hoppity-hoppity into the sky. That is how you make the cord move with no hands—pull down a branch and tie the cord to it.
But how do I make the branch stay until a hare comes?
I will think about it tomorrow. Now I do not have to be more clever than a hare, only a branch.
I go inside and sleep.
SIXTEEN
MIRANDA
Caliban has caught a hare.
It was some days in the doing, but it seems he has succeeded in devising something Papa calls a snare, and Papa is ever so pleased with him. I am happy for Caliban, though I will own, I am a little bit envious of the praise that Papa heaps on him. But that is petty of me.
The hare is understandably displeased at having been caught, and Caliban bears a number of scratches from its strong hind legs. Nonetheless, he bears it no ill will and keeps it in his cell since we have nowhere else to contain it. I rather wish that it had taken Caliban longer to catch it, or that the stars aligned for Papa’s endeavor sooner, for within a week’s time, Caliban has become passing fond of the hare. Resigned to its captivity, it hops around his cell and comes to nibble greens from his hand.
I am quite taken with it, too; but I have not forgotten Bianca’s fate. When Caliban asks if we should name the hare, I say no.
And then altogether too soon, the stars have aligned and Mercury’s day is upon us.
We gather in the kitchen in the darkness before dawn. Papa carries his staff and the thurible and he wears a robe I have never seen before, striped with blue and grey in the light of the banked embers in the fireplace. I know from my studies that these are colors that Mercury favors.