fter a few days, Julian had found a place in the routine of the Elder family. Before breakfast, he would help Robin feed and milk the goats and collect the eggs. Every time he milked Aphrodite, the level of milk in the bucket rose a little higher.

While the girls had their lessons, he and Jo-Jo would feed the chickens. There was an incubator inside the barn, and one day they watched two ungainly chicks struggle out of their shells. By the next day, the slick, limp creatures had been transformed into buttery balls of fluff peeping about the yard. Julian cupped Jo-Jo’s hands around one chick. It was almost weightless, a ticking little heartbeat surrounded by yellow feathers. Only the frowning angle of its tiny beak gave a hint of its future as a sharp-eyed chicken.

Nancy came by and admired the little chick extravagantly. Then she asked the boys to come into the garden shed to help start the new tomatoes while the girls finished their math sheets. Jo-Jo’s job was to fill the cardboard egg cartons with soil, but at least half the dirt ended up on the floor. Julian kept waiting for Nancy to correct Jo-Jo, but she didn’t seem to mind. She handed Julian a bag of tomato seeds that she had harvested the previous fall and told him to plant twelve tiny seeds in each egg carton.

Nancy worked silently alongside the boys for a while, then said, “So, Julian, how is everything going for you? Are you happy here? Usually I can tell, but with you I’m not really sure.” Her usually cheerful face was clouded with worry.

Julian looked at her in surprise. “It’s great,” he stammered. “You guys are great. Everything’s great.”

“But you must miss your mom. With her so far away.”

He had a sudden memory of his mother leaning against the sink, looking toward the window, her fragile fingers twisting the ends of her long, black hair. “I don’t even know who I am anymore,” she’d said, and she’d looked at him as if he might know the answer.

“I guess.” He cleared his throat. “She wanted to take me with her, but it was really expensive. The tickets and everything. I’m kind of used to it anyway. She always traveled a lot. Working. Or going on retreats.”

“Who took care of you, then?”

“I stayed with my friend Danny a lot. Or the woman upstairs—Mrs. Petrova—she used to watch me when I was little.”

“My mother died when I was fourteen,” Nancy said abruptly. “I cried for a month.” She turned away from him and started sweeping the floor beneath Jo-Jo’s chair.

“The first time I came to Huckleberry Ranch, I fell in love with it,” she said, in her usual light tone. “I was a city girl. I came with my friend—Bob’s cousin. I never wanted to leave.”

“Well, I guess you didn’t,” Julian said.

She laughed. “You’re right. I told Bob we should get married. At first, he said no. He thought I loved the ranch more than him! But I kept asking, and finally he said yes.” She pushed back the strands of brown hair that had escaped her ponytail. “I guess that taught me a lesson: Don’t be afraid to ask for what you want.”

By the end of the morning, they’d planted two hundred seeds. Nancy said it would be enough to keep them in tomato sandwiches through next fall.

After lunch, Julian was lying on his futon reading Build Your Own Smart Home, when Robin flopped down beside him.

“Let’s go to Big Tree,” she said urgently. “I’m finally finished with geometry! We need to get working on Operation Redwood!”

Downstairs, they found Molly sitting on the sofa, immersed in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. As they walked past, she looked up and said, “Wait for me!”

Robin slammed the screen door shut. “Race you!” she called to Julian, and she flew down the deck steps and across the creek. When Julian got to the bridge, he couldn’t help glancing back. Molly was standing in the doorway calling to him. He waved, as if he thought she was just saying good-bye, then sprinted off.

Maybe today he could catch up to Robin. He hadn’t known the trail the first day, he told himself as his feet pounded against the dirt, and he’d been tired from the bus ride. He walked quickly across the tree-trunk bridge, then started up the long switchbacks, pushing until his lungs ached. He didn’t even stop to get water at the spigot.

At the second river crossing, he still hadn’t caught up to Robin. Sweat dripped down his forehead. He began to wonder if maybe she’d taken a different trail. He crossed the river and jogged toward Big Tree, thinking he might have beaten her after all. But when he’d scrambled down the slope and into the circle of redwoods, there she was, sitting with her arms around her knees, wiggling her toes, and not even out of breath.

“You had a head start,” he said.

Robin looked at him with pity. “Next time, I’ll give you a head start. You can have a ten-second handicap.”

“I don’t need a handicap.” Julian sat down next to Robin, still breathing hard. He picked up a thick stick and began sharpening the end with his pocketknife. “Oh, that’s a pretty little knife,” Robin said. “Can I see?”

He handed her the knife and she opened and closed the two blades. “Who’s J.S.C.?”

“It was my dad’s,” Julian said. “I think he got it from his father.”

“It’s old, then. I bet it’s real ivory. From elephant tusks,” she said, handing it back.

Julian opened the larger blade and whittled the stick into a point. “That wasn’t very nice, leaving Molly behind,” he said at last.

“Molly! I thought we were going to start planning for Operation Redwood. We can’t have Molly here. She’ll tell Mom and Dad everything. Even Jo-Jo can keep secrets better than she can!”

“Well, OK,” he conceded. “So, what are you thinking?”

Robin heaped his wood shaving into little piles. “Even if you can’t convince your uncle not to cut down the trees,” she said after a moment, “maybe you could get him to come up here. If he saw Big Tree for himself, he might change his mind.”

“No way.” He stopped whittling. “My cousin Preston was supposed to write a report on redwoods and—I meant to tell you this earlier—Sibley starts talking about how many board feet an acre, how many dollars per board foot. He says this place is worth ten million dollars!”

“Ten million dollars!” Robin frowned. “I don’t think that’s right.”

“Well, that’s what Sibley was saying. Or I think he was. Anyway, he’s always working. He would never come way up here.”

“We could write a letter to somebody,” Robin suggested. “The president. Or maybe the governor.”

“You think they’re going to care about some little pocket of trees way out here? They wouldn’t even read it.”

“OK, then. You think of something. We’ll take turns.”

Julian began sharpening the other end of the stick.

“It doesn’t have to be a good idea,” Robin said impatiently. “Just throw out any idea. It’s called brainstorming.”

“How about a protest?”

“Who’s going to be protesting. You and me? And Molly? And Jo-Jo?”

“Your turn, then.”

“We’ll chain ourselves to the trees,” Robin suggested. “So they can’t cut them down.”

Julian grimaced. “How long can you stay chained to a tree anyway?” He clicked his blade closed and put the knife back in his pocket. Robin sighed and flopped down on her back. The trees soared up around them, letting in a jagged ring of blue sky. They could hear the hollow sound of a woodpecker drilling high above them.

“I just thought of an idea,” Robin said, sitting up again. “But it’s a secret.”

“What kind of secret?”

She looked at him with her fierce blue eyes. “A big secret. If I tell you, you have to promise, cross your heart and hope to die, that you won’t tell.”

“I promise.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die.”

“OK. Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Right in the middle of Big Tree Grove, there’s a secret tree house.”

“Where?” asked Julian, looking up at the canopy around him.

“Not far. But I’ve never been inside. My brothers refuse to bring me up until I’m twelve. That’s July twenty-ninth. There’s some big initiation ceremony.” She was quiet, sucking on the end of her braid for a moment.

“Well, so what? So what if there is a tree house?”

“We could go up in it. Like Julia Butterfly Hill.”

“Who’s that?”

She sighed with exasperation. “You don’t know anything! She’s this woman. And she was trying to protect this big old tree near Humboldt, way up north of here. And she went on this platform way up high in the tree where nobody could reach her and she lived there for more than two years so nobody would cut it down.”

“Did it work?” Julian asked skeptically.

“I think it did. The logging company didn’t cut down the tree. And a lot of other trees ended up being protected. It was called . . .” She paused. “Headwaters. I think. Anyway, the point is, we could do the same thing. We could go up in the tree house and stay there and then nobody could get us down until they agreed to save Big Tree Grove.”

Julian turned this idea over in his mind. Staking out a tree house was much better than chaining himself to a tree. “How do you get up in it?”

“Well, that’s the only thing. It’s pretty high up. I think my brothers must use ropes or something.”

“So we don’t even know how to get into this tree house?”

“My birthday’s next month. Maybe you could come back.”

“Even if I could, then what? The two of us just stay there until Sibley changes his mind?”

Robin gasped suddenly. “Oh, I know!” she said. “Oh, this is the best plan ever! My friend Ariel is coming to visit from Phoenix for two weeks in August. It’s all set. And you could come back up and we’d all do it together.”

“I don’t know.” His mom was coming back sometime in August, but he didn’t know the exact date. And he wasn’t sure about spending all that time with two girls. Three, actually, counting Molly.

“It’s too bad Danny couldn’t come. He’s got really good ideas. And he’s good with tools and stuff like that.” This was true. He had watched Danny take apart the pipe under his kitchen sink once.

Robin opened her eyes wider. “Maybe he could come. It would be much more fun with four of us!”

They were talking so intently that they almost didn’t hear the muted clanging of the dinner bell.

“Oh, we’ve got to go home,” Robin said. “Now I can’t show you the tree house!” She looked up hopefully, as if it might suddenly materialize out of thin air. “Next time.” She looked at him and smiled. “Ten-second handicap?”

Julian started to protest—they’d run all the way to Big Tree already—but the look on her face made him change his mind. As he ran up the slope, he could hear Robin counting backward from ten, with exaggerated slowness. He was almost to the river by the time she got to “one.” He listened for her gaining on him, but there was no sound but his own footsteps. He had more endurance, he thought. He was more of the long-distance type.

He pounded on and on, reaching the top of the long hill and tearing down again, his legs flying. He got his second wind and was sure he was running even faster than when he’d started. He was almost at the house and she still wasn’t anywhere close.

Finally, as he turned around the last bend toward the house, he saw the red of her T-shirt. She was sitting in a wooden chair on the deck, smiling triumphantly.

“I took another route,” she explained when he’d trotted across the creek and climbed slowly up the stairs. “It’s a little longer, but it has a nice view of the river.” He did notice with some satisfaction that her forehead was glistening with sweat.