Nicky stood in front of the sink, running a finger through the water and adjusting the knobs. She handed Clete a kitchen towel. “I’m sorry for my sister. I think she misses her friends. And, we all miss our mom.”

“I know,” he said, stepping aside. “Having your life changed by this virus must be hard. And your mother…” His voice drifted off.

Nicky set the glasses above the sink. “Sometimes I think she’s having a harder time than me, or even Dad. She’s just not open to much.”

Clete nodded. “Your dad’s cool. He made that guitar?”

“He had a shop. Your dad helped him build it, when I was seven.”

“I remember that. My mom and dad left the island for Grandpa’s funeral. I was seven too. I hadn’t even met my grandfather. I guess he never really forgave my mom for coming to Alaska and marrying an Indian. My mom told me that that’s what Grandpa called my father.”

Nicky reached for the detergent to wash the cast-iron pan. “It sounds mean, but you didn’t miss much. He was always kind of cranky, though I liked his stories. We only saw him every now and then.”

Clete gently took the pan from her, sloshed water around it, and set it on the stove, pouring in a dash of olive oil.

“Best to just rinse, and season,” Clete said. “Soap ruins it.”

“Dad took us to see him sometimes,” Nicky continued. “He found quarters in our ears, and made Styrofoam bunnies disappear. At the funeral I remember your mom crying.”

When she looked at him she could see that he was trying to imagine his tough, loud mother in tears.

“Maybe we should go up and paint the attic before your twin gets back,” he finally said, taking a paper towel to wipe down the cast-iron pan, which had grown shiny with heat.

“Okay. Don’t let Josie scare you. Lately I don’t even think she likes me.”

“She doesn’t scare me,” he said as they walked through the hall, guitar music coming from her father’s room. “I think she’s just really sad.”

“Probably. Hey,” Nicky said as they climbed the stairs to the attic. “Want to help me move this tank? Josie and I are switching beds.”

“Sure.”

Nicky unplugged Watermelon’s heat lamp and took one side. Watermelon’s head twitched as his home shifted yet again.

“You’re definitely getting the better view,” Clete said. “At least until they cut down the trees.”

Nicky climbed over the bed and set her forehead against the window. The fog had burned off, and she could see clear to the back of the valley, where the mountains started.

“I can’t believe that actually might happen.”

Clete joined her at the glass, kneeling on a pillow and looking out.

“You see that lighter-colored treetop there, about halfway up the valley?” Clete asked. “The tall one?”

She picked out the frilly point she had noticed that morning. “I see it.”

“My dad says it’s been living for over a thousand years. They call it the Old Yellow Cedar.”

“That old fisherman, Sven, told me about it on the ferry,” Nicky said.

“Did he tell you about the Three Guardsmen?”

Nicky shook her head.

“There are two big hemlocks and a spruce in front of the cedar. They poison the soil around them, so they can be alone. It’s called allelopathy. I think of them as cranky trees, because they stand tall on the far side of the river, protecting the Old Yellow Cedar.”

“My uncle planted a forest of Norway spruce on his farm when he first arrived,” Nicky said.

“Planted forests never get big, because the trees aren’t connected underground. The trees just end up fighting for nutrients beneath the soil. In Sky River Valley, the trees are all linked up by mushrooms. Fungal threads connect them, growing between their roots. It’s how they communicate, the mother trees providing the saplings with nutrients, the Three Guardsmen clearing the soil around the cedar.”

“I never knew that,” Nicky said.

“Trees can even warn each other about predators by releasing scent in the air. And that’s just the beginning. There’s so much we don’t know about them, especially old-growth, like in Sky River Valley.”

“What do mushrooms get from helping trees?” Nicky asked, recalling from biology the word symbiotic.

“The fungi get carbohydrates from the roots. In exchange, the trees use the network built by them, which people call the Wood Wide Web. It’s all just about the opposite of a Christmas tree farm.”

Nicky slid off the bed and began to make it. She had never thought of Uncle Max’s forest of Norway spruce as a bunch of trees boxing each other beneath the soil, or of Christmas tree farms as anything other than neatly ordered cones planted along hillsides waiting for the holiday.

“How well do you know Sven Ruger?” Nicky asked. “I met him on the ferry.”

“Old Sven. No one knows him that well. He and his cat kind of keep together. My mom once wrote an article in the Courier about how he plays mandolin to the fish. Rooster meows along. That’s why they catch so many.”

“He told me about nurse trees, and ghost trees, and how the trees are carnivores,” Nicky said as Clete shook out a canvas drop cloth. With his pocketknife he popped open a can of paint, then mixed it with a stick.

“Pretty cool, right?” Clete said. “When you come to our island tonight, I’ll show you a line of saplings that grew up from a nurse log.”

“Okay,” she agreed, watching as he poured blue paint into a metal tray.

He looked up at her. “You know, I wasn’t kidding when I said in the car that I could hear the trees.”

Nicky dipped a brush into the tray, wiping it along the edges.

“I didn’t think you were,” she said. “Where should I start painting?”

“The rafters,” he said.

He seemed to sense that she preferred silence, and they got to work. She painted the wide-open spaces first, just like Uncle Max had taught her. Clete used a roller, steadily filling in the knee walls before he switched to a brush. He flung the work cloth over Josie’s bed, his brow knitting as he painted the sides and undersides of the rough-hewn rafters. With his pocketknife he started cutting rectangles of insulation, the foam squeaking as it slipped on the wet paint.

“Your sister can touch things up later,” he said. “Even though she doesn’t seem to care about details.”

Nicky laughed, both at his joke, and the idea that Josie would ever pick up a paintbrush. “I wouldn’t worry too much about her.”

When all the rafters were painted, she set down her brush in the tray.

“I like trees,” Nicky started. “I’ve always liked them. I read about them, and go walking all the time on my uncle’s farm. But they’re just—trees. Even though I sometimes wish they could talk, I also know they can’t.”

Clete stood with a piece of insulation in one hand. “You mean you’ve never heard them?”

“No,” she said definitively.

“I’m not talking about like in some Disney movie,” Clete said, smiling. “It’s not like you’re in the woods and they start waving their branches, swaying and making oooh sounds. Like I said, they communicate through the soil, and also through the air. In biology class we learn that they’re all battling to grow the highest, competing for the most sunlight. It’s more complicated than that. They’re helping each other, especially the old-growth valleys, like the one out your window. They’re a family. Old trees blow down, new ones grow in their place. It just happens at such a slow pace that we hardly notice, because our lives are too short.”

Nicky didn’t respond. Clete tore open a new package of rollers, tossing her one. “Why is that such a crazy thought? A mother tree blows a lucky seed onto an old stump, and that stump keeps the seed out of the snow, nourishing the sapling as it grows. When it connects into the fungal network, the mother tree feeds it nutrients through the filaments, helping the sapling grow. Humans take care of their young. Why not trees?”

“Because they’re like fish—they have thousands of seeds. I don’t see salmon out there nursing their babies.”

“Of course salmon nurse their babies. After a salmon dies, it washes up on the bank and rots, creating nutrients for bugs to grow. Salmon fry eat the bugs when they hatch in the spring. You’re just not thinking about it in the right way.”

A shiver moved through Nicky as Clete said this. Even after they died, salmon helped their children.

“When you touch a tree, it’s like feeling a heartbeat through someone’s chest, or touching a live wire and getting a shock.”

“That’s not the same as talking.”

“That’s all talking is,” Clete insisted. “Sending signals.” With his knife he pointed out the window toward the valley. “Those trees out there, they’re talking right now. You know what about?”

A buzz started at the base of Nicky’s spine, spreading over her back. She held his stare. “What?”

“They’re talking about you.”

“No,” she said, shaking her head. “Maybe you didn’t hear me. Trees don’t talk, and they definitely can’t tell the difference between people. And once animals are dead, they’re dead. That’s it. It’s just that simple.”

“They knew you were coming,” Clete continued, punching in a piece of insulation with a closed fist. “That part I don’t get. I mean, I understand the mycorrhizal network—trees connected by millions of miles of filament built by mushrooms beneath the soil. The soil is alive in the same way the ocean is—thousands of terrestrial insects down there working together to stabilize the ground cover, and help the trees. Why don’t we study the soil like we study the sea? But the hemlocks and cedars and spruce on the island where I live—where you’ll come tonight—those trees actually knew you were coming. I guess it’s not that weird, considering they use scents and signals through the network to warn of insects, and disease. But a person?” He closed his utility knife and turned thoughtful. “Signals can’t travel through the ocean. It’s gotta be a scent, though the sea winds would have blown it off. I don’t know. Maybe a mushroom that floated on a current…”

Nicky stepped toward him, her hands on her hips. It was all too much. “If you keep saying trees talk I’m going to stomp out of here just like Josie did.”

Clete watched her, working to read her face to see if she was serious. Then he leaned down to slice a batt of insulation. “Nicky, the network beneath the soil is lit up like a Christmas tree. Everyone—all the trees—are alive with it. A signal went out the moment you stepped foot on the island.”

Blood rushed in her ears. None of this made sense. “Me? I don’t know anything about this island. What are they saying?”

With an open palm he pounded insulation into the space between the rafters. “Simple. They said you’re the one who’s going to save them.”

“Save them from what?”

He ran his marker down another rectangle, making a neat black line, then picked up his knife. It hovered in the air like a wand. “From me, Nicky,” he said softly. “From Lars Ruger, the owner of the Norseman Mill. From my father. Your sister was right—from this island.”

Clete started across the room for another piece of pink insulation. His words echoed off the attic ceiling.

“It doesn’t matter if you don’t believe me. You’ll find out soon enough. Soon everything I’m telling you will make sense.”