Cheri's Strange Whistle

It started on a Tuesday.

Hoo-weee.

Just once, thin and strange, somewhere down past the ferns.

Everyone heard it. Tang said it was the wind. Jackfroot said it was probably nothing and ran off to do six things. Taro said "hm" in a way that could have meant anything.

Cheri the red giraffe stopped absolutely still and did not move for a very long time.

"That," she said, "is not the wind."

Cheri wanted to know what things were. Not vaguely. Exactly. And a sound she could not name felt like a word missing out of the middle of a sentence.

So she got her notebook.

She stood at the Old Bridge and waited, with her long neck up above the canopy where the sound came clearest, and every time she heard it she wrote down three things: where she was, which way it came from, and how loud.

Hoo-weee.

She wrote it down.

She moved twenty steps and waited again.

Hoo-weee.

She wrote that down too.

It took her all afternoon, and by the end she had eleven measurements and a small careful map with eleven lines drawn across it, and all eleven lines crossed in exactly one place: the bend of the stream, where the tall reeds grew.

Cheri looked at her map. Her map was correct. She could feel it.

"Loud," she said, tapping the last column. "It's very loud. From that far away, to be that loud, it would have to be —" She measured the numbers against each other. "— big. Quite big."

She showed the others. Kiwi checked her arithmetic twice and could not find anything wrong with it.

So they went to the bend of the stream.

And the sound stopped.

They waited. Nothing. They waited longer. Nothing.

Cheri went back the next morning, alone, very carefully. She heard it three times on the way down — hoo-weee, hoo-weee — and then, about twenty steps from the reeds, it stopped again.

She tried the day after that. She tried going slowly. She tried a wider angle. She checked her lines and her lines were right, they were right every single time, and every single time she got close, Wan Hundred Woods went quiet around her.

On the fourth day Cheri sat down at the top of the bank with her notebook shut in her lap and worked out the last piece, and it was the piece she liked least.

The measurements weren't the problem.

She was.

She was the tallest thing in Wan Hundred Woods. She came over the ferns like a sunrise. Whatever was down there heard her arriving long before she arrived, every time, and there was nothing in her notebook that could fix that, because the thing her notebook could not measure was herself.

"Cheri?"

Blueberri had come along the bank and sat down next to her without Cheri noticing, which nobody ever did.

"My map is right," said Cheri.

"I know."

"It goes quiet because of me."

Blueberri looked at the reeds for a moment. Then she lay down flat on her back in the grass with her paws behind her head, as though the afternoon were something she had cleared her whole schedule for.

"Then be shorter," she said.

Cheri stared at her.

"Lie down," said Blueberri. "Don't look at it. I'll be here."

So Cheri folded her long legs, and folded her long neck, and lay down in the grass at the top of the bank — which she had not done in years, because getting up again is a whole event — and she looked at the sky instead of at the reeds, and she did not measure anything at all.

The ferns moved.

A minute went by. Two.

And then, four feet from Cheri's nose, a bird came out of the reeds.

It was the size of a plum.

It hopped up onto a dry hollow reed, put its beak to the open end, and blew.

HOO-WEEEE.

The reed shook. The sound came out of the far end enormous, far too big for the bird, rolling away over the water and off through the trees where eleven pencil lines had been trying to find it all week.

The bird looked pleased with itself. It did it again.

Cheri did not move. Cheri barely breathed. But very slowly, with one hoof, she opened her notebook flat on the grass beside her, and without ever taking her eyes off the bird, she wrote.

Then she stopped writing and just watched, which for Cheri was the harder of the two.

Later, walking back with Blueberri as the light went gold, Cheri said, "I had the size wrong."

"You had the place right," said Blueberri. "Nobody else got anywhere near."

"The reed made it loud." Cheri turned that over, and it delighted her more than being right would have. "A small sound in a hollow tube comes out big. I'll have to measure a tube."

"Tomorrow," said Blueberri.

"Tomorrow," Cheri agreed.

And behind them at the bend of the stream, a bird the size of a plum practised its one enormous note, over and over, into the evening.