New Smell
Kiwi smelled it first thing in the morning, before he had even come down the rope ladder.
Something sweet. Something warm. Something that was definitely not there yesterday.
He stood on his top platform with his nose in the air and his eyes shut, and by the time he opened them again he had already drawn the answer in the dirt with a stick.
Because this is what Kiwi does. Kiwi does not wonder about things. Kiwi builds about things.
He gathered a wide green leaf, a length of springy vine, and one small grey feather from under the fern where the woodpigeons argue. He rolled the leaf into a cone. He fixed the vine to the narrow end so the whole thing could turn. He tied the feather to the front, loosely, so a breath of anything would set it wiggling.
"The Super Sniffer," he said.
He held it up.
The feather wiggled.
Kiwi followed it, and the feather led him briskly to the Berry Patch, which smelled of berries, which everyone already knew.
He shortened the vine and tried again. This time the feather led him to the stream, which smelled of stream. Then to Tang, who smelled of the inside of Tang's house. Then back to the Berry Patch.
The trouble was not that the Super Sniffer was bad. The trouble was that it was excellent. Wan Hundred Woods has about a hundred smells in it on a slow day, and the Super Sniffer had opinions about all of them.
So Kiwi made it better. He made the cone smaller. He made the feather lighter. He built a second feather, and then a third, and hung them in a row so he could read them like little flags.
By the middle of the afternoon he had a Super Sniffer with five feathers, a swivel, and a proper handle, and it worked perfectly, and it pointed at absolutely everything.
Kiwi sat down on a root and looked at it.
"It can find any smell in the forest," he said. "I only want the new one."
Blueberri had been on the root the whole time, not saying much. She does that when somebody is busy being busy.
At some point she had slid down until she was hanging off the root by her knees, head underneath, arms dangling, the way a monkey does when a morning has gone on long enough.
"It's better this way," said Blueberri, upside down.
"What is?"
"The smell." She swung a little. "It's stronger down here. No. Up here. I have stopped being sure which one I am."
Kiwi looked at her for a long moment.
Then he looked at his Super Sniffer, with its five polite feathers, every one of them hanging sideways, sniffing along the ground like a machine built by somebody who had never once looked up.
"Oh," said Kiwi. "Oh."
"I have smelled it before, you know," said Blueberri, still upside down. "Last year. For about a week. Then it stopped, and I forgot all about it until just now."
He untied the whole thing and lashed it to the longest branch he could carry, and held it up over his head like a very serious flag, and turned in a slow circle in the middle of the woods with Blueberri walking beside him.
North: nothing.
East: nothing.
Then the feathers went mad.
They followed it. Past the Old Bridge, up the long slope, into the part of Wan Hundred Woods where nobody goes on purpose because there is nothing there — and there, over their heads, an old tree that had been an ordinary old tree all year had gone quietly and completely into flower. Small white flowers, thousands of them, all the way up into the canopy.
The whole hill smelled of honey and rain.
Jackfroot arrived because Jackfroot always arrives. Tang got there somehow before Jackfroot did. Cheri counted the flowers on one branch, gave up, and said "many," which cost her something.
Kiwi pushed the branch into the ground so the Super Sniffer stood up on its own, and the five feathers went on wiggling away above them, still working, still right, still pointing at the thing everybody could now see for themselves.
He sat down with his back against the tree and, for once, did not build anything at all.
"One week," said Blueberri.
"Then we had better not waste it," said Kiwi.
The Super Sniffer wiggled away over their heads until it got dark, and nobody took it down.
