The morning came when he found the plant standing at the door and waiting for him. He should have been surprised, of course, but he really wasn’t, for he had lived with it, watching it of eventide, and although he had not dared admit it even to himself, he had known what it was.
For here was the creature he’d found in the woods, no longer sick and keening, no longer close to death, but full of life and youth.
It was not the same entirely, though. He stood and looked at it and could see the differences - the little differences that might have been those between youth and age, or between a father and a son, or again the differences expressed in an evolutionary pattern.
‘Good morning,’ said Mose, not feeling strange at all to be talking to the thing. ‘It’s good to have you back.’
The thing standing in the yard did not answer him. But that was not important; he had not expected that it would. The one important point was that he had something he could talk to.
‘I’m going out to do the chores,’ said Mose. ‘You want to tag along?’
It tagged along with him and it watched him as he did the chores and he talked to it, which was a vast improvement over talking to himself.
At breakfast, he laid an extra plate for it and pulled up an extra chair, but it turned out the critter was not equipped to use a chair, for it wasn’t hinged to sit.
Nor did it eat. That bothered Mose at first, for he was hospitable, but he told himself that a big, strong, strapping youngster like this one knew enough to take care of itself, and he probably didn’t need to worry too much about how it got along.
After breakfast, he went out to the garden, with the critter accompanying him, and sure enough, the plant was gone. There was a collapsed husk lying on the ground, the outer covering that had been the cradle of the creature at his side.
Then he went to the machine shed and the creature saw the birdcage and rushed over to it and looked it over minutely. Then it turned around to Mose and made a sort of pleading gesture.
Mose went over to it and laid his hands on one of the twisted bars and the critter stood beside him and laid its hands on, too, and they pulled together. It was no use. They could move the metal some, but not enough to pull it back in shape again.
They stood and looked at one another, although looking may not be the word, for the critter had no eyes to look with. It made some funny motions with its hands, but Mose couldn’t understand. Then it lay down on the floor and showed him how the birdcage ribs were fastened to the base.
It took a while for Mose to understand how the fastening worked and he never did know exactly why it did. There wasn’t actually, any reason that it should work that way.
First you applied some pressure, just the right amount at the exact and correct angle, and the bar would move a little. Then you applied some more pressure, again the exact amount and at the proper angle, and the bar would move some more. You did this three times and the bar came loose, although there was, God knows, no reason why it should.
Mose started a fire in the forge and shoveled in some coal and worked the bellows while the critter watched. But when he picked up the bar to put it in the fire, the critter got between him and the forge, and wouldn’t let him near. Mose realized then he couldn’t - or wasn’t supposed to - heat the bar to straighten it and he never questioned the entire rightness of it. For, he told himself, this thing must surely know the proper way to do it.
So he took the bar over to the anvil and started hammering it back into shape again, cold, without the use of fire, while the critter tried to show him the shape that it should be. It took quite a while, but finally it was straightened out to the critter’s satisfaction.
Mose figured they’d have themselves a time getting the bar back in place again, but it slipped on as slick as could be.
Then they took off another bar and this one went faster, now that Mose had the hang of it.
But it was hard and grueling labor. They worked all day and only straightened out five bars.
It took four solid days to get the bars on the birdcage hammered into shape and all the time the hay was waiting to be cut.
But it was all right with Mose. He had someone to talk to and the house had lost its loneliness.
When they got the bars back in place, the critter slipped into the cage and starting fooling with a dingus on the roof of it that looked like a complicated basket. Mose, watching, figured that the basket was some sort of control.
The critter was discouraged. It walked around the shed looking for something and seemed unable to find it. It came back to Mose and made its despairing, pleading gesture. Mose showed it iron and steel; he dug into a carton where he kept bolts and clamps and bushings and scraps of metal and other odds and ends, finding brass and copper and even some aluminium, but it wasn’t any of these.
And Mose was glad - a bit ashamed for feeling glad, but glad all the same,
For it had been clear to him that when the birdcage was all ready, the critter would be leaving him. It had been impossible for Mose to stand in the way of the repair of the cage, or to refuse to help. But now that it apparently couldn’t be, he found himself well pleased.
Now the critter would have to stay with him and he’d have someone to talk to and the house would not be lonely.
It would be welcome, he told himself, to have folks again. The critter was almost as good a companion as Towser.
Next morning, while Mose was fixing breakfast, he reached up in the cupboard to get the box of oatmeal and his hand struck the cigar box and it came crashing to the floor. It fell over on its side and the lid came open and the dollars went free-wheeling all around the kitchen.
Out of the corner of his eye, Mose saw the critter leaping quickly in pursuit of one of them. It snatched it up and turned to Mose, with the coin held between its fingers, and a sort of thrumming noise was coming out of the nest of worms on top of it.
It bent and scooped up more of them and cuddled them and danced a sort of jig, and Mose knew, with a sinking heart, that it had been silver the critter had been hunting.
So Mose got down on his hands and knees and helped the critter gather up all the dollars. They put them back into the cigar box and Mose picked up the box and gave it to the critter.
The critter took it and hefted it and had a disappointed look. Taking the box over to the table, it took the dollars out and stacked them in neat piles and Mose could see it was very disappointed.
Perhaps, after all, Mose thought, it had not been silver the thing had been hunting for, Maybe it had made a mistake in thinking that the silver was some other kind of metal.
Mose got down the oatmeal and poured it into some water and put it on the stove. When it was cooked and the coffee was ready, he carried his breakfast to the table and sat down to eat.
The critter still was standing across the table from him, stacking and restacking the piles of silver dollars. And now it showed him with a hand held above the stacks, that it needed more of them. This many stacks, it showed him, and each stack so high.
Mose sat stricken, with a spoon full of oatmeal halfway to his mouth. He thought of all those other dollars, the iron kettle packed with them, underneath the floor boards in the living room. And he couldn’t do it; they were the only thing he had - except the critter now. And he could not hive them up so the critter could go and leave him too.
He ate his bowl of oatmeal without tasting it and drank two cups of coffee. And all the time the critter stood there and showed him how much more it needed.