The Srebrnica River curved behind old willows so sharply that from a distance it looked like a kinked ribbon. At the sandy bend, Hania crouched down and blew on the wet sand to chase away the midges. She always started her day by checking her tracks. She carried a sketchbook in her backpack, which she called the Track Atlas, pencils and a magnifying glass from her grandfather. Olek, her younger brother, kept a backpack with a half-litre bottle of water and a box of sultanas, which he munched on when he was nervous. "Check this out," muttered Hania, tapping her finger against the print. "Five fingers, wide, claws... a badger. Just why is it walking this way, so close to the water?" "And here?" Olek put his hand to another series. "Three long fingers, breaks like needles... a heron. And... and it's weird." His last word broke off midway through; he could see a sort of even streak in the sand, as if someone had been pulling a string of grass for a while. Hania raised her eyes. Green tongues of eyelash swayed on the water, and the wind was knocking thin, silver leaves off the willows. It was a warm, fragrant summer, one in which everything sounds louder: the splash of a beaver, the flutter of goldeneye wings, the rustling of reeds. And suddenly - silence. On the other side of the river, even the stubborn woodpecker, which had been practising its drumming since morning, had fallen silent. Something black flew over the water and perched on a fence post right next to it. It was Kaja's crow - a bird so bold that it had learned to open bicycle locks with its beak, and so curious that it was putting Hania's stolen trinkets back in its pocket as if it were haggling. "Kra!" announced Kaja, croaking her beak. A silver scale fell out of its beak, glinting like a tiny mirror. She caught it still in the air and placed it under Hani's nose. "Kra. Come on." "She says we should go," snarled Olek, but he was already putting on his backpack. Hania only nodded. Kaja often made things up, but never without reason. They walked along the bank, wading through the soft grass. The footprints they saw on the sand appeared every now and then: badger tracks, fox tracks, leaping like zigzags, bird tracks, ending in splayed fingers. They all ran in one direction - upstream, towards the bend where the Srebrnica hugged the forest wall. "It's like an arrow," whispered Olek. "They all go there, look." "Don't say 'everyone' or you'll still think people too," replied Hania, but her heart began to beat faster. Kaja jumped from stake to stake, then to willow, and looked again and again to see if they were going. As they passed the last footbridge, the path narrowed and fell into thick thickets of calamus. It smelled of mint and ooze, frog wasps clacked against the water, and blue dragonflies circled overhead with what looked like miniature arrows. Finally, Kaja dropped to the ground and stumbled a few steps, as if she couldn't keep her balance. She stopped at a stick stuck into the shore and tapped it with her beak. The stick was wrapped in dry grass. Someone had attached a heron feather and a smooth seashell to it. Up close, Hania noticed that the grass wasn't just any grass - it was a twisted long ribbon of rush, tied like the knot her grandfather used to tie snowshoes. "A sign," she whispered. "Just whose?" The answer came immediately. Out of the bushes, with as much caution as the moon emerges from behind a cloud, came a beaver. He had wet fur from which drops dripped, and a broad tail that slapped unhurriedly against the mud, leaving a fan-shaped trail. Behind him, as if on an invisible rope, a second shadow emerged - a fox, drawn, red, with eyes so alert that a strange sensation of being measured from nose to heel struck Hania. "Oh dear," leapt up Olek. He narrowly missed crunching another raisin out of stress. "They... they... are looking at us." Kaja jumped beaver-beaver, fox-fox, as if she was counting them. "Kra! Come on, faster!" "If this is a silly joke, Kaja, then I stop giving you buttons," muttered Hania, but she moved on. Olek followed her, keeping close. The path led them into a clearing they didn't know, although they knew every stone in the area. It was like a bowl - surrounded on three sides by a wall of forest and open to the river on the fourth. In the middle grew an oak so old that the bark on it had a silvery sheen, as if someone had polished it every night. Its spreading boughs cast a shadow cooler than that of all the willows together. And there were animals there. Not one, not two, but many - hedgehogs like nudibranchs, a pair of roe deer with dark eyes like ripe plums, two rabbits that, sticking out their ears, looked like grass dodgers, a badger with stripes on its muzzle, an otter standing on its paws as if asking what to do next, and someone else that Hania couldn't name because she always saw it from a distance - something yellow-brown and softly stepping, which looked like a patch of light in the shade. "I don't believe it," swallowed Olek. "It's like... like a deliberation." Hania suddenly felt as if she had two voices in her stomach: one saying that this was the moment she had been dreaming of since she started running the Atlas of Tracks, and the other whispering that they should turn back immediately because something unusual was happening where animals gather in broad daylight. The beaver stepped forward. Droplets fell from his chin like little beads. He looked at the children, then at Kaja. A crow beeped, beeped, tapped its beak on the ground, as if confirming. "They call me Boryk," the beaver said. His voice was low, snarling, like the sound of a splash under a bridge. The words were a bit like pebbles in the mouth, but understandable. "We don't have time. The water is dying." Olek sat up until he was impressed. Hania felt one of the two voices in her stomach scream with delight. Yes, the animal was just talking to them. "Dying water?" she repeated, stopping to consider whether it was appropriate to ask the question of an oak, a deer or a beaver. "What do you mean?" Boric raised his head towards the river. "We've been swimming here for generations. The ger by the old river bed. Cubs... in the reeds. Someone... cutting off a tributary. The old channel by the mill. Stone on stone. Gellies. Turned off. Water flows, but not here. It's falling." The last word rang out harshly, like if something falls that should never fall. All ears that were in the clearing pointed upstream. Even the wind held its breath. Hania listened - at first nothing, just the whisper of leaves, but then a quiet, deafening sound spilled out, like the rumble of a train that can't decide whether to go or stop. Was it water, receding somewhere around the bend? Or was it metal squeezing something? "My dad says that the old mill is sometimes visited by someone," choked out Olek. "To take pictures. But who would... why would..." "The fish stay in the holes," added the fox, who had remained silent until then, calmly. Hania got all the way hot. The fox's voice was like smoke, soft and yet pinched in the eyes. "The birds don't know where to sit. It's starting to get worse." "I saw people at the airlock," Kaja snarled, tapping her claw against the bark of an oak tree. "With helmets. With pink waistcoats. They were honking like cranes out of a box." Hania was already about to ask what that meant when she heard a splash, as if someone had thrown a bucket into the water. Then another. The river moved - not in the way it usually ripples, but as if someone had taken off their coat. The level began to drop by a hair, barely perceptible, but enough to reveal a pebble more where a moment ago there had only been a mirror. "It's happening now," she whispered, her heart thudding like a terrified sparrow. "It's about to get shallow in here." "Frogs. Eggs. Reedbuck nests," Boryk listed briefly, as if he was counting what was salvageable on one paw. He thumped his tail on the ground once, a second time - not in anger, rather in a rhythm that was to turn all their collected weakness into action. "Need." The deer stepped back and pointed its muzzle towards the woods, as if it had already seen the path to run. The hedgehogs began to move their noses as intensely as if they were about to sniff out a solution. Olek looked at Hania, and something dawned in his eyes that Hania knew well - it was the spark that lit up when they found a new trail. "I... we..." Hania began, but did not finish. From the other side of the river, where a narrow footbridge was hidden in the rushes, a light flashed. First one, then the other, like two blinds. It was not the stars - the day had not yet finished its course. It was something else shimmering and shifting, dissecting the reeds. The crow's wings suddenly spread wide. Kaja jumped sideways, like an eel out of the water. "Kra! Here they come!" The rumbling sound struck clearer now, metallic, with short pauses, as if someone was coiling a chain and stretching it back. From the bushes, on the side of the mill, a rasp and a voice also came to them - not words, rather the short shouts one hears when working hard. Somewhere a hammer clattered against metal. Between the reeds they could see orange stripes on their jackets and the tip of something shiny - a rod? a crowbar? "Hania..." Olek grabbed her sleeve. "They... they're doing it now. Here. Right now." Boryk did not look away from the river. His moustache trembled, as if sensing a current that no one had ever seen before. "Don't delay," he muttered, but the word was addressed to no one - to the children, to the foxes, to the oak, to the river itself. At the same moment, the ground beneath his feet trembled, quietly, as if someone had laid their hands on a drum. Another sound reached them from the upper bend - a dragging swish, sudden and cold, from which even a magpie fell silent on an extreme branch. Hania reflexively took a step back and stepped on something soft. She looked down - it was a scrap of green rush cord, tied in a knot, identical to the one at the sign above the bank. Before she could raise her head, someone from the side of the path coughed, very humanly, very close. A shadow fell on the sand at her feet. The torch cut through the twilight beneath the oak, stopped on Boryk, moved on to Kaja, flashed across the eyes of the fox and hovered over Hania's face. "What are you doing here?" came a hard whisper, and in the same instant a shadow with yellow eyes flashed behind her back, which Hania did not expect at all - and something heavy rustled in the reeds exactly on the other side of the river.