Summerland by Michael Chabon Page A

strange tenderness, to dig in the sand underneath it. They were digging separately, but all of them stayed in the area shadowed by the upraised, snaggled roots of the log. They slipped their small hands into the sand with a hiss and then brought them out, cupped, with a soft, sucking pop . The sand they removed in this way they drizzled through their fingers, writing intricate squiggles on the smooth surface of the beach. The driblets of sand made daisies and cloverleaves and suns. At last one of ferishers cried out, pointing at the pattern her wet handful of sand had formed, like a pair of crossed lightning bolts. The other diggers gathered around her, then, and with vigor, they began to dig all together at the spot. Before long they had dug a hole that was three times taller than any of them, and twice as wide. Then there was another cry, followed by what sounded to Ethan like a loud, rude belch. Everyone laughed, and the diggers came clambering up out of the hole.
    The last three struggled out under the shared burden of the largest clam that Ethan had ever seen. It was easily as big as a large watermelon, and looked even bigger in the ferishers' small arms as they staggered up onto the beach with it. Its shell was lumpy and rugged as broken concrete. The rippled lip dripped with green water and some kind of brown slime. The ferishers set it down on the beach and then the rest of the mob circled around it. Ringfinger Brown gave Ethan a gentle push at the small of his back.
    "Go on, boy," he said. "Listen to what Johnny Speakwater gots to say."
    Ethan stepped forward—he could almost have stepped right over the ferishers, but he felt instinctively that this would be rude. He arrived at the innermost edge of the circle just as the ferisher chief was going down on one knee in front of the clam.
    "Hey, Johnny," Cinquefoil said in a low, soft voice, calling to the clam like a man trying to wake a friend on the morning of some long-awaited exploit—a fishing trip or camp-out. "Whoa, Johnny Speakwater. All right now. Open up. We need a word with ya."
    There was a deep rumble from inside the clam, and Ethan's heart began to beat faster as he saw the briny lips of the shell part. Water came pouring out and vanished into the sand under the clam. Little by little, with an audible creak, the upper half of the clamshell lifted an inch or so off of the lower half. As it opened Ethan could see the grayish-pink glistening muscle of the thing, wet and slurping around in its pale lower jaw.
    "Burdleburbleslurpleslurpleburbleburdleslurp," said the clam, more or less.
    Cinquefoil nodded, and pointed to a pair of ferishers standing nearby. One of them reached into a leather tube, a kind of quiver that hung at his back, and pulled out a rolled sheet of what looked like parchment. The other took hold of one end, and then they stepped apart from each other, unrolling the scroll. It was a sheet of pale hide, like their clothing, a rectangle of deerskin marked all around with mysterious characters of an alphabet that Ethan didn't know. It was something like a Ouija board, only the letters had been painted by hand. The ferishers knelt down in front of the clam, and held the unfurled scroll out in front of him.
    Cinquefoil laid a hand on the top of the clam's shell, and stroked it softly, without seeming to notice what he was doing. He was lost in thought. Ethan supposed he was trying to come up with the right question for the oracle. Oracles were tricky, as Ethan knew from his reading of mythology. Often they answered the question you ought to have asked, or the one you didn't realize you were even asking. Ethan wondered what question he himself would pose to an oracular clam, given a chance.
    "Johnny," the chief said finally. "Ya done warned us that Coyote was coming. And ya was right. Ya said we ought ta fetch us a champion, and we done tried. And spent up half our dear treasury in the bargain. But look at this one, Johnny." Cinquefoil made a