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lift its head. Its eyes were beginning to glaze.
    â€œGo,” Matty told her in an urgent voice. “Get those things.”
    â€œDo you think they’ll help?” Jean asked dubiously. She took her hand from the dog and stood, but she lingered.
    â€œJust go!”
Matty ordered.
    â€œYou needn’t use a rude tone, Matty,” Jean said with an edge in her voice. But she turned with a flounce of her skirt and went. He barely heard the sound of the door closing behind her. Steeling himself against the painful vibrating shock that he knew would go through his entire body, Matty placed his left hand on the mother dog, his right on the puppy, and willed them to live.
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    An hour later, Matty stumbled home, exhausted. Back at Mentor’s house, Jean was feeding the mother dog and giggling at the antics of the lively puppy.
    â€œWho would have thought of that combination of herbs? Isn’t it amazing!” she had said in delight, watching the creatures revive.
    â€œLucky guess.” He let Jean believe it was the herbs. She was distracted by the sudden liveliness of the dogs and didn’t even notice how weak Matty was. He sat leaning against the wall in the shed and watched her tend them. But his vision was slightly blurred and his whole body ached.
    Finally, when he had regained a little strength, he forced himself to stand and leave. Fortunately his own homeplace was empty. The blind man was out somewhere, and Matty was glad of that. Seer would have noticed something wrong. He could always feel it. He said the atmosphere in the homeplace changed, as if wind had shifted, if Matty had so much as a cold.
    And this was much more. He staggered into his room off the kitchen and lay down on his bed, breathing hard. Matty had never felt so weak, so drained. Except for the frog . . .
    The frog was smaller,
he thought. But it was the same thing.
    He had come across the little frog by chance, in the clearing. He had no reason to be there that day; he had simply wanted to be alone, away from busy Village, and had gone into Forest to get away, as he did sometimes.
    Barefoot, he had stepped on the frog, and was startled. “Sorry!” he had said playfully, and reached down to pick the little fellow up. “Are you all right? You should have hopped away when you heard me coming.”
    But the frog wasn’t all right, and couldn’t have escaped with a hop. It hadn’t been Matty’s light step that had injured it; he could see that right away. Some creature—Matty thought probably a fox or weasel—had inflicted a terrible wound upon the small green thing, and the frog was almost dead of it. One leg dangled, torn away from the body, held there only by an oozing bit of ragged tissue. In his hand, the frog drew a shuddering breath and then was still.
    â€œSomeone chewed you up and spit you out,” Matty said. He was sympathetic but matter-of-fact. The hard life and quick death of Forest’s creatures were everyday things. “Well,” he said, “I’ll give you a nice burial.”
    He knelt to dig out a spot with his hands in the mossy earth. But when he tried to set the little body down, he found that he was connected to it in a way that made no sense. A painful kind of power surged from his hand, flowing into the frog, and held them bound together.
    Confused and alarmed, he tried to scrape the sticky body of the frog off his hand. But he couldn’t. The vibrating pain held them connected. Then, after a moment, while Matty knelt, still mystified by what was happening, the frog’s body twitched.
    â€œSo you’re not dead. Get off of me, then.” Now he was able to drop the frog to the ground. The stab of pain eased.
    â€œWhat was that all about?” Matty found himself talking to the frog as if it might be able to reply. “I thought you were dead, but you weren’t. You’re going to lose your leg, though. And your hopping days