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fairy tale, but what? The Seven Crow Brothers, that was the one — with the sister who saved them all by whittling her own finger into a key to fit an impossible lock.… And yet he could not touch the bones. Instead he took off his boots and used them as scoops, scraping up wet sand and burying the bones as best he could; then, barefoot, carrying the boots, he walked back quickly, the red light from the setting sun in his eyes.

    Even before life had been disrupted by the ship-wreck, things in the Thoreau house that summer were already in a state of agitation (“all of a doo-dah,” said Mother) because the family was packing to move, to a large house they had recently completed building in the center of town. This was a social and economic “return,” as their move out of town several years earlier had marked a grim moment in their finances. The family’s move back to the center of Concord was made possible by the recent prosperity of their pencil factory. This small business, which Father had inherited, occupied a barn warehouse. The family had always joked about their move “west” a half mile from town, and called the house-and-barn their “Texas” house. Henry’s inventions — of a new way of grinding plumbago for pencil lead and for printing, and a new way of pressing the woodtogether around the lead — had made the business thrive, so that now they were providing pencils and printer’s ink to shops throughout New England and even Europe. Once they had moved back “east” into the center of town, their old Texas house would serve as offices and shipping station for the business.
    But with Henry away, the moving had slowed. Mother was in a stew, un-packing and re-wrapping the plate and glassware, so that dozens of bundles littered the dining-room and parlor. All meals were now eaten in the kitchen. Father was not good at asking for help and kept trying to do the heavy work by himself; last night, the fourth day of Henry’s absence, he had strained his back trying to move a grain bin.
    Anne was down to one smock, one dress, and a shift — everything else was packed away in trunks. For now most of Henry’s things were temporarily lodged in a shed, and there Anne hung the bird-cage and, every morning, tended to his Monarch caterpillars. He had allowed her to help with his butterfly hatchery this year — last year, his first of documenting, she only had been allowed to watch. She was better than he, it turned out, at finding the rice-like white eggs on the milkweed plants. Of the dozen or so they had captured in June, only five had hatched into caterpillars, and one was now so fat it would soon be at its last moult and go into a chrysalid.
    That morning, when Mother was rubbing Father’s back with liniment and scolding him, Anne escaped the kitchenand went out to the shed for her morning chore. She peered into the glass box that sat on the table by the one window, then lifted the pierced-tin lid with great delicacy — the fresh, shiny green chrysalid was attached by sticky threads to the underside of a pierced dimple — and reached in to drop fresh milkweed leaves for the caterpillars that were still eating. She fished out the dried leaves and with a rag pinched up the tiny black droppings.
    She and her brother shared a sort of giddy admiration for these plump caterpillars, striped like a dandy’s waist-coat out of The Lady’s Book in bright yellow-green, black, and white. When you held one in your hand, it would at first curl up timidly, its wedges of caterpillar flesh bunched together like a squashed accordion; but then it would stretch out again, lifting its head and waggling short black horns.
    The tabby cat had followed Anne to the shed. She nosed against the glass box, then against Anne’s pencil and ruler, and got a vigorous push off the table. The Canary-bird twittered nervously. In the Monarchs note-book, Anne wrote a description of the chrysalid, gently angling the ruler for a measurement.