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CHAPTER 1
The creek behind our house talks all the time. It whispers in the hot months when the water is low, and it murmurs in the cold months under a skin of ice. After snow melts or rain falls, the creek nearly shouts.
What does it say? I couldn't tell you, any more than I could tell you what the frogs are saying when they croak or the birds when they sing or the winds when they rustle the trees. I just love to listen.
So I'm always glad to visit the creek, especially in the summer when the air is like an oven.
One muggy day, my little brother Michael and I decided to go down to the creek and pan for gold. Dad gave us a shovel for digging up gravel. Mom gave us two cake pans for dipping water and swishing the gravel around. We dipped, we swished, hunting for nuggets in our tin pans, and we talked about how we'd spend our money once we struck it rich.
"Look here, Lizzie!" he would cry, or "Look here, Mike!" 1 would cry, whenever we thought we'd spied some gold. But it always turned out to be a shiny pebble or a bit of yellow leaf.
What we did find were fossils — the curvy outlines of shells, the feathery shapes of ferns, even the slinky tunnels of worms.
Mom told us our fossils were millions of years old. Just think! After all those millions of years, we could still dig up worms in the mud, see ferns curling on the banks, and find mussels hunched in their shells down on the bottom of the creek.
Once Michael found an arrowhead in the gravel, and he called me to come see. It was a beauty, made from stone the color of chocolate, as long as my thumb, sharp enough so we handled it carefully The people who'd chipped the arrowhead, Mom told us, had lived here hundreds of years ago — maybe even thousands.
I wondered if those long-ago people had ever stood here listening to water burble over rocks.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Crawdad Creek"
by .
Copyright © 1999 Scott Russell Sanders.
Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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