The Bell in the Deep Water

The pond behind the willows was the color of dark tea, and Otter had never once put her whole face beneath it.

She could swim, of course. She could roll and dive along the surface, chase silver minnows, float on her back with her paws folded on her belly like a small brown boat. But the deep water, the still cold part where the light stopped and the world turned green and then grey and then nothing at all — that place she left alone.

Her grandmother had told her about the bell.

"Long ago," she had said, "a little boat carried a brass bell across this pond, and the bell slipped over the side and sank. It rests down there still. On the quietest evenings, when the wind lies down, you can hear it ring."

And there it was — faint, round, gold in the ear. A single note rising up through all that dark. It made her chest ache with wanting. She wanted to see it. She had wanted to see it all summer.

But the deep water was cold, and the deep water was dark, and Otter did not like the not-knowing of it.

"I could go tomorrow," she told the frog on the lily pad.

The frog blinked his slow gold eyes. "The bell is patient," he said. "It has waited a hundred years. It can wait for a brave heart."

A brave heart. Otter turned the words over. She did not feel brave. She felt like a small warm animal who liked the top of the water very much.

That evening the wind lay down, and the note came again — long and low and lovely.

Otter swam to the middle of the pond, where the reeds gave way and the bottom fell out of sight. She looked down into the green-going-grey. Her heart knocked against her ribs like a paw on a hollow log.

"I don't have to go all the way," she said to herself, and her own voice steadied her. "I can go as far as I go, and that will be far enough."

She tipped her nose down and dove.

The first stretch was easy, sunlit, full of the shapes she knew. Then the light thinned. The cold pressed her fur flat. The green turned to grey, and the grey turned to a soft heavy dark, and every part of her wanted to turn and rush back up to the bright ceiling of the world.

She did not rush. She hung there in the dark and let herself be afraid, the way you let a shiver pass through you and then leave.

It was only water. It was only cold. It was only the not-knowing, and now she was inside the not-knowing, and it had not swallowed her whole. Her chest still rose and fell. Her paws still knew how to swim. The fear was there, and she was there too, both of them together in the deep.

She let herself sink one length lower.

And there — a shape. Round, patient, furred with green. The bell lay tilted in the silt, its old brass gone soft and dim, a small fish drifting through the mouth of it as if through a doorway. Otter reached out one paw and touched the curved cold side.

The metal hummed under her touch, the faintest gold ring, meant only for her.

She had seen it. She had come all this way through the dark, and the dark had let her, and here it was — real and quiet and not frightening at all now that she was beside it. Just an old bell resting, the way tired things rest.

Otter turned and rose toward the light, slow and unhurried, carrying the hum of it in her paw the whole way up.

She broke the surface into the last of the evening. The willows stood soft against a rose-colored sky. The frog was still on his lily pad, exactly where she had left him.

"Well?" said the frog.

"I touched it," Otter said, and the words came out very small and very glad.

The frog said nothing more. He only blinked his slow gold eyes and settled deeper into the green.

Otter floated on her back with her paws folded on her belly, the sky darkening gently above her, the dark water warm now beneath her, and far below, patient as ever, the old bell keeping its quiet.

And the pond was still. And the pond was hers. And the deep, low ring of it rose once more through all that dark, and this time she was not afraid.