09/15/2026
🐾 Bolt’s Story
A Seedcake on a Leaf
Meet the Characters: https://adventuresofbolt.com/characters.html
Marrow went up the ridge this morning and did not ask anybody.
I know because she asked me to walk her to the bottom of it, and I said yes before I had worked out what I was saying yes to, which is a thing that happens to me around that possum.
— —
The argument had been going since the Sunday the young raccoon came down to the ferns.
Four of them have been up there since the twenty-ninth of August. The skunk. One of the young raccoons. Wren, and her boy with her.
The other young raccoon came down as far as the ferns nine days ago and sat there and would not come in, and went back up, and nobody has seen him since.
And the clearing has been chewing on one question ever since and getting nowhere with it.
— —
“Somebody ought to go up.”
“And say what?”
“That they can come back.”
“They know they can come back. Nobody told them they couldn’t.”
“Then somebody ought to go up and say it anyway, because knowing a thing and having it said to you are different.”
That was Thimble and it is the best sentence anybody produced in nine days.
— —
But the other side had it too, and it was not cowardice, and I am going to put it down fairly.
They went of their own accord. Nobody drove them. If four animals walk out and the clearing sends a delegation up the hill after them, that is not an invitation, that is pressure with company.
And the one who came to the ferns came on his own. Nobody fetched him. That is the direction the thing is supposed to go and if we start hauling animals down that ridge we will teach the whole lot of them that coming back is something that gets done to you.
Newton put the hardest version of it.
“If you go up and they say no, you have made it harder for them to come down later. A refusal is a thing an animal has to live with afterward. At the moment they have not refused anything.”
— —
And that is where it stuck, for nine days, because both of those are true.
Then two evenings ago — this last Sunday, after the meeting — somebody said the thing that cannot be answered. It was one of the older rabbits and she said it quietly on the way out.
“There is a kit up there.”
— —
Nobody had a reply to that and nobody has had one since.
Whatever Wren decided, that kit did not decide it. He is not old enough to have an opinion about a fox or a bobcat or a middle wall of anything.
And I am not saying she did wrong to take him. Mothers move their young and do not put it to a vote, and if she had left him down here somebody would have had a great deal to say about that instead.
What I am saying is that there is a small one on a ridge tonight whose situation was settled entirely by somebody else, and that is the sort of thing this clearing is supposed to mind about.
And every animal in that clearing has been walking around with that for two days.
— —
So Marrow got up before light and came round by our gate.
It was cold enough that morning to see your own breath, which it has not been since May, and there was frost on the low grass in the shadow of the fence that went off the moment the sun got round to it.
“Walk me to the bottom of the ridge trail.”
“Does Ephraim know?”
“No.”
“Marrow —”
“I’m not going to a meeting, Bolt. I’m going up a hill.”
— —
It is about a mile and a quarter to the bottom of that trail and it took us the best part of an hour.
Marrow walks at possum speed and will not be hurried by anybody, including me, including this morning. You hear her before you see her — that dragging shuffle and the stick going down every third step.
She had a leaf.
That goes down because it is the entire story, and I did not understand it until we were most of the way there.
Seedcake. On a leaf. The same as she did for a cat at the ferns two Wednesdays ago and for a raccoon at the ferns nine days ago.
“That’s for Wren.”
“It’s for whoever is at the top of the trail.”
“And if that’s the bobcat?”
“Then he gets a seedcake,” said Marrow, “and I expect it will confuse him considerably.”
— —
At the bottom she stopped and made me stop.
“You’re not coming up.”
“I know.”
“I mean it. A dog coming up that trail is a different animal arriving than a possum with a leaf.”
“I said I know.”
And she looked at me for a second and said, “You’re a good dog and you are very bad at waiting,” and went up.
— —
I waited two hours and ten minutes at the bottom of that trail and I am not going to pretend I was calm about it.
It smells different at the foot of that ridge. Colder. More rock and less green, and the creek noise drops away behind you so that you can hear a great deal further than you want to.
She came back down at about nine.
“Well?”
“Not here.”
“Marrow.”
“Not here, Bolt.”
She was not hurt. She had no leaf. And she did not say one word the whole mile and a quarter home, and I did not ask her one question, which is the single hardest thing I have done in a month.
— —
She told Ephraim at midday and she told him in front of whoever was about, which I do not think was an accident.
She got about forty feet up the trail and Wren was already standing in it.
She had heard us coming from a long way off, the way you do up there, and she had come down to meet Marrow before Marrow could get any further.
Which Marrow says, and I agree, is not the behaviour of an animal who has stopped thinking about the clearing.
— —
“What did she say?” somebody asked.
“That is hers,” said Marrow. “She can say it herself when she wants to.”
“Marrow —”
“I am not going to stand in this clearing and report on a conversation that a frightened animal had with me on a hillside.”
And that was that, and there was a silence, and I have never respected anybody more in my life.
— —
“Can you tell us anything at all?” said Ephraim.
“Three things. I asked her this morning whether I could and she said those three and no more, so that is what you are getting.”
One. Wren and the kit are all right and are eating.
Two. She did not say no.
Three. She asked how Asa was.
— —
That third one went through that clearing like cold water.
“She asked about Asa,” somebody said, as though saying it again would make it settle.
“She asked about Asa.”
“She’s got a kit up there.”
“I know what she’s got up there,” said Marrow.
She is up a ridge with a bobcat and a young one and she asked after an armadillo who got hurt on the nineteenth of August.
She has been thinking about us. Not the whole time, maybe. I do not know that and I am not going to say it.
But an animal can walk out of a room and still be carrying the animals in it, and this one is, and every one of us found that out at the same moment.
— —
The leaf is still up there somewhere.
Marrow says she put it down and came away and did not look to see whether it got picked up, and that this is the part she is sure about and would do again.
Nothing is settled. Wren is on the ridge tonight and so is the kit and so are the other two, and there is no plan and no date and nobody has agreed to anything.
But somebody went up. And somebody came down. And the clearing knows one true thing this evening that it did not know two days ago.
— —
Something to Think About
“You have not strengthened the weak or healed the sick or bound up the injured. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. You have ruled them harshly and brutally” (Ezekiel 34:4, NIV).
That is God speaking against the shepherds of Israel, and before it goes anywhere else it has to be said plainly what it is.
It is an indictment of leaders. Ezekiel is prophesying against men who were supposed to be feeding a flock and were feeding themselves instead. It is not, in the first place, a verse about how a congregation handles the people who stop coming.
But the charge in the middle of it will not stay in its own century, and I am not sure it was ever meant to.
— —
You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost.
And do not simplify the indictment, because I nearly did.
These men failed in more than one direction at once. They ruled harshly and brutally — that is in the same verse. They did not strengthen the weak or heal the sick. And the next line says the sheep scattered because there was no shepherd, so the scattering is laid at their door too.
They are not charged only with sitting still. Part of why those sheep were on the hills at all was the way they had been handled.
But sitting still is in the charge. You have not brought back the strays or searched for the lost. Failing to go after them is named alongside everything else, as its own count, and that is a hard line for any church that has ever comforted itself with well, they knew where we were.
— —
And now the other side, because that clearing had it right and the argument was real.
A rat said that a refusal is a thing an animal has to live with afterward, and he is not wrong. Push somebody into saying no out loud and you have handed them something they now have to defend.
There is such a thing as pursuit that hardens. Anybody who has been on the end of it knows the feeling — the calls that are really summonses, the concern that is really a campaign, the visit that arrives with an agenda in its pocket.
Ezekiel is not commanding that. He is charging men who did nothing, and the cure for nothing is not everything.
— —
So look at what the possum actually did, because it threads the whole needle.
She went. That is the first half and there is no getting round it — she did not send a message and she did not wait for the argument to finish. She got up before light and walked a mile and a quarter and then up a hill on her own legs.
And she arrived carrying a seedcake on a leaf.
Not an argument. Not an invitation that had to be answered. Not when are you coming back. Food, put down on the ground, from an animal who then came away without waiting to see if it got picked up.
That is going after somebody without requiring anything from them when you get there. It is the hardest combination there is and almost nobody manages it.
— —
Two more things and then I will let you go.
She refused to report the conversation. Somebody asked what Wren said, in front of everybody, and she would not tell them, and she had asked Wren’s permission for the three things she did share.
If your church cannot go after somebody without the visit turning into information that circulates afterward, you are not ready to send anybody, and the people you are going after can smell it from a long way up the hill. Marrow was trusted on that ridge because she is the sort who cannot be quoted.
And she asked after Asa. That is the line I would take home. A frightened animal on a hillside, with everything she has got wrapped up in her own situation, asked how the hurt one was getting on.
Be careful what you build on that. Some people leave and do not look back, and some are relieved to be gone, and I am not going to tell you they are all secretly aching for you — that is the kind of comfortable thing a church says to itself and it is not always true.
What that hillside proves is narrower and better. Do not assume that leaving meant they stopped caring. You do not know. She asked about an armadillo.
— —
And the last thing, which is the only reason any of this is bearable.
Twelve verses after the indictment, God stops charging the shepherds and says what He is going to do about it Himself.
I will search for the lost and bring back the strays. I will bind up the injured and strengthen the weak.
The shepherds failed and the searching did not stop. He took it up in His own name.
— —
Before the last thing, two limits on all of that, because a story like this gets used as a licence.
Not every hill should be climbed alone, and some should not be climbed by you. If there is real danger up there, get help and tell somebody who can do something. If you are not the right one to go, do not appoint yourself — a dog arriving at the top of that trail is a different animal arriving than a possum with a leaf, and Bolt staying at the bottom was part of the wisdom of the whole visit, not a failure of nerve.
And do not let caution become a respectable name for doing nothing. That is the trap Ezekiel is actually describing, and it is far commoner in churches than recklessness is.
— —
So go up the hill, if it is yours to go up. Take something to eat. Put it down. Come away.
And do not go believing the outcome rests on how well you do it. The Shepherd’s care did not begin when you started up that trail and it will not end when you walk back down.
You are not the shepherd of anybody’s soul. He is.
