The Stolen Child

By Clara Hume

In The Stolen Child, we’ll find a world unrecognizable to those of us in living in the early to mid-21st century. Fran and Leo’s youngest child, Fae, goes missing after extreme wildfires force the family off their Idaho mountain. Fae’s story is told in short interludes, which contrast with the first person narratives written by the adults around her, as her life is upended and she ends up in Schull, Ireland, the home of the “last wolf in Ireland.” As her family sails through new waters in Canada, and then across the Atlantic, to find her, a romance grows between Fae’s older brother Alejandro and his best friend Kristy. Yet, the backdrop to the blossoming relationship is a journey to find the missing child–sinister and full of mystery, speculative about an even more drastically climate-changed time than the one we’re experiencing now and one in which false narratives and dangerous ideologies continue to flourish.

The Stolen Child is inspired by WB Yeats’ poem of the same name, and by Fae’s mother, Fran’s, childhood interest in Irish mythology. Fae’s story reflects the literal stolen child. The story also follows her family and friends as they go to the ends of the world–the waters and the wild–in their search for her.

Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

Human suffering is wrought by many things, but in Fae’s case, a strange religious cult is taking children. Is it to protect them? Something more sinister? Find out as the second part of this duology travels to the new wilds of northern British Columbia and then Ireland.

Early on in the story, we’ll meet the fates of many characters we loved in Part I, Back to the Garden–and a reading guide is available to those who want to dig in to this book without reading the prequel. A new generation is ushered in–children from some of our favorites–like Fran, Leo, Mae, Buddha, Maisie, Caine, and more. Fae is the youngest of them all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Dragonfly Publishing
• Release date: Nov 28, 2022
• ISBN: 9781927685327

Clara Hume

(Mary Woodbury, pen Clara Hume)I run Dragonfly.eco, a place to find meaningful stories about our natural world and humanity’s connection with it. I’m also a writer and am the author of Back to the Garden (Moon Willow Press, 2014), Bird Song: A Novella (Dragonfly Pub, 2020), and Finn’s Tree Alphabet (Dragonfly Pub, 2021). Upcoming is the sequel to Back to the Garden, The Stolen Child (2022). I’m also a contributing author to Wild Tales from the River (Stormbird Press, 2018). I’m part of the core writer team at Artists and Climate Change and have guest-posted at Chicago Review of Books, Ecology Action Centre’s Magazine, ClimateCultures.net, Free Word Centre, SFFWorld, and Fjord’s Review. My articles have been translated at Chinese Science Writers Association and Zest Letteratura Sostenibile. I’m a graduate of Purdue University, where I received two degrees: English and anthropology.

Book preview

Prologue

The year Fae began writing a journal was the year human calendars moved to 2100. She had found everyone's diaries in Elena's cellar and began reading them with curiosity, even at the soft age of eleven. They had moved all the notebooks and old-world history books, novels, and poems to Elena's place and named her Keeper of the Stories. This was after many wildfires had flirted with the edges of their property.

Fae read on lazy afternoons, with true interest, beneath oak and lodgepole pine trees or at the canopy of her mother's old cave at the lake down the mountain. She knew that a century ago, the World Economic Forum began the One Million Tree Initiative and that a century before that Planck's Law came into being, formulated by a German physicist to explain some kind of radiation distribution that Fae did not quite understand yet. A century before that, her country, the United States, was relatively new still, its independence just a quarter of a century before. Joseph Banks discovered the electric battery that year, and Dr. Benjamin Waterhouse used the first cowpox vaccination on his son. A century before that, the Gregorian calendar came into use in western Europe, but Fae only knew of one calendar on the mountain, and it was one that Elena kept so that they could remember the seasons and days of solstices and other traditions. Many events had occurred each century, but in 1600, what intrigued Fae was that a stratovolcano called Huaynaputina exploded in Peru, changing the climate as far as Europe and Asia. It was later, when she asked her parents about the volcano, that she learned humankind had become a new kind of volcano, disrupting ecosystems and climate similarly, but in an act of slow attrition rather than one big eruption.

As she looked back at history, she realized most recorded events in the books kept on the ranch were concerned with North American and European events, except for one large hardcover series of books called, simply, World History, published in 2025, seventy-five years ago. It was to these books that she turned to learn about modern history, the Middle Ages, and ancient history.

But before that were the earliest humans, their lives occurring over millennia instead of centuries. And before homo sapiens and their languages were other species, like Homo Habilis and Australopithecus, and so many other genus and species that went all the way back to primates and before that, different types of mammals, and before that tetrapods and fish and worms and eukaryotes. But then, that was not simply millennia but mega-annums, and if you looked back at space, history became a scale of time so great, called the Peta second scale, where then you looked at giga-annums and tera-years.

Fae looked to space with her parents sometimes at night, outside their cabin, through the trees, and though it felt to her elders that they were on a dying Earth, Fae felt it had just begun. Wildness opened around her, and she did not have the memories that her ancestors did: of civilizations failing to operate as they had been. But it was her silly dad who reminded her of where she came from. He would bend over and pounce around on all fours or stand upright to beat his chest or scratch under his arms and make gorilla noises. She would say, Dad, we didn't come from gorillas; we just share a common ancestor with them! And he'd laugh and say, That's my little plum.

Part I. Wild Mountain Memories

Interlude - Faerie

Her mother had named her after the word faerie, whose etymology, derived from different places, dealt with magic, enchantment, and even fate.

She was as brown as her parents, golden and wild curly headed, with cerulean eyes that seemed to be a portal to another world. She flitted through the forest, toward Sand Creek, on a trail her older brother had helped to pack and blaze with his horse. It was late spring, and the sun stood high in the sky, turning leaves translucently green as if spider webs ran through them. She was alone, or so she thought. She had learned to be ever watchful for mountain lions, along with boars and wild dogs. She skipped and bounced but did not run because she knew that might make her seem like prey. She didn't have a care in the world, though a bounty of thoughts crashed through her.

She was the youngest on the mountain and would be until her brother and the older kids began to have kids. She liked the freedom of being the youngest. She came after the first children, who were guinea pigs and treated with caution. By the time Fae came along, her parents and their mountain friends had mellowed.

She reached the creek and its little bridge, and did as she always did, dipped her feet in the creek, felt the waters cool and calming. A fluttering of leaves rustled in the wind. The slight hair on her arms bristled, and she looked around, finally convinced it was really only just the wind. Then, a footstep from the east, past the bridge. A breath. Or just her imagination?

Fae began to walk home. Along the way, a cloud passed over the sun, turning that small area of the sky ominously darker blue and oddly stretched while other clouds began to coalesce above her. The first rain drop fell halfway home, but it was a short storm, like always. Enough to dampen the trail, cool her skin, and enhance the smells along the trails, the native blackberries and the minty perfume of hyssop.

She felt that she was being followed. She knew everyone on the mountain. The occasional drifter came and went, but they came by mountain roads, not from the wilds of the creek or beyond. Not from here.

Swiftly. Swiftly now. Making her way home, to the familiar faces.

Kristy

Two decades have passed since we returned to the mountain from our journey. I still remember pieces of that trip to the South that I took as a small child, though now I suppose my memory has to do more with the supportive evidence offered by all the photos my Auntie Fran took as well as the continued stories throughout the years by my elders: my parents, Auntie Fran and Uncle Leo, Uncle Buddha and Auntie Mae, and Auntie Maisie and Uncle Caine. Not my true biological aunts and uncles, they were nonetheless faces of familiarity who resettled on Wild Mountain following the Great Leaving, as they would come to describe that trip across desolation road, the road of America.

When they used to ask me, as a child, what I remembered, I would say as I do now. I recall a hot wagon and blurry scenes through the open flap at the back of the wagon: blue skies and glowing moons and trees wavering in the wind. I remember rotten stenches and being uncomfortably hot. My memories are like pieces of fabric floating in the wind, waving at me. I was always with someone, never allowed to go out into the world to discover things on my own. I remember before, vaguely, when Cameron died, though now he is an abstract painting in a picture frame rather than a solid face. The few photos of him are inaccurate, made of old film. Any sadness I felt when he died became wrapped up in a blanket thrown around me, or maybe I wrapped it around myself, to separate myself from that awful incident. Not sure how the blanket got there, I eventually figured that it took away the bluntness of that day, in the same way that time heals. And Cameron's death did not hugely shape my life, though I have always felt like something was missing. Another part of me.

My clearest memory is of our return to Wild Mountain and celebrating with a big bonfire on a golden afternoon, teased by snowflakes, when we harvested apples, loving the cold because our wagon journey had been oppressively hot. Because of that harvest party, which lasted all day and into the evening, autumn was always my favorite season. The way the golden light beamed through blue skies and touched the mountain mesmerized me. Auntie Fran said that she imagined faeries dancing in the dust particles and mist as the light settled. Uncle Leo played the guitar, his strums fanning the space around us like a soft light, and as the day went on and people got tipsy from the cider, they danced around the fire. I remember their dark shapes silhouetted by an amber glow. And then snow began to lightly fall.

Then, my life unfolded. I grew up with the kids on the mountain. Kids not yet born when we returned to Idaho. Kids who would come along in the oneiric years. Nathan was my friend from the get-go. He was the little boy who rode his rusty tricycle along the sidewalk when my parents and their friends arrived in Beaufort, South Carolina, so long ago, to bring Barbara and Johnny and my pappaw back home. Nathan and his mother, Elizabeth Sands, joined us on Wild Mountain. A few months later, Auntie Fran gave birth to Alejo, short for Alejandro, a squirming and active boy, always in the saddle or out in the fields. This year was his twentieth, and he'd grown into an observatory type, not too talkative. Kind of like his mom and younger sister Fae. But he wasn't as socially independent as them. He smiled and cracked jokes and became my best friend. As we got older, other children came along. In order after Alejo: a child that Auntie Mae had conceived with her old friend Joe, a daughter named Jen. Then Jan Lee was born, the daughter of Kenny—who came back with Jimmy and Ishmael, all from the South, along with a woman named Mayme he'd met from Mexico, who came back with the rest. Then Derain, a year later, son of Maisie and Caine. They had Anna two years later. A year later, Buddha and Mei finally got together and had a son, Emerson.

Fae, Alejandro's sister, came last, and nobody since. We ranged from age eleven to twenty-five, with Nathan being the oldest. Fran named Fae due to her obsession with faeries when younger, and the babe came into the world on the night of one of the biggest snows we'd ever seen. It was a freak storm happening at the end of December. She did not enter the world kicking and screaming but calm and thin. Leo and my mother, Elena—Fran's attendants—checked Fae quickly for breath, and she was fine and let out one meek cry. And then her entire childhood was like that. As she grew, a head full of bronze-colored waves sprouted out as wild as could be, and her dark skin was reminiscent of her Spanish grandfather, everyone said, though Fran had inherited it too. Fran wondered often if she were sickly, due to her quiet inwardness, but the girl ran the forests and mountains like her mama had and learned to ride a horse early on. She was a spitting image of young Fran, that one, though emotionally more reserved than the other children at the ranch.

Her hair gained darker highlights when she was just a toddler—they say that was from her grandfather—and her odd personality remained observatory and reserved, but as she grew, her elders always said, Fae is an old soul. Perhaps that is just what happens when children do not have playmates and whose living experience is based upon adults. The older kids at the ranch, not the least her brother Alejo, took Fae under their wing, but it became obvious to them that, like her mother, Fae would rather be traipsing around the mountain on her own rather than hanging out with others. And everyone accepted that, though they kept an eye out.

Life on Wild Mountain had become more challenging as time went on. Brush fires were more commonplace, and the families abiding here were surprised by the way that the passage of time had unfolded so cruelly and shockingly. Our road trip across America twenty years prior had been harsh and frightening. Now, back on the mountain, which was once safe and familiar, change dropped on to us, resculpting the landscape and turning it into a dangerous place. More fires in the summer and fall. Floods and mudslides. Harsher winters. A loss of goods once hoarded. It became harder to grow crops, keep the animals healthy, and rely on our once freshwater systems.

By now, we had been talking about moving again but weren't sure where. Fewer drifters surprised us as the wilderness grew and increasingly stomped out remnants of what civilization we had known bebeenwhich had already started dwindling, and now had become retaken by vines, animals, and throngs of insects.

Interlude – Hawthorn

Fae had no recollection of the southern journey her parents took many years ago, but the trip had been etched into her memory by the journals and tales told about it. Not even Alejo, her big brother, had been born yet, but had been alive in their mother's belly. Elena had collected all the stories. She had many names: weaver, Keeper of the Stories, and ocean lover. She had not yet stepped into the ocean properly, except through her favorite literature. If Fae took after her own mother's independent traits, always in the forests, exploring and wild, it was into Elena's fascination with stories that she secretly fell. Her older brother Alejo had also followed their Auntie Elena, though was more interested in the making of books. When he wasn't herding sheep or riding into woodlands surrounding their ranch, he liked to scour through the old journals, and where the ink had become faded, he had scribbled notes in the sidelines of what he thought the text said, and then he would check with the elders later. Elena taught him how to sew leather and paper, and Alejo liked to rebind books that had begun to fall apart. Fae took the old journals, once she learned to read several years ago, and read them back-to-back, enthralled by their memories and Maisie's fluid drawings, as if she lived in a state of flux.

Fae would gather an old notebook, put it in a knapsack, and collect the necessities for an afternoon—water, sunhat, comfortable riding clothes—and ride Hawthorn down to Lake Stardust. The horse was a gentle, big gelding and allowed her to partake in lackadaisical days. She had learned that word from one of Elena's books and used it whenever she could. She enjoyed the faster gallop of her brother's horse Lakota and the younger horses, but Hawthorn was perfect for when she just wanted to go somewhere and spend a slow afternoon reading.

Fran

Sometimes during the hottest part of our late spring and early summer afternoons I sat with Elena, and we snapped beans to make shucky beans. We collected half-runner seeds each year and planted them, and then beans were ripe by late spring because of the warmer temperatures these days that allowed us to start our gardens in March rather than in April. The beans grew fast in the overwhelming sun, and we had built a cistern to hold rainwater, so irrigation usually was not a problem, though increasingly the lack of rain and snowmelt became a threat. After snapping the beans into three or four pieces and taking off their ends, we would string them up to dry in sunny corners of our cottages and, once they were leathery and dry, we stored them in root cellars or we'd cook them right away. To cook them you had to rinse and blanch them, and then simmer them for hours over a fire. They tasted unique and nostalgic and wonderful with any kind of pork fat, which we had on reserve from the numerous boars still roaming the mountains.

Maisie liked to join us, her fair skin turning pink, even in the shade of apple trees. We also invited Mei and Mayme, who was Kenny's partner. Having an activity united us and provided a space for gossip, dreams, and regrets. By now we were middle-aged, our hair slightly graying at the temples, a lesser definition in our once angular faces and taut skin, our children growing up, making us nostalgic about our former selves that we remembered so well. At times our daughters joined us, even our sons, but none were that interested in beans. As long as they remember how we make the beans, Elena often pointed out. If the other women were too busy, just Elena and I would sit and reminisce, but we were careful not to exclude anyone. Our friendship went way back. If we didn't get alone time during bean-snapping, we'd ride up to the mountains and collect herbs and nuts and talk about the old times and try to figure out the changing world.

It was on one of these afternoons, when we were done with bean-picking and the other women had gone back home, when Elena and I removed the aprons that kept the bean ends and strings off us. We felt like sitting and talking, in no hurry to get up or move or do anything at all. The sun was strong in the late afternoon sky, painting a misty curtain of light that separated us from the distant mountains. For a while we said nothing. We liked to look across the mesa and the peaks beyond and take it all in. The gardens beyond our cottages were tall with corn, around which pole bean half-runners grew, and colored by nearby pumpkins and squash, planted in the tradition of three sisters. The other plants stood tall and jungle-light, waving in a heavy wind that also picked up our aprons on the grass and kept us awake.

Have you ever wondered if our kids have something between them? Elena said.

Alejo and Kristy?

Yeah. I mean, it's just a thought. They seem close, like we were, but I wonder if it's more.

I giggled. You really think?

I don't think it for sure. I just wonder.

I thought about our children. The two had been like brother and sister since I had given birth to Alejo long ago. Kristy had once seemed to have a hole of emptiness from when Cameron died. When Alejandro came along, she had another baby to nurture, even though she was still a toddler herself. And she and Alejo had grown together—often playing with Nathan too, though he was more reserved and preferred the company of his own thoughts. Even as the other children came along from our growing brood, Kristy and Alejo had been tight, like us, their mothers, I always thought. Elena and I shared a bond that could not be broken or paralleled. But I just didn't see romance in our kids.

I think they're too close as friends, honestly, Elena.

I have always thought so too!

What made you wonder?

I caught Kristy looking at a drawing that Maisie did of Alejo recently. She was lounging on her cot and just gazing at it, lost in thought. She didn't even notice me standing in the doorway.

That would be…weird, I said.

Maybe it would be extraordinary?

I looked at her. She had a sly grin on her face. Maybe, I said, not convinced.

Remember your mama saying how she used to date boys she met from the internet?

I sighed inwardly. That was before she met Dad, when she was still a teenager. Remember that old drifter who came up here last year?

There's a few that stopped by.

The older man. We were surprised he was still a drifter. Troy was his name, remember?

Oh, yeah. Barely.

He told us there were a few places you could get on the internet again. I could hardly believe it.

I believe it, Elena said. We're the backwards ones, Fran.

I nodded and wondered how far spread technology really was these days. We still had a computer down in the cellar, but what good would it do without any real electricity or a network?

Elena had planted a seed about Kristy and Alejo, and in the next few days, as beans dried and life went on, I couldn't get it out of my mind. What if. And wouldn't that be weird for Elena and me to share an even closer bond, possibly a grandchild someday? I shook it out of my head. It wasn't preposterous but wasn't a reality yet either, and I didn't want to dream that big.

Within four days, the beans were good and dry, and I took them down from sunny corners, pulled them from the string we'd hung them on, rinsed the ones I would cook right away, and discarded any bad parts. Then I put them in an old pot and covered them with water. I soaked them overnight. The next morning, I rinsed them, refilled the pot with water, and lifted the kettle above a fire outside.

It was the same bonfire space where we had celebrated so long ago, after our return to the mountain, when we made apple cider and danced in the evening. It was when Leo, Buddha, and I found the bear, the same afternoon that spit snow. I remembered so many things about that day. It still drew significance to me because we'd made it home safely, and my mother seemed happy to be back, even though she still acted like an entitled southern beauty whose entire life had been an affair of drama and appearances. She pranced around, got drunk on mulled wine, and danced like a shadow that night. The next morning, even hungover, she awoke with a poised face trying to look like a lovely southern belle, but she had no idea just how tired she looked or how her wrinkles lined her face like an old book.

The beans had to boil for an hour. And then I rinsed them again and put them back in the big iron pot for another few hours, this time throwing in a slab of bacon and pulling the kettle higher so that the beans would simmer.

Kenny stopped by to visit when the beans were cooking. He and I had a connection, for I'd been hiding with his mother Eugenia twenty years ago when his dad got shot in cold blood. Kenny had never written a journal before then and was surprised when Leo gave him a notebook much later, after he'd met us in Mississippi long ago. He always said that meeting us was a godsend, but also I knew that it was a part of his memory that swallowed him in great sadness for days and nights. One second, twenty years ago, Leo, Joe, and I had stopped by Kenny's family's produce stand on the side of the road, and the next moment a group of men came along and callously killed his father. Maybe it was because he was black. Maybe it was because he opened his mouth and tried to calm the situation. Kenny's mother Eugenia didn't last long after that. Her heart was simply broken in two.

Jimmy and Ishmael, who had been Eugenia's cousin–an uncanny fact we learned while there–stayed at the little house on the river with Kenny, and when they decided to come to Idaho together, Kenny and Mayme, a girl he'd met on the road, were with them. There was nothing for him in the South anymore, he said. We didn't honestly think they would make it across America back then. At the time, Kenny told me, he didn't know if he cared if he died trying. But that was dumb, he said. He wanted to live, more than anything. If he hadn't wanted to survive, he would have stayed back there in Mississippi and dried up like the old land.

Kenny had met Mayme, who came through one day like a breeze. She was from Mexico and had traveled across the border with her family in a wagon. Her parents had been shot on the border by some strange breed of vigilantes who were the descendants of those who had wanted a wall built between the countries long ago. It was weird to all of us that such ideology still existed in these times. The whole world was falling apart, immigration meant nothing, and refugees fled every country and every city. What a strange hill to die on, I thought. They had not killed Mayme but kidnapped and beaten her one night. She escaped afterward because they'd all been stupid and gotten drunk and passed out, and she simply got back in her parents' wagon and kept going, stealing some of their guns to boot.

Once Mayme got deeper into the United States, she headed east to try to escape the heat of the uninhabitable desert, and that's how she ended up coming across Eugenia's old home on the river that we had visited so long ago. Kenny had told us the story when they met Mayme years ago, and Jimmy had hopped in her wagon and said, Hot damn, Mayme's ride is like a petite version of the one we traveled down south on. Then he said, Hey y'all, what say we fix her up and head to Idaho?

Well, as the story goes, Mayme never looked so relieved and from then on, she became part of the family. She and Kenny bonded over the recent deaths of their parents, but he also took a liking to her. She was beautiful inside and out and didn't have a mean bone in her body. Her face was gentle and kind, and she smiled a lot and made people feel good about