The Treasure That Wouldn't Fit in a Pocket

The map had a raindrop on it the shape of a mango. Yusuf held it up by its two soft corners, and a second warm drop fell from a giant leaf and landed right beside the first one, so now the map had two mango shapes and one smudged word he couldn't read at all.

"Never mind," he said. "Pirates don't need every word. Pirates need a boat and a hat." He had both. The hat was a broad green leaf with a feather poked through it, and the boat was a raft called the Biscuit Tin, six planks and a long pole and a great deal of patience.

The raft went down the Emerald River as slow as a thought. The river here did not rush anywhere. It leaned around the bends, under leaves as wide as doors, and the warm rain came down in fat drops that landed one at a time, and everything smelled of wet moss and ripe mango.

Grandma stood at the back with the pole, pushing them along whenever the river forgot to. She had her hat pulled down over her eyes, the way she did when she was thinking, or napping, or both at once.

Tilly sat at the front with her chin on her knees. Tilly collected small things. She kept a beetle's wing that was like a brown glass window, and the sound a mango makes when it lets go of the branch, and she had a different pocket for each one.

Yusuf sat in the middle with his biscuit tin open on his knees. Inside was a white feather, a stone with a gray stripe around it, and the map, which he had found folded in three at the very bottom, in his grandmother's handwriting, only much wobblier than she wrote now.

The map showed the river curling like a sleeping cat, and three clues in careful pencil, and an X at the end that wasn't very X-shaped. Yusuf read the last line out loud, the way he always did, because it was his favorite line in the world. "The best treasure on the Emerald River does not fit in a pocket."

"Is that so," said Grandma, from under her hat.

"It is so," said Yusuf. "Pirates don't make things up." He said it firmly, because sometimes, in the quiet, he wondered whether he was a proper pirate at all. A proper pirate's treasure went clink. Yusuf's treasure went ffft, because it was a feather, and thump, because it was a stone.

"First clue," said Tilly. "Find the bend where the river hums." Then nobody said anything at all, because they were all listening.

Yusuf listened hard. He heard the leaves breathing. He heard the raft nudging the water, and the rain going plip on the tin. He did not hear one single hum, and he began to suspect that the map was older than the river.

"There," said Tilly, pointing with her chin. "It isn't a bee. It's the water going under a root." Yusuf listened again, and there it was: a low, round hum, like blowing across the top of a bottle. It had been humming the whole time, underneath everything else.

Grandma poled them around the bend and into a hush. The leaves shut out the sky. Somewhere above them a mango let go of its branch and landed in the river with a sound like a small green bell. The glow-worms were just beginning, one green light, then another, strung through the branches like somebody had hung fairy lights for a party and then gone to bed.

"Second clue," said Yusuf. "Tie up where one big leaf hangs upside down." He looked up and his heart did a small hop, because there were about a thousand leaves above them, and every single one was right side up.

This was Tilly's kind of problem. She stood up, slow and steady, and turned her head like a weather vane. "There," she said at last. "Left of the fat branch. The pale one." And there it was: one leaf turned over, showing its pale underside like a hand showing its palm.

Yusuf tied them to a root. He had a knot for every job. The hold-fast was for when the river tugged. The let-go-slow was for when it tugged harder. And the kind hug was for holding something without making it feel squeezed.

That was when something above them said, "Hhhh."

They looked up. A sloth hung from the branch, upside down and perfectly still, with a face like a friendly old cushion and two round eyes blinking at them one at a time.

"Hello," said Tilly. The sloth blinked. "Hhhh," he said. Then came a long, warm, leafy pause, long enough for the raft to turn a little, and then, at last, "...ello."

"That was a whole hello," said Yusuf, delighted. "I'm Yusuf. This is Tilly. That's Grandma." "Mimo," said the sloth, and it took him until the rain stopped to finish saying his own name.

Mimo explained, at his own speed, that he had been hanging in this tree a long while. On the third branch up, he said, there was a little tin box with a mango scratched on the lid. It had been there since before he was born. He had never once opened it.

"Why not?" asked Yusuf. "Because I am never in a hurry," said Mimo, "and a box that old can wait."

"Third clue," said Tilly, and read it out. "Send someone slow up to the third branch." Four heads turned toward Mimo. Mimo turned his head back, very slowly, and looked pleased.

"I could go up," he said. "But I can't tie a rope around my own middle. My claws are made for hanging and not much else. And I can't count branches from underneath, and I certainly can't open tins."

"Then all of us go," said Yusuf, "except one of us stays in the boat, because that's the rule." Grandma lifted her hat just enough to look at him. "I'll hold the raft steady," she said. "Take your time, both of you. Slow is not the same as stuck."

So Tilly counted the branches out loud, one, two, three, her finger in the air like a conductor's. Yusuf looped the rope around Mimo's middle with the kind hug, snug and gentle. Grandma set the pole against a root and held the Biscuit Tin as still as a held breath.

Then Mimo began to climb.

If you have never watched a sloth climb, it is like watching a cloud cross the sky. Mimo reached up with one arm and thought about it. He took hold of the branch and thought about that. The rain went plip on the tin. The river hummed its one round note.

"A little left," called Tilly. Mimo went a little left, and it took the length of a song. "Now up one leaf." "Up one leaf," said Mimo, as if this were an excellent idea he had thought of himself. The glow-worms came out one by one, until the air above the river was freckled with green.

When Mimo reached the third branch, he hooked the tin box with one careful claw and swung it free. It was small and rusted at the corners, and the mango on the lid had been scratched with something sharp a long time ago. He lowered it down the rope, hand over hand, slowly, while Yusuf caught it and held it against his chest.

The lid came off with a soft pop.

Inside was a mango seed, dry and brown as an old beetle, and a note folded twice. The writing was wobbly, worse even than Yusuf's. Tilly read it in the glow-worm light. "To whoever finds this. The treasure does not fit in a pocket. Look up."

So they looked up.

The tree above them was full of glow-worms. Hundreds of them, strung along every branch like someone had hung fairy lights for a party and then, this time, remembered to leave them on. The light was soft and green. It fell on the leaves, and it fell on the river, and the river carried a whole second sky of it, gently, around the bend.

"Oh," said Yusuf. It was a very small sound for a pirate.

And above the glow-worms, warm and heavy and smelling of sugar, hung about forty ripe mangoes.

Tilly stood very still, the way she did when she was putting something into her memory pocket. "I wish I could keep a whole night," she said. "Just this one. Folded up small." "You can't," said Yusuf. "That's why we have to stay in it," said Tilly, and she was right.

Grandma had taken her hat off. She was looking up too, and her face had gone young in the middle of it. "I was nine," she said. "I had a little boat and a tin box. I sat right here and ate a mango off this tree, and I thought somebody ought to find it someday."

"You wrote the map," said Yusuf. "You wrote it for me." "I wrote it for whoever," said Grandma, "and then I left it in the tin where a certain pirate might find it." She smiled at him. "Someone had to hold the boat."

"It took a long time," said Mimo, who knew about time. "It took a long time," said Grandma. "And it wanted four of us. Two to look, one to be slow, and one to hold the raft steady."

Grandma split a mango with the back of a spoon, one clean line down the middle, and they ate it on the raft with the juice running down their chins. Mimo had a bite. He chewed it for a while and said, "Good," and by the time he got to "mango," Tilly was laughing into her knees.

Yusuf took out his own biscuit tin. He put in the mango seed and added a scrap of paper, and he wrote on it in his best wobbly letters: "Look up." Then they folded the old note and the new one together, put them back in the rusted box, and Mimo carried it up and hooked it on the third branch, for whoever came next.

"Come back down," called Tilly. "In the morning," said Mimo. "I'll start now."

The glow-worms turned their lamps down low. The rain thinned to one drop, then half a drop. The river went on humming its one round note under the root, going nowhere, in no hurry, the way rivers do at night.

Grandma poled them home slow and steady. Tilly put her chin on her knees. Yusuf held his biscuit tin the way you hold a sleeping cat, and the lights behind them got small, and green, and far away, and then they were only a soft green blur that might have been glow-worms, or might have been mangoes, or might have been the last of the evening folding itself up.

"Good," said Mimo, from his branch. "...night," said Mimo, when the raft was halfway around the next bend.

The river hummed. The leaves dripped. Nobody in the whole green dark was in a hurry, and nobody needed to be, and the Biscuit Tin carried them home the long, slow, sleepy way.