"I saw her, too," said the Unicorn, "as I made my desperate leap from the old toy chest. I remember the look on her face."

"I think we should dance for her," said the little mouse acrobat. "I think we should show her what we learned from Blanche. I think that she is someone who could understand."

So it was that Elise awakened in the pink chair to the extraordinary sight of a mouse and a Unicorn dancing together across the wooden floor as if it were a great and severe and simple stage. They did a dance like nothing she had ever seen or imagined, one that suggested great struggle and great peril and great tenderness, great sorrow and great joy, being old and young, near and far all at once.

Clutching her white rabbit, Elise watched in rapture. Finally, she could bear it no longer. She put the white rabbit carefully down on the seat of the chair and began to dance with them. They danced and danced and danced until the first light of dawn started to show in the windows and Elise thought she heard her mother's step upstairs. Their dance traced the outlines of an enormous journey.

Very quietly, Elise led the mouse and the Unicorn in the dance to the front door, which she opened. No longer moving herself, she watched them dance away across the snowy meadow to the edge of the woods, where the mouse leapt up onto the Unicorn's back just as he took an enormous bound into the forest. Only the golden glow of his horn lingered behind.

"You're up early, aren't you?" said Elise's mother when she caught sight of her.
"Yes, I am," Elise agreed.
"Did you hear the thunder in the night?" her mother asked.
"Oh, yes," said Elise. "It was quite a storm."
"When I was a little girl, the thunder terrified me," Elise's mother said, "I thought the world was coming to an end. Or maybe I wished it would."

They both laughed, standing together looking out the window at the beginning of dawn. Just as they laughed they heard the hoot of an owl in the woods, soft and low and, in its own way, shy and sweet.

What most of the guests remembered about that Christmas in the Okanogan in addition to the snow and the thunder was that both the snow leopard and the white rabbit that Druid Meyer had made mysteriously failed to work on Christmas morning. This seemed both to surprise and to upset Druid Meyer in a way that no one present could recall ever seeing him be upset before.

He seemed desperate to fix his two creations. In fact, he wanted to leave that very morning to go back to the city to work on them. However, Elise's mother insisted that he stay for dinner. Elise, herself, said that she loved the white rabbit even better just as it was. She didn't need for it to do any special tricks.

Eric, though disappointed, followed his sister's lead and told Druid Meyer that he loved the snow leopard just as it was and would cherish the memory of its remarkable leaps. Druid Meyer ate very little for dinner and left in the early evening to go back to Seattle. Elise was not sorry to see him go.

No one looked in the antique toy chest to notice that a Unicorn was missing. The spider's web was undisturbed and, if the spider, herself, felt a pang of loneliness, she kept it to herself and went on weaving there in the darkness that held within it the memories of untold struggles.

Elise went up to bed early that night, for she was tired. But she could not bring herself to get into bed without repeating bits and pieces of the dance she had done with the mouse and the Unicorn. She knew her feet would never forget. Unbeknownst to her, her eyes had deepened so she looked even more like her own mother. She had acquired the gaze of a person who tries to see, as best she can, to the very center of things.