It made Elise glad to get away from the city and to be alone with her own thoughts and the sky and the mountains. She could leave most of her sorrows behind in the city and bring along only the hopes that were so close to her heart that they filled her with fear and wonder. Elise had the idea already that her sorrows and her hopes were sisters. Like sisters, they could bear to be apart for a while without losing their connection. Underneath they were very much the same. Like sisters, they simply happened to have set out along different paths in life.

Her father always took two weeks off from his very difficult and important job with a software company around Christmas time. Up in the Okanogan her parents were less worried and more playful, too. If she worked very hard, she could even begin to imagine that they had once been children like herself. Her big brother Eric had more time for her. This could be a mixed blessing. When he was in one of his good moods, there was no one in the world she would rather be with. When Eric was in one of his mean moods, she was frightened of him. She wondered whether this was the same person she loved so very much.

Elise looked forward to going to the Okanogan in the winter. Each year, too, the family was joined at the house in the Okanogan by guests for the holidays. The house had gotten bigger and bigger as the years had gone by. Her mother's grandfather, who had moved from Boston to Seattle because he felt New England was getting so crowded it might as well be Old England, had built the original log cabin shortly after he bought two thousand acres for about a dime an acre. People had thought he was a fool because he had spent so much, $200, on such a large piece of land that was good for nothing.

Elise's mother always said that what she loved about the land up in the Okanogan was that it really was good for nothing, very good for nothing. With the exception of adding onto the original log cabin for the fifth time and installing a more powerful generator, they hadn't done anything to the Okanogan place. They still came in the old dirt road and it was still a twenty minute drive over to the nearest neighbor's house. Elise's mother said that when you had land that was so good for nothing almost anything that you did to it was going to make it less good for nothing. Elise's mother said that one of the big troubles in the world was that there was getting to be less and less land that was good for nothing, so if you were lucky enough to have some, then you had a real responsibility not to mess it up.

Elise wasn't sure what her father and her brother, Eric, thought about what her mother said, but she knew she agreed. She was a lot like her mother and that made her a little bit different from other people, just the way her mother was. It seemed to Elise that something else was always on her mother's mind, something other than what she ever talked about. Occasionally a gleam would show in her mother's eye or her brows would furrow so that the shadow of a cloud seemed to pass over her whole face. Elise didn't know what it was, but she knew it was there. She couldn't tell if it was a hope or a sorrow or maybe both together. She was so curious, but she didn't know how to ask, because she could tell it wasn't something that came in words.

Last summer in early August when all the grasses were brown, Elise had climbed all by herself up the hillside behind Kidney Bean Pond at the north edge of their land until she was walking the ridge among scattered small spruces and looking down and east what seemed about twenty miles into the old landscape of Western Washington, a landscape that seemed so ancient it might even have been another planet. She'd never been so far from home up there by herself.

As she was walking along with a little fresh breeze in her face, she saw two does peacefully grazing at the other end of a small clearing.. She stopped and waited and watched. Every once in a while one of the does would lift her head and twitch her ears and sniff. They didn't gaze off at the landscape but just went right on eating. Elise was surprised to see that they were just about exactly as tall as she was, no taller.

She spent the next half hour trying to see how close she could get to them without bothering them. When finally she got to about eight feet away, they didn't seem like animals any more. They seemed more like friends, maybe a little bit different than she was, but not much. Their heads and necks rose up from brown platforms that were supported by four legs with hooves at the end, while she only had two legs to hold up her shoulders that held up her neck and head. When she looked into their brown eyes, they seemed so liquid and so smooth that she felt she might be able to dive into them and be only in the world of the deer and the forest, the ancient Okanogan hills rising above the snake twisting Columbia River.

As she took one more very small step towards them, they bounded away, lifting their tails like white flags behind them. The spring in their legs astonished and delighted Elise. They jumped so high they were up above the smaller of the spruces on the ridge. As she followed them with her eyes, she caught just a glance of a stag, who swiftly turned and disappeared. She wondered if he had been there all along. Once the deer were gone, Elise turned for home, stopping to jump into Kidney Bean Pond, swim a few strokes and get cooled off. Elise didn't tell anyone about the does up there in the spruce on the ridge behind Kidney Bean Pond, not even Eric or her mother. She kept them all for herself. But whenever she thought about how the land was good for nothing, she thought of those does up there on the ridge line. She thought that, while all land couldn't be good for nothing land because people needed land to grow crops on and land to live on, good for nothing land was a very good kind of land.

This particular winter it snowed more than anyone around could remember, even old Otis Tyler who was eighty-eight years old and had been living in the Okanogan all his life. It snowed every day for the first five days they were up there, which made for very good cross-country skiing. One afternoon there were flashes of lightning in the northern sky. The snow came falling down as to the beat of a huge thunder drum. Elise sat in the large living room of the newest addition and stared at the antique cabinet in which the old toys were kept.

Some of them had come over from Europe and had more than a century of history to them. There were wooden dragoons and hussars and lancers and cavalry and artillery men of so many different kinds. When Eric was little he had spent countless afternoons staging battles with these old toys. Sometimes, when the battles grew too pitched, one or another of the toys became real casualties of the mock war and broke. Their father was glad to repair them. He said that he didn't believe in toys that didn't get the chance to have children play with them. He said that, if children didn't play with them, then all the life went out of them. That wasn't a fate anyone would wish on a toy.

Sometimes, if the repairs were too intricate or delicate he would enlist the aid of the children's Godfather, David Meyer, who was also known sometimes as Druid Meyer, because there was something of the wizard about him. He had an enormous shock of wild curly white hair that crowned his head. Druid Meyer worked with her father. What exactly he did was never clear to Elise. The best she could understand was that he thought about things. When there were particularly difficult problems he tended to come up with solutions that were very different than what other people came up with, because his mind worked differently than other people's minds.

Druid Meyer was the most singular of their regular Christmas guests in the Okanogan. He was singular, first of all, because of his appearance. In addition to the tousled shock of white hair on top of his head, he had an almost all white full beard. This made his cheeks look like slopes that were covered with snow. He had large hazel eyes that scanned nervously and sharply. He was tall and could perform, even at sixty, a feat that always had impressed Elise, so that each year she asked him to do it for her. He always obliged.

While standing, he would grasp hold with his right hand of his left ankle and position it in front of his right knee. In this way, his left leg and his right arm made a sort of hoop, through which he would proceed to jump in one sudden motion so that his bent left leg, with his right arm still holding his left ankle, ended up now behind his right knee. When Elise saw him do this, she always laughed in a mixture of glee and terror. It was such an odd thing to do and Druid Meyer was such an odd person.

Druid Meyer had always been interested in computers and automata. He had built robots before anyone else was interested. He had worked as one of the principal debuggers of the computer software for the Apollo moon landing. Then he had left NASA to take up a career as a clown for fifteen years with the Ringling Brothers Circus before he came back to work again on computers and programming languages. To Elise, Druid Meyer's face sometimes looked profoundly sad and sometimes profoundly cruel and sometimes, which was the most disturbing of all, completely blank.

Not all the toys in the antique toy cabinet were old. Some, in fact, were quite new, made just within the last few years. Since she and Eric had been very little, Druid Meyer had made them each a toy each year. He was uncannily good with his hands. Last year, he had made Eric an officer of cavalry mounted on a wooden horse. While both the officer and his horse looked as if they might be very old toys, the horse, about four inches tall, was capable of prancing across the floor moving all four legs gracefully while the officer waved his sword. Not only that, if you helped the officer dismount and placed his hand on his mount's bridle and if you whistled, the officer, stepping smartly, could lead the horse across the floor.

Druid Meyer had inserted a miniaturized audio receiver and a computer chip and devised tiny cunning bearings for the joints. Tiny motors attached to cables concealed in the wood gave these little figures the muscle power they needed. Both Eric and the children's father were thrilled with this gift. But Elise was not quite so sure. On the one hand, she felt it was an amazing thing to watch the horse and rider padding back and forth across the floor or a table top. On the other hand, there was something just a bit ominous. Where would Druid Meyer stop? What did he know and how did he know it? If he knew so much, why didn't he seem happy or at peace? Why did his face sometimes look like an owl's just at the moment it sighted some poor mouse in the grass of a field by moonlight?

In the toy chest, there were now three generations of Nutcrackers, the first more than sixty years old. Elise thought of them as grandfather, father and son. The newest one Druid Meyer had made for her last year at Christmas time. It was perhaps even more remarkable than the officer of cavalry and horse that he had made for Eric. This Nutcracker was able to whirl on one foot, leap and then salute after it came to a stop. It was uncanny because when it did this, it seemed so close to being alive. Elise had been fascinated with it last year and had made it do its trick over and over again.

She had wanted to take it back to the city, but her mother wouldn't let her. Her mother said there were some ways it was safe to be hypnotized in the Okanogan that it wasn't safe to be hypnotized all year round in the city when you had to go to school and to learn things. Elise had not understood what her mother meant, but she did not argue, because she knew that, when her mother said, "No," in that very quiet way of hers with the gentle and deep eyes in her face, her mother's mind was quite made up and there was no changing it. Elise did not like to admit it, but the way her mother had of saying, "No," was one of the things she loved the most about her mother.

This year all their guests, some twenty or so people from the city that now seemed so far away, had arrived by the afternoon of Christmas eve - all, that is, save Druid Meyer. It was still snowing and each little group had its own story of the trip up and how long it had taken. All were veterans of the Christmas trek to the old Okanogan and all had come in four wheel drive vehicles with chains on the tires. Even so, it had been a difficult and exciting trip.

It was still snowing as the muffled sun, lighting up the clouds on the western horizon so that they were a brighter whiter softer gray than the rest of the sky, was sinking. Elise's mother said that she was starting to get worried about Druid Meyer. Elise's father laughed and said that Druid Meyer was the last person that he would ever worry about. Elise saw the small look of hurt and disapproval pass swiftly across her mother's face.

Elise herself felt in a way that it would be a relief if Druid Meyer did not come. However, then she was curious, wondering what sort of marvelous things he would have made for them this year. Also, she knew Eric was beside himself with excitement waiting to see what Druid Meyer would have come up with this time. She had heard Eric tell their father that, when he grew up, he wanted to be just like Druid Meyer. She had heard her father answer, very thoughtfully, and in an almost sad tone of voice that being that way wasn't something that you got by wanting it. It had to happen to you.