Chapter 11

Adair assumed that there had to be a reason why there was no snow around the dark blue tree. After thinking about it for a bit she concluded that it was probably because the tree was absorbing the water not just with its roots underground but also somehow in the air. Or there was a chance that the tree's absorption rate was above the amount of snow coming down. If either of these options happened to be the case, perhaps she could provide the tree with more of the snow as a substitute for the lake water.

There was only one way to find out. She wished for an empty bottle to collect some snow in it from the bag, however it turned out to be a far more difficult task than expected due to how compact the snow was, but eventually she was able to get a decent amount into the bottle. She then put it close to the fire, waited for it to melt and rushed over to the tree to pour the water by its roots. Unfortunately, as soon as she entered the radius of the 'no snow zone', at least that was what she had named it, the water in the bottle just vanished.

She then turned over the bottle to see if anything would fall out, but nothing did as far as Adair could see. This confused her greatly. One second the water had been in the bottle, and the next second it was just gone. Without any water. Adair opted to do it again, only this time she put a lid on the bottle after she filled it up, just in case the tree was somehow able to suck it up through the opening. Once again it disappeared without any trace.

She then considered whether the water might have just turned invisible, so she went outside the no snow zone, but there was no change. Even after she turned it upside down and put her hand underneath it did not become wet. Adair understood that she would have to try something different. For her next attempt, she went over to the edge of where the snow tunnel started and the no snow zone began and poured the melted snow onto the divider between the two pieces of land. Alas, just as she had feared, once the water passed the middle of the line, it was just gone.

This made Adair consider the possibility that perhaps the dark blue tree was not absorbing the water, but in fact its disappearance was a defense mechanism because it would be harmful to it. The other trees did not seem to have that problem, then again this tree was clearly special. It seemed like she would have to try and find a way to collect some lake water, too bad that was easier said than done.

Judging by the fact that Mr. Bear had been able to catch her trying to sneak off to the lake every single time, she highly suspected that there had to be some invisible tripwires that she was setting off once she crossed a specific area of the tunnel.

To test her theory, she slowly walked down the tunnel near the lake and after each step waited for her furry protector to come for her. Once she discovered at which point the bear would come for her, she tried to jump over where the bear caught her last time, but it did not change the outcome. With her next attempt, she tried to crawl under those imaginary tripwires, but yet again the bear caught her in the same spot.

This was when Adair decided to make a separate tunnel to the lake. Even if her assumption about tripwires was incorrect, something was telling the bear that she tried to go that way, but hopefully if she created her own tunnel she could bypass whatever mechanism it was and quickly get some lake water.

Now the question was how to start her own tunnel. If she was an adult she might have asked the magical bag for a shovel to dig her way through, but as a baby she did not have the arm strength to accomplish such a thing. Additionally, she would have to make sure that the bear did not notice her making an extra tunnel, so it had to be hidden as well.

The place she decided on was where the bear had made their makeshift toilet area. This was because it smelled so bad that both she and the bear tried to spend as little time as possible in the cubby area that the bear made. This was also very convenient for Adair because the bear had constructed that area extremely far away from the box's entrance.

While it wasn't the closest thing to the lake, as long as Adair was able to beeline to her destination, it wasn't that far away. Adair's next problem was determining which way the lake was. If she made a mistake while making her tunnel it would become a huge waste of time.

After a few days of making sure she was going in the right direction, she began digging her tunnel with two suitable small wood paddles. While the smell was absolutely terrible, she was able to get used to it after days of digging. Two weeks passed, and eventually, Adair was able to reach the lake.

It took so long for two reasons. First, Adair was very slow at digging out her tunnel, and second, she did not keep a straight line through the whole process. The tunnel twisted and turned several times, which took up a lot of time. Now that she reached the lake, she quickly went and got the bottle she hid from the bear. She then filled up the bottle and went to the tree, and poured the water at the base of the tree.

Although it had taken Adair quite a long time to fulfill her part of the deal, the tree did not seem to mind and began to write down the letters of the alphabet for Adair. Afterward it arranged those letters to form words with a picture underneath each one of them, conveying their meaning to baby Adair. She would have to trust that the tree knew what it was doing, because it could cause many issues for Adair's learning of the language if the tree taught her wrongly.

When she looked at the pictures she saw that the first was a girl, the second picture was a bear, the third picture was a tree, the fourth picture was a giant box, etc. Adair then committed each of these words to memory. Then for practice, she started writing the words out and then drawing the picture next to them. She did this not only for the practice but also to make sure that she understood what the tree wrote.

She deliberately wrote some of those words with either the wrong letters or with some of the letters at the wrong place to check if it was paying attention. She was relieved that each time she did so, the tree would cross out the wrong word and correct her spelling. She continued to write the words until she determined that she fully understood them and would be able to write them on her own. This took the rest of that day. She realized that it would look suspicious if she spent too much time by the tree, so she then went back to the bear and played with it, just waiting for her large protector to go to sleep again so she could continue learning the language with the tree.

This caused a routine to be set up where twice a day, Adair would bring water to the tree, and the tree would then spend three hours per water teaching Adair the language. While Adair realized that she was only being taught to be able write the language without the knowledge of how to speak it would pose a significant problem in the future, right now she couldn't do anything about that.

Just a few days after the tree had started teaching Adair, the same multi-colored lightning appeared in the sky, and that is when it stopped snowing very abruptly. Adair began to conclude how the storms started and ended. Unless she had miscounted the days or it was just some sort of bizarre coincidence each storm had lasted exactly 30 days with lightning at its end and they had started exactly 180 days, so 6 months apart.

Adair was not exactly keeping a calendar yet though so she may be days or even weeks off of her estimate; she thought that she was pretty close to calculating when each storm happened.

Once she was able to form some easy sentences, she asked if the light blue tree that appeared right next to the box house was something like a brother of the dark blue tree. Adair actually wanted to ask what sort of relation the two of them had, if any, but she lacked the words to ask something so complicated at the moment. Nevertheless, the tree was able to understand her question and to her surprise it stated that it was that light blue tree as well.

Apparently, the tree had dozens of bodies all over the forest, each one having a dark bluish bark. The older it was the darker it would become. Adair and the tree continued to talk about what the rest of the forest was like, and this took up their whole three-hour session.

There were many setbacks along the way, but overall the over two months they spent together for Adair to comprehend the language had been a smooth process. The fact that she already knew a language that contained the majority of the same letters also helped because this meant that she did not need to learn how to write a completely new language.

Once the tree informed Adair that it had taught her everything she would need to know, she decided it was probably time to come clean to Mr. Bear about what she had been doing. He had raised her and protected her while she had been unable to do so herself and she was feeling bad for having gone behind its back each day to collect the lake water when he did not want her to be there.

Adair contemplated how she would best confess to the bear, but since she only had one form of communication avenue, she ended up writing: "I've been taking lessons from the tree to learn how to write," right outside the entrance of the box. After she did this, she ran off to hide because she did not know how the bear would react.

Adair waited for hours and hours, but she didn't hear the bear at all. Although she started to get hungry, she pushed down that feeling and waited to see if the bear was laying a trap for her. Roughly 15 hours later, Adair came out of her hiding spot, starving, thirsty, and needing to use the restroom. When she did come out, the bear already had a bottle of milk ready, and as soon as Adair finished the milk, he brought her to the makeshift bathroom and specifically pointed out where Adair's hole in it was.

At first, Adair was embarrassed, but when the bear brought her back to the box, and she saw what was written beneath her writing, she wanted to faint due to embarrassment. It read, "I know."