“I guess we keep trying to get in touch with Genevieve.” Cal leans against the bedpost and shoves his hands in his pockets. “And in the meantime, we’ll just have to wait.”
Catoctin, Maryland— September 1908
The next afternoon,Ora and John were to meet again so they could set out for the woods on the outskirts of town. That’s where he said he’d encountered the bird three times in the past few weeks, so she believed it the logical place to start their search.
She entered the newspaper office, where she found a boy around the age of thirteen whose face was red from either sun or exertion assisting a man with a deep brown complexion. This must be John’s right hand, Mr. Prichett, and their junior apprentice, Chester, both of whom he had mentioned in his letters. They were hard at work stacking what she assumed to be leftover copies of the morning’s paper along the edge of the room. The stacks were growing quite tall. Then again, John had mentioned that business was not particularly strong since he took over the publication two years ago; the townspeople considered him an outsider despite his having lived there for half a decade, and his views were often criticized as too broad-minded for the smallrural community. Not wanting to interrupt, Ora simply nodded to Mr. Prichett and Chester in greeting, then continued farther into the office. She found John again at his desk, as she had yesterday, but this time too engrossed in reading a telegram to notice her entrance.
“Good afternoon,” she said when it became awkward waiting for him to look up and see her.
“Oh, Dr. Worthy—Ora. I apologize. I was just reading this and—” He seemed to realize he was rambling and instead cut himself off, bowing his head and stating simply, “Good afternoon to you as well.”
“Are you prepared to go, or shall we wait? If your work requires your attention…”
He slipped the telegram into the pile of other loose papers on his desk. “No, this is unimportant. Let’s be off.”
It was a twenty-minute walk through muddy paths carved into farm fields to reach the woods, and Ora once again praised the makers of her walking boots, which more than made up for in sturdiness and comfort what they lacked in fashion. She was also grateful for the sparsely decorated hat that shielded her eyes from the bright midday sun as they walked west. But more than any of her accoutrements, she appreciated the company.
Thanks to their months of correspondence, she and John spoke with the ease and familiarity of old friends. Ora felt comfortable with him in a way she almost never felt with men as a rule—the reason she had no qualms about going into the forest alone with him. It was refreshing to spend time with someone she knew respected her and her professional knowledge, and when he asked her deep, thoughtful questions about her work and seemed to actually listen to her answers, even when they became a bit too technical or meandered, she went from admiringJohn Otis Morse to wanting him nearly as much as she wanted to discover a new species of bird.
They reached the woods and John led her deep into the sea of trees toward the location where he first saw their quarry. A woodpecker’s rhythmic report came as music to her ears, and she instinctively searched for it amid the canopy before John’s voice recovered her attention.
“It was there,” he said. “Near the top of that sycamore. It was far enough away that I didn’t think anything of it until I came across it again the next day.”
“You seem very familiar with these woods,” Ora said as she studied the tree, searching for any flashes of color or movement among its branches. “Do you walk here often?”
“Sometimes. If I need to clear my head.”
She glanced at him before reaching for her binoculars from the canvas satchel she carried with her. “And what do you need to clear your head of? If you don’t mind me asking.”
He put his hands into his pockets and stared up at the sycamore. “Well. Money concerns, mostly, to be quite candid. I think I’ve mentioned to you before that my paper isn’t particularly popular. I thought I’d hammered the final nail in my coffin when I came out in favor of universal suffrage last year.”
“Surely you knew that would be unpopular. Yet you decided to print it anyway?”
“Surely you knew it would be unpopular for you to become a scientist. Yet you decided to do it anyway?”
Ora smiled contritely as she trained the binoculars on the surrounding trees. “Touché.”
“I’m a man who stands by my principles,” he said, then added more quietly, “or, rather, I try to, as best as I can.”
“Perhaps we will find our bird and you can do a wonderfulwrite-up, with a big, beautiful front-page illustration to go with it. And it will sell not only here but in neighboring towns, even in Washington and in Baltimore. Visitors will come from all over the world to see the thing for themselves, and you’ll be lauded as the best thing that ever happened to Catoctin, Maryland. Not that you’ll stay here long, as you’ll be fielding offers from every major paper in the country. They’ll all be clamoring for you to work for them.”
John let out a small amused sound. “What an imagination you have.”
“It could happen,” Ora assured him.
“Hm.”
Another fifteen minutes passed without any sightings, so Ora asked John to take her to the next part of the forest where he saw the bird, then the next. Though, while he was able to immediately find the sycamore and the small clearing, the last location proved more elusive.
“I could have sworn it was this way,” he said, turning left, then right, then left again. “There should be a tree with two large rocks to the right and then…”
Ora followed, saying nothing, though her mind began to buzz with concern as it was growing late and, despite her good boots, her feet were starting to ache from traipsing over the uneven ground. Eventually she said, “The sun will be setting soon. Perhaps we should be heading back to town. We can resume our hunt tomorrow.”
He glanced up at the trees’ canopy as if just noticing the change in the amount and color of light sneaking through. “Oh. Yes. I didn’t realize. I apologize for making you wander for so long.”
“No need. I rather enjoy the hunt, as it were.”
“You’re right, though, that it’s probably for the best if we return tomorrow,” he agreed. “We won’t see anything in the dark, and by then hopefully my internal compass will have recalibrated.”
