It was foggy out, the rain drizzling. His favourite kind of day. The sun, like the woodstove, was too hot. Not that there was much sun around these days. Good, he thought, he liked weather.

Herby pulled on his mitts. He still wore the kind that had the string that went inside his jacket, even though he was nearly seven. Those mitts were for babies, he’d said to Nan when she handed him a new pair.

“These mitts are for youngsters that don’t lose a hand to the bog every time he goes out there.” She’d retorted with a smile. Herby didn’t want to lose these mitts, so he said nothing and threaded the string through his sleeves. No one could tell that they were on a string when they were on his hands anyway. And he didn’t really play with the other kids at Nan’s.

They were down the street quite a ways, and they didn’t like what he liked.

He was dressed for the weather, for the wind and the wet. He had on his heavy-duty windbreaker. The blue one that he was growing out of, but that he didn’t want to grow out of.

It was the perfect colour blue. Right in the middle. Not too dark and not too light. He feared he’d never have another one like it.

He was wearing his favourite jogs, the grey ones that were soft on the inside. And he had on the worn t-shirt with the hole in the neck that his mother said to stop wearing, but gave up on putting it in the giveaway bag because he kept sneaking it out of there. No one else would want this, he knew. It was threadbare but soft, and the faded polar bears on the front of it still made him happy. They were kind of like friends.

He also had on under his windbreaker a sweater his aunt made from scraps of yarn, the sleeves different colours and textures. He thought it was the coolest sweater he’d ever seen, and knew he was right when even his teacher commented on it on the playground last week.

“That’s an interesting sweater, Herby” she’d said. “Where does a boy get a neat sweater like that?”

“My aunt made it. She’s quirky,” he’d replied. He didn’t know what quirky meant exactly, but he’d heard his mother describe his aunt that way and thought it must be a good thing. Quirky sounded fun.

Herby headed to the big rock. He was told he had 45 minutes before he had to come in, and he was eager to check and see if his discovery from yesterday was still there. He’d left it at the edge of the bog and thought about it all night. He’d even drawn a picture of it and tucked it under his pillow so he’d be sure not to forget about it in the morning. He had the paper in his pocket. He could picture what it looked like, but the reminder on the paper made it real. He hadn’t imagined it. It was real. He was sure of it.

Up the path he went, the big rock ahead of him on the horizon obscured by the fog. But he knew it was there. This land, this space, this bog under the big arching sky, this all felt like his. No one else came out here but him. Occasionally, a cousin would join him, but most of his cousins were older and preferred watching TV or listening to records. They were indoor people, and he was an outdoor person. A very important distinction to a seven-year-old.

And besides, when there were others that joined him in his bog (which wasn’t a real bog, more a marshy area with a path and a stream), they always did things he didn’t like. They picked the pitcher plants and opened the leaves to look for bugs, they overturned rocks to find wet, squiggly insects and weren’t careful to put them back. And they tried to push him into the stream. He always wore his yellow rubber boots; he hated getting wet feet, but he also hated being pushed into his stream. He liked to wade into it on his own terms, when he was ready.

The other kids with their mini-dramas were too disruptive. They didn’t get it. They were always talking about this kid and that kid in their class or on their bus, and he found it boring. He wanted to tell them to shut up and look. To look at all the action around them, the little bugs, the birds, the paw prints of the animals left behind, where they went and what they were, a mystery he thought he could solve.

Other kids didn’t understand the feeling; that’s what he called it. It was like a rushing inside his chest, the feeling he would get when the wind whipped around him. The best time he got the feeling was when his parents took him to Cape Spear, and they stood on the cliffs at what he called the back, behind the lighthouse, looking onto the great slabs of rock that slanted into the sea, the wind so loud in his ears it drowned out his own thoughts. That was the best time he got the feeling. The rushing in his chest was fierce; he felt like he was the rock, he was connected to it all.

He mentioned the feeling to a kid at school one day and wished he hadn’t. He’d thought the kid would look at him, wide-eyed and tell him the same thing happened to him. That was when he stood on what felt like the edge of the earth, that he got a rushing inside him. That was what being alive must feel like. But to his dismay, the kid did look at him wide-eyed, but then squealed with laughter and told the whole class that sometimes Herby got a funny feeling and felt a rushing, and the whole class turned it into a tease about him peeing his pants. It wasn’t funny, and it made him feel small. But he still chased the feeling.

Herby had a pocketful of Moose Cookies. Little locally made shortbreads in the shape of a moose’s head. He plucked one from his pocket and apologized to it before biting off its antlers.

At the end of the path, Herby stopped. Here was where it looked like you couldn’t go any further. To anyone but him, the marsh looked like a bog, like a no man’s land. But Herby knew the path beneath the brush; his footsteps made it. He looked around. This was where he left it yesterday. Today, in the fog and the drizzle, he couldn’t see a sign of it anywhere. He trudged through his boy-made path and thought of calling out to it. But he didn’t know what it was called. Or how he could call it to him. He thought it could hear him, maybe. Though yesterday it hadn’t responded to him out loud, but had just kind of shuffled about and shook, or bounced a little up and down.

Herby made it to the big rock and climbed up it. He sat on top and pulled out another cookie along with the picture he’d drawn. To anyone else, it looked simply like two circles, one smaller one and another, like a halo drawn around it. He didn’t know what it was exactly; it was a circle, he thought, but a really round one; it was round all the way around like a ball. But it was more than a ball. It was an orb. The word came into his head, and he knew it was right. It was an orb.

“Sorry, buddy,” he said to the cookie, this time biting off the moose’s nose first.

As he chewed, he caught a glimmer of something.

He stood on the rock. There it was! It was back! He thought of jumping off the rock and running to it, but the brush below was prickly, and before he knew it, there it was right next to him.

“Hey, buddy!” he said. He threw his hand in the air to get a high five, and the orb bounced. It was happy to see him, too. He could tell.

“So what do you want to do today?” He asked the orb.

The orb didn’t answer. It turned as if it was surveying the land below the big rock. Then it lowered.

“Okay then, let’s just sit here for a bit.” Herby sat down. The rock was cold. The wind whipped around. The fog moved. The drizzle stuck all over everything.

Herby noticed the wind didn’t move the orb the same way it didn’t move him. Although the wind could move his clothes, pin his pants to his legs, whip off his hat, but it didn’t lift him off the ground, it didn’t move anything on the orb. The orb was unaffected by the wind.

And the drizzle too. Herby noticed that the orb wasn’t wet. It didn’t have a slick layer of water on it. It was just glowing, unaffected. The orb was like it was mirrored, reflective, but almost transparent at the same time. In some light, it looked golden, but today it looked more silver.

He wanted to ask it what it was made of, but it wasn’t talking, so he wondered and didn’t say his question out loud.

He also wanted to ask it how long it was going to be around for. He liked to know when things were happening; he wasn’t a fan of surprises. Not at all.

But how could it tell him? He kept quiet.

Yesterday, when it had come upon him, he was startled. But only for a moment. The orb had a peacefulness about it that fell on him. He wasn’t afraid of it. He didn’t know what it was, or what it was doing there, or if it was lost, but he felt that he was the right one for it to be near. He thought, better the orb found me instead of the kids at school. They would probably try to kick it. Or poke it.

Who are you? He asked the orb yesterday. He didn’t get a response, and that was okay with him. He only asked it because that’s what it seemed like you were supposed to do, from what he’d learned from movies and comic books.

The orb doesn’t answer any questions, he understood. Yesterday, it floated around him, never going too high above him. A couple of times it darted ahead, and he followed slowly behind, but then it would slow down and wait for him to catch up.

But today, Herby and the orb sat on the rock. Out there in his bog, he didn’t mind doing nothing. He could spend hours fiddling with something, dragging a stick across the mud, or staring into a puddle. The purposelessness of just being there out in the weather was all the entertainment he needed. He hated to go back into the stuffy house with the TV or radio always on, the voices droning on and on about the most boring things in the world. Outside, he could hear only what he wanted to hear, what the bog wanted to tell him. It was his favourite place.

The fog began to clear, and he knew his forty-five minutes were almost up. He didn’t have a watch; he’d asked for one for the last two Christmases but didn’t get it, the excuse being that he’d lose it, and he could have a new calculator wristwatch when he was older. Maybe nine, his mom had said. Maybe when you’re more grown up.

He thought about this now, and it made him angry. He told the orb.” You know, everyone acts like being a grown-up is so great, like it’s the best thing ever. But grown-ups are the most boring. They’re even worse than the kids in my class. They only care about dumb stuff, and they never go outside.” He could tell the orb was listening; it had turned slowly as he spoke. Like it was looking at him.

“You know what,” he told the orb, “I’ll never be like them, I’ll never forget to sit by a stream, to skip rocks, I’ll never be so boring as them, I promise you.”

The orb glowed a little, and he knew it believed him. He believed him.

When it felt like he might be past his time, Herby climbed down the big rock, and the orb followed him. Like the day before, when he crossed the edge of the bog onto the path, it stopped. He wondered why it didn’t follow him home.

On the walk back to Nan’s, he missed it. He was suddenly very aware of how alone he was most of the time.

He thought about the orb and its strange presence and couldn’t wait to tell his mom all about it.

He tried to explain it to her as she washed the dishes and he dried them after supper. With her blue rubber-gloved hands in the sink, she warned him to be careful in the bog. “It can swallow you up, you know,” she said.