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asking because I need to assess the food supply. Some are saying there are fewer fish than there once were. Look here, what I’ve been writing.” He passed a paper over to Matty. There were columns of numbers, lists headed “Salmon” and “Trout.”
    Matty read the numbers and frowned. “It might be true,” he said. “I remember at first I would pull fish after fish from the river. But you know what, Leader?”
    â€œWhat?” Leader took the paper back from Matty and laid it with others on his desk.
    â€œI was little then. And maybe you don’t remember this, because you’re older than I am . . .”
    Leader smiled. “I’m still a young man, Matty. I remember being a boy.” Matty thought he noticed a brief flicker of sadness in Leader’s eyes, despite the warm smile. So many people in Village—including Matty—had sad memories of their childhoods.
    â€œWhat I meant was, I remember all the fish, the feeling that they would never end. I felt that I could drop my line in again and again and again and there would always be fish. Now there aren’t. But, Leader . . .”
    Leader looked at him and waited.
    â€œThings seem
more
when you’re little. They seem bigger, and distances seem farther. The first time I came here through Forest? The journey seemed forever.”
    â€œIt does take days, Matty, from where you started.”
    â€œYes, I know. It still takes days. But now it doesn’t seem as far or as long. Because I’m older, and bigger, and I’ve gone back and forth again and again, and I know the way, and I’m not scared. So it seems shorter.”
    Leader chuckled. “And the fish?”
    â€œWell,” Matty acknowledged, “there don’t seem to be as many. But maybe it’s just that I was a little boy back then, when the fish seemed endless.”
    Leader tapped the tip of his pen on the desk as he thought. “Maybe so,” he said after a moment. He stood. From a table in the corner of the room he took a stack of folded papers.
    â€œMessages?” Matty asked.
    â€œMessages. I’m calling a meeting.”
    â€œAbout
fish?
”
    â€œNo. I wish it were just about fish. Fish would be easy.”
    Matty took the stack of message papers he would be delivering. Before he turned to the staircase to leave, he felt compelled to say, “Fish aren’t ever easy. You have to use just the right bait, and know the right place to go, and then you have to pull the line up at just the right moment, because if you don’t, the fish can wiggle right off your hook, and not everybody is good at it, and . . .”
    He could hear Leader laughing, still, when he left.
    Â 
    It took Matty most of the day to deliver all of the messages. It wasn’t a hard task. He liked the harder ones better, actually, when he was outfitted with food and a carrying pack and sent on long journeys through Forest. Although he hadn’t been sent to it in almost two years, Matty especially liked trips that took him back to his former home, where he could greet his boyhood pals with a somewhat superior smile, and snub those who had been cruel to him in the past. His mother was dead, he had been told. His brother was still there, and looked at Matty with more respect than he ever had in the past, but they were strangers to each other now. The community where he had lived was greatly changed and seemed foreign, though less harsh than he remembered.
    Today he simply made his way around Village, delivering notice of the meeting that would be held the following week. Reading the message himself, he could understand Leader’s questioning about the supply of fish, and the concern and worry that Matty had felt from him.
    There had been a petition—signed by a substantial number of people—to close Village to outsiders. There would have to be a debate, and a vote.
    It had happened before,