Read Online Margaret and the Moth Tree by Brit Trogen, Kari Trogen - Free Book Online Page B

whirl until they’re ready to collapse with happiness. So you can’t blame them, really, for being quite tired out by morning, content to rest up quietly until the next night’s festivities.
    The other thing that moths are doing in the daytime is thinking up clever new games to impress their friends. Moths are very competitive, you see, and love nothing more than to show off.
    You may have seen them at a game called Light-Hopping, which is one of the oldest and most popular moth games. Every time a moth spots a light or a lamppost, he will race to it as fast as possible. The last one to hop on the light is It, and that moth has to tag one of his friends, do three quick loop-de-loops and touch the light again before his friend can tag him back. This game is so popular that moths will even practice at it all alone, just to be ready when the time comes for a real match. And it is so popular that even the rumors of great danger posed by mysterious lights known as
candles
cannot stop them from playing it.
    They have other games, too. There is Hoverpik, where moths fly in formation to make shapes that the others guess at, and Billabump, which is a flying form of leapfrog. In fact, Margaret had interrupted a game of Billabump between Pip, Rimb and Flit that was taking place on the lawn. When the three moths had heard Margaret’s footsteps approaching, they’d abandoned their game and fled into the tree.
    There are very few events that can cause moths to abandon a game before it’s finished. On rare occasions, a silently swooping owl or a sudden hailstorm might cause moths to take cover inside their tree.
    On one infamous night many years before, a barefoot dreg named Sally Winkleson had shuffled through the yard in her nightgown, fast asleep. She had walked straight through a game of Hoverpik, stopped in her tracks, and then turned around and marched back to the orphanage, pausing once to ask, “Which way to the cheese factory?” But the appearance of Margaret, wide-awake and curious, was the first of its kind.
    These were some of the marvelous things she discovered listening to Pip, Rimb and Flit, as she took in the sights and sounds of the moth tree for the first time.
    â€œGames afoot!” called a voice suddenly from outside. “Whirlawhoomps!”
    The wings of the three moths began to twitch. Then, without a word, they flew upward out of the branches and into the night.
    Margaret scrambled after them, back through the makeshift tunnel in the brush. And what she saw when she emerged made her gasp for the second time that night.
    More moths had come out of hiding. There were dozens, maybe hundreds of them, flitting through the air in chaotic loops and twirls. The sky was alive with moths at play.
    At first she didn’t see a pattern in it, but after sitting quietly for a few minutes, she began to understand.
    Whirlawhoomps is a moth game played late in the spring, when the most impatient of the moths have emerged from their cocoons and the slow movers are still enjoying their time as caterpillars.
    To play, each moth pairs up with a caterpillar, who spins a small thread of silk. Together they fasten one end of the thread around a small blue berry, which the moths call Plurpils. Once the Plurpil is fastened, the moth carries the other end of the thread with its front legs and takes off into the air.
    And that is when the fun really starts.
    The goal of Whirlawhoomps is to swing your Plurpil so that it squishes into another moth, marking them with blue juice. As soon as that happens, the moth who has been squished on is Out for the rest of the round, and the moth who’s done the squishing zips off to look for their next target.
    Margaret, sitting cross-legged at the foot of the brush, hardly knew where to look. Her eyes darted between loop-de-loops, and swinging Plurpils, and zooming and zipping moths. She popped a handful of Plurpils into her mouth from time to time, and they tasted