Foy scrambled over the chain link fence that separated his backyard from the base of Sleeping Lion Mountain, the name the locals gave to the last foothill of the Davis Mountains that ended or began, depending on how you thought of it, at the edge of their town. Sometimes he walked to school down Fort street if he wanted to walk with Mickey Wallace. Mickey’s mom always had sweet-rolls or doughnuts for breakfast, and you got to wind your way through the junked cars to get to their back door. One of them was even a limousine that Mickey’s dad swore he would get running one day and give them all a ride.
 
But on this day Foy wanted to walk across the base of the mountain. The ground sloped up sharply from the backyards into boulders and crags and massive outcroppings of weathered rock. Foy picked his way along the base of the rocks. He climbed a huge boulder and stood on the top, proudly looking over the town. His mother told him that this giant rock had tumbled down from the top of the mountain thousands or maybe millions of years before. She said all the rocks at the bottom had fallen down. He said he’d never seen one fall, but she said it only happened maybe once every hundred years, so you probably wouldn’t. Foy bent down and scratched FD into the top of the rock with his pocket knife. He then placed a fist-sized rock on top of his initials to hide them. It was nice that they were hidden and only his to see.
 
He climbed off the boulder and noticed a broken egg at the base of it. He squatted to inspect the egg and drew a sharp breath. The little egg had cracked perfectly into two jagged parts. In between, still intact, was a messy yolk and a tiny, barely-formed baby bird.
 
“Wow,” he whispered.