The Dark Floor

The next day Polly did something she rarely did. She folded her wings and dropped, down past the canopy, down through the tangled middle of the forest, all the way to the floor. It was a different world down there. Almost no sun reached the ground, and the light that did was soft and green and dim. The air was still and cool. Her red head was the brightest thing in sight, glowing like a small lamp in the gloom.

A line of green moved across the dark soil. Polly leaned close and saw ants, each one carrying a cut piece of leaf above its head like a tiny green sail. These were leafcutter ants, and they were farmers. They do not eat the leaves they carry. They take them underground, chew them into a soft bed, and grow a special fungus on it. The fungus is their food, and the forest is their field.

Nothing on the floor is wasted. A fallen leaf, a piece of wood, a dropped fruit, all of it is taken apart quickly and used again. In the warm wet air, fungi and tiny creatures break everything down and feed it back to the trees. The forest grows on its own ruins. What dies in the morning is part of something living by night.

On a wide dark leaf, something small and bright caught Polly's eye. It was a frog no bigger than her glasses, colored a sharp blue and black. Its bright skin was a warning, not an invitation. Polly looked but did not touch, and kept very still. All around her, in the dim and quiet, the floor of the forest was busier than it seemed.