Stagtine, 17. The Sunrise
Section 2, Chapter 1
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Paddy, or Padraig, is a bull in the emerging Wildland. One February morning he was in his paddock, above the barn, as was considered appropriate on farms. It happened that he was unhappy and lonely in his position and strode, violently, to tell us so, threatening our lives and disrupting our best laid plans.
A flash of prismatic orange and red and opal blue ignited above the winter grey hills and hovered before it declined; The dawn’s brilliant colors rising to sing up their sun. But only momentarily. Frozen droplets of snow purled from cold, grey clouds to even colder, greyer mud, knitting into a heather quilt that covered everything our eyes could see.
“Grab that line, quick!” I instructed in a tired drawl. The wet, morning cold was already weighing heavily on me. “He’s coming back on us!”
“It’s stuck! It won’t budge!” Morgan cried as she worked to reel in the line of electrified grazing wire. The thick and now freezing mud clogging the spindle of the reel as it went, shocking her with its ten thousand volts. A plastic reel constructed from plastic strands laced with metal threads to carry the electrical current—the modern farmer’s great tool and the wet, winter farmer’s great curse.
A light sparkled across the mountain from one of our few neighbor’s kitchens—over a mile across the river valley below and up a few hundred feet of the near sheer rock cliff on the other side. It was morning and they were busy making their coffee and living, as normal humans do, in their normal human ways.
“Is this normal?” her voice resounded across the mud, and landed with a fat, final slap—more a tired plea than a question.
I did not respond. Her question produced no ripples.
The cold engraved the dawn’s departing darkness with crisp, thin edges. Weather you can feel between your fingers. If it gets colder, it will descend as an enflamed numbness into your fingertips. If it gets wetter, no one has a chance. There is little worse than freezing rain kissed bitterly by harsh, westerly winds. We would all soon freeze from the outside in, cracking as we go.
“Is this normal!” Morgan’s voice cracked with emphasis as ten thousand volts pulsed through her veins.