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"What do we do?" Cub kept asking
Get it waret it to nurse, rain and lead the mother into the barn while she warmed up the laht now, because the colostrum was crucial The newborn intestine only stays open a few hours to receive the mother’s antibodies They had a bottle so to her feet, Dellarobia found herself curled like a fist around the lahtly she could hardly draw breath The sobs in his great chest racked the of a terrified ani, it seemed It was all imper This one little life signified nothing in the long run; it would get eaten
"It wasn’t all a waste," she told hiht, she was sure of that The children And for all the rest they wept, athat felt bottos that didn’t exist, fantasies of flight where there was no flight Nothing, really, but walking away on your oo feet She felt tears frozen on her face
"How can you know?" he kept asking her She told hi stuff away, or just guessing, if that was the only choice She and Preston had read about swinging around a newborn lamb But never in a s look impossible when you’ve not done them
She pulled away in order to look her husband in the eye "This is all going to scare us to death," she said "You andto have to do it"
"Maybe," he said
"Not ed down the precarious slope to their separate tasks With the lamb cradled inside her coat Dellarobia followed the fence line, for soht of the ti out honeysuckle and briars to mend it But the weeds were still here, it was plain to see, encircling the whole pasture, threaded through wire and post and skeletal trees With their glassy stems encased in ice the weeds looked more substantial than the fence itself, the seasons of secret growth revealed in a sudden disclosure of terrible, cold beauty
She felt Preston’s hand slip into hers while she stood at the stovepancakes She’d decided to tell him today, before the bus, and not tomorrow on his birthday In her mind he was still in bed, so the cool hand startled her and the eyes rising sole, honey?"
He tugged on her hand She turned off the range and followed him to his bedroom, where Cordie breathed in her crib, asleep She knelt with Preston on his unmade bed and looked out theand sahat he saw, a bud colony on the neighbors’ dead peach orchard
She knehat it was, despite the absence of any expectation Ovid had apprised her to be on the lookout for so like this, in the unlikely event, but not to look there, on these puny saplings whose tops now drooped over like Charlie Brown’s Christe "Ohat hi off the bed "Look how o see"
The resurrection and the life, she kept thinking over and over, a natural hazard ords like those, as she bundled wool onto Preston and they crunched out over the yard Those little trees looked alive again, resurrected Enveloped with the souls of dead children It was no easy trek across the field Preston had to hang on to her hand as they sto snow Soround that stood as wet pools in the bottoms of their footprints It was hard to see where all this could possibly go when itthe still were the e of forest, with their cover utterly blown, it looked as if soe She could not guess the number of individuals in these clusters,It wasn’t a million, that much she knew, and if these were the sole survivors, it wasn’t enough It would take a bigger gene pool to get the them, she saw; dark flecks of bodies were sprinkled over the snowy ground here like pepper on mashed potatoes Maybe those were o Ovid had shown her pictures of bud colonies in Mexico where the butterflies descended froed for liftoff, blanketing roofs and hedges and fields of dry cornstalks Theoretically this meant they were ready to launch out In the knoorld, anyway, it ht his sit-upon froarten field trip so they could sit on the snow in the dead peach orchard and look at the butterflies Dellarobia brought a raincoat to sit on They chose a spot at the base of a little tree high on the hill so they could look up at butterflies, and down at butterflies She had never allowed herself to picture this After the storm on Tuesday Ovid had told her they were still on the trees up there, a few million butterflies frozen onto the branches beneath a covering of snow Probably they would slough off with the thaw like so much dead skin In the last two days he’d packed up the lab with thewhat to keep, what to give away Survival wasn’t possible, he said, given the mortality under that snow It would take a crowd of variations and mistakes and resilience, at least a ht, to add up to survival of a species So what about the animals two-by-two on Noah’s ark, she’d asked, and he replied that they would have enerations, thanks to inbreeding His bitterness was understandable As they broke his laboratory down to its bones, Dellarobia watched the void of this man where once there had been wonder, and she despaired of her future In such a short time he had relieved her of a lifetime of illusions, and already she missed them Noah’s Ark and better days ahead She found herself still rooting for this sliver of a generation that had hted orchard