9

Frances Crawford counted seven men, a car and a truck. On the back of the truck was stenciled in large red letters the word EXPLOSIVES. The men scrambled out of the cars and, lugging their equipment, headed north through the woods along a cable line laid earlier in the week. Every one hundred feet they drilled three six-foot holes. The dynamite men came along behind them and placed charges in the holes. Then, using a shooting box, the men set off the explosives. By monitoring the sound waves from the explosions as they bounced off rock formations thousands of feet below ground, a computer could estimate whether or not there was a chance of finding oil there.

The little army advanced efficiently, not stopping to rest until its men came to the riverbank, where they had to decide the best way to cross. One man pointed toward a shallow spot in front of Frances’s cabin, but the others shook their heads. Instead, they took off shoes and socks, rolled up pant legs, and waded across a somewhat deeper spot, holding their equipment out of the water. The stream’s iciness surprised them and they laughed and shrieked like school children.

On the other side of the river, they stopped to dry off. A couple of the men knelt down to drink the clear water from the stream. Finally they picked up their gear and disappeared into the woods.

Frances had been at the window all morning. Now she knew how the early settlers who loved the woods must have felt when the landlookers and cruisers came through the countryside buying up whole forests for the lumbering companies to cut down. The dog, hackles up, ran back and forth, yelping nervously each time a charge went off. When the explosions were no longer audible, she left the window and hurried outside.

She expected some drastic change—bits of the earth’s crust scattered over the ground, a fire, craters. However, apart from the trampled bracken and some bare spots about the size of a saucer where the charges had been exploded, there was nothing to see. Perversely, it was not what she wanted. She would have been pleased to find beer cans, trash, dead birds and animals, the earth ripped open, anything to justify the rage she felt over the assault on her land.

But nothing was there except a July day full of yellow flowers. Goldenrod was in bloom, as was the St.-John’s-wort, with its butter-yellow petals. The mullein blossoms had begun their long climb. Cinquefoil trailed along the ground, and beside the stream was a stand of jewelweed where dragonflies came and went.

Frances walked along the river, telling herself nothing would come of the tests, confident the river would contrive some spell to throw the machines off. She saw men in Texas puzzling over the computer results, “Look here, look at what that tape does when we get near the river, certainly can’t be any oil there. We’ll have to try elsewhere.”

Her fantasy was interrupted by a rustling on the ground: a meadow vole after last fall’s acorns. She passed some sickly chokecherry trees, shrouded with deserted-tent worm webs. The milkweed growing along the trail gave off a cloying smell. She stopped to pick some blueberries which grew on the steep bank. A white-throated sparrow sang from the top of a nearby pine. As she stopped picking to listen, the dog trotted by and upset her berry basket.

Reaching out to save the basket, she let go of a sapling she was holding onto to keep her balance on the bank. A rock under her foot gave way and she slipped down the hill, her arms and legs scraping against sand and sharp twigs. She tried to catch hold of a branch, but she was moving too fast. When she finally came to rest at the bottom of the hill, the basket lay empty a few yards beyond her. The dog had taken off after a chipmunk.

She tried to sit up, moving with great care. Her arms and one leg seemed to be all right, but the other leg was twisted under her body. There was a sharp stab of pain when she tried to move it. She felt it carefully. There didn’t seem to be any break. Possibly it was no more than a bad sprain. Even so, it would be difficult to get back to the cabin.

She heard the voices of men calling to one another. At first she felt relief at the possibility of help. Then it occurred to her it must be the team from the survey company returning to their truck. It was insupportable that they should find her sprawled here, helpless. But how to get away? On her hands and knees? They would overtake her. She decided to stay perfectly quiet. If they discovered her, she would pretend nothing was wrong. She retrieved her basket with a stick so they would think she was picking berries. As she tried to get into a more comfortable position, a searing spasm shot through her leg. It was all she remembered until she came to, cradled in the arms of the large man who had drilled the holes for the explosives.

“Are you all right?” He sounded nervous, like someone who has just had a strange baby thrust into his arms. “I felt your leg before I moved you and I don’t believe there’s anything broken, but you should see a doctor.” The other men were gathered around her, peering down, worried looks on their faces.

She felt like a senile Snow White surrounded by outsized dwarfs. And the clumsy oaf had had the impertinence to feel her leg! “Just put me down,” she told him. “I can manage the rest of the way myself.”

“I don’t think you ought to put any weight on that foot, ma’am. It looks pretty swollen.” The man was frowning.

When she began to wriggle in his arms, he reluctantly lowered her. The other men moved back as though she might explode when she touched ground.

And she did. She yelped with pain. Two of the men made a sling with their arms and silently waited. Without a word she lowered herself into it and put a reluctant arm around each man to steady herself. The procession moved toward the cabin.

“How did you know where I lived?” she asked.

“They briefed us before we came out. This was volunteer duty, like cleaning out a machine-gun nest. They said you might take a potshot at us,” The big man laughed; the others grinned.

She felt better. She might be helpless now, but she had made them think twice about tramping through her property. “I don’t suppose you can control the results of your tests, what they say?” For that she would be happy to play the pathetic old lady and even whine a little.

“No ma’am,” the man said apologetically. “We don’t have nothing to do with the results. They go right into a computer and then we send them off to the company. We never see the results.”

So much for that.

They were at the cabin. “Can we call the doctor for you? Or we could bring the truck over and take you right to the emergency room at the medical center.”

The thought of riding into town in one of their trucks was odious. “Thank you just the same, but I don’t have a phone. If you’ll put me down in a chair, I’ll be fine. I feel much better.” And then, with a terrible effort, she added, “I’m glad you gentlemen came along. There’s some lemonade in the icebox if you’d like some.” But the men seemed anxious to be on their way. Did they imagine that she had booby-trapped the icebox, she wondered, or put rat poison in the lemonade?

She hobbled over to the window and watched them squeeze like Keystone Cops into the small car and the truck and take off. What angered her most was that having tramped that land for fifty years, winter and summer, she had believed there was nothing she did not know about it. Now they had come with their fancy paraphernalia, and the fickle land had immediately yielded secrets she would never learn.