Cole Brennan's Arc

Chapter 2 of 6

Ty had pointed north, to land Cole didn't own. That land belonged to the hog farm, and its owner was a stranger to Cole. The bloom came from there. So the next morning Cole walked the fence line to the property he'd never set foot on. He meant to find the man who ran it and make him stop the poison before summer. Cole crossed a stretch of muddy ground and found the source. Water spilled from a pen and ran into a shallow channel. The channel fed the creek that fed his fields. Green film shone on the surface, the same film Ty had lifted from the trough. Cole crouched and stared at it. Every foal he'd dreamed of raising would drink this. He stood and looked for someone to blame. An old man knelt beside a sick sow near the pens. White hair stuck out under a plaid collar. He held a bucket to the animal's mouth and murmured to her like she could understand. He didn't hear Cole come up. "Your runoff is killing my horses," Cole said. The old man turned. His face fell, not with anger but with worry. "Killing?" He set the bucket down. "I'm Ernest Meadows. Whose horses, son?" "Mine. Downstream. The vet traced the bloom right here." Cole pointed at the channel. "That water crosses your land into my creek." Ernest walked to the channel and looked. He pressed a hand over his mouth. "I didn't know it went that far." He glanced back at the sow. "My hogs have been sick too. I thought it was just them." His voice shook. "I'd never poison an animal. Never." Cole believed him. The man's hands were dirty from tending the sow, not from carelessness. But belief didn't clean the water. "Then help me fix it," Cole said. "The vet says the source has to be cut off. If it runs till summer, I lose everything." Ernest nodded fast. "We build a trench. Line it, slope it, send the runoff away from the creek. I have the stone. I have the pipe." He looked at Cole with wet eyes. "I should have caught this. Let me make it right." They shook on it there, in the mud, the sow wheezing behind them. By dusk they had marked a path for a reinforced channel to carry the dirty water clear of the creek. Cole drove home with a plan and a partner. The obstacle was solved: he'd reached the owner, and the man would stop the bloom. But Ernest's last words rode home with him. "Whatever's in my hogs put it in the ground," the old man had said. "A trench moves the water. It won't cure what's already sick." Cole thought of his low fields, the soil already tainted, and the mare still shivering in his quarantine barn. Cutting the source was only the start.