Delphine Fernside's Arc

Chapter 10 of 11

Della left the patch and walked down to the root hollow to check the packed crates. She smelled the trouble before she saw it. The stacked crates in the cool dark were bleeding. Ripe juice had worked through the slats and pooled red on the dirt floor. The wood was stained dark from the bottom board up, and each drip hung a long moment before it fell. She had packed them too tight and too fast, and now the weight of the top row was crushing the fruit below. She crouched to lift the top crate off and stopped. A thin black line was moving across the floor. Ants. A whole trail of them, streaming in from a crack near the roots, curving around a stone, climbing the lowest crate in a shining column. More were coming from outside every second. By morning the crates would be crawling. Grans and the cousins would arrive to find spoiled fruit under a blanket of ants, and the ripest row back at the patch already turning. Della's stomach dropped. She had asked for help, and the help would come to ruin. She needed to break the trail and clear the crates before the ants got deeper. She turned out her pockets. String. The empty seed tin. And the small leather pouch Grampy had tied to her belt that morning, with a stub of chalk inside for marking crates. She pulled the chalk out and pressed it hard against a flat stone at the mouth of the hollow, dragging a thick white line across the ants' path. The marching column hit the chalk and broke apart. Ants circled, confused, wiping their feelers. The line held. That stopped the new ones. It did not help the ones already on the crates. Della grabbed a curled slab of bark from the pile near the hollow wall and used its edge like a dustpan. She swept the ants off the wood in long careful strokes and tipped each load out past the chalk line. She worked one crate at a time. When the bark filled, she carried it out and shook it clean. Her knees went numb on the dirt. Her hands went sticky with juice and sharp with tiny bites. When the last ant was off the last crate, she sat back on her heels. The chalk line held a dusty white bar across the doorway. The ants milled on the far side of it, cut off from the sweet. She wiped her palms on her apron and looked at the crates. The bottom boards were still soaked. The lowest berries were mush. She lifted the top crate off the stack to take the weight away, then the next, until each one stood alone on the floor. The fruit inside was saved. But three crates' worth of bottom berries were already lost, and the chalk would not hold past the next hard rain.