Delphine Silt's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Delphine Silt waded into the shallows at first light and counted six dead frogs before she reached the bend. The water had turned the color of pea soup overnight. She knew the smell already, sour and green, and she knew what it meant for anything breathing through wet skin. For two years she had been saving jars of coins and scraps of donated lumber toward one thing: a proper rescue shelter for every displaced amphibian in Hemlock Swamp. She had drawn the floor plan on the back of a feed sack. She did not have walls yet. She had a bucket, a net, and a bloom that was killing faster than she could scoop. She worked the shallows until her arms shook. She lifted a slouched olive-green tree frog off a floating log, its spotted back already going slack, and dropped it into the clean rainwater in her bucket beside four others still kicking. The dying ones she could not save she laid on the bank in a row so she would not step on them twice. By noon the bucket held eleven live frogs and no room for more. She hauled it up the slope to her shed, tipped the frogs into the old cattle trough she had scrubbed the night before, and ran back down. The bloom had crept another ten feet toward the deeper pools. She understood then that scooping would not finish this. She left the net in the mud and went for the feed sacks stacked behind the shed. She dragged them to the narrow mouth where the shallows fed the main channel and packed them across it, sack after sack, until the poisoned water stopped moving into the rest of the swamp. It took her until dark. When she straightened up, the dam held. Thirty-one frogs sat in her trough, alive, with nowhere else to go. The shed was not a shelter. It was a shed with a trough in it, and by morning she would need more troughs, more clean water, and walls.