Delphine Silt's Arc

Chapter 2 of 3

Delphine slept two hours on the shed floor and woke to the frogs shifting in the trough. The dam had held through the night, but the dam only stopped what was already here. If the bloom started again upstream, the poisoned water would slide past her sacks before she knew it was coming, and every frog in the trough would breathe it in through their skin. She needed to know what had fed the bloom. She pulled on her boots and took a clean jar from the shelf. Then she lifted one of the spotted tree frogs from the trough, an olive-green one with dark markings and slack back legs, and set it in a smaller pail with fresh rainwater. She would carry it with her. If it went sick before she did, she would know the water she was testing was bad. She walked the channel upstream past the dam, dipping the jar every hundred paces and holding it to the light. For an hour the water stayed clear. Then she came around a low rise and saw the cause. A row of feed troughs sat tipped in the shallows where someone had rinsed them out and left them. Green sludge crusted the rims. Fertilizer pellets, half dissolved, lay scattered in the mud. The runoff pooled in a shallow bend and ran straight into the channel that fed the swamp. Delphine set the pail down and watched the tree frog. Its throat pumped steady. The water in the pail stayed clean because she had drawn it before this bend. She waded in and righted the troughs one by one, dragging them onto the bank above the waterline. She scraped the wet pellets into her jar and capped it. The source was not a mystery anymore. It was a chore someone had done badly, and it could be done badly again tomorrow by the same hand or another. She could not sit at her shed and wait to scoop the dead. She needed to find who owned these troughs, and she needed walls up before the next rain washed a new batch of pellets into the channel. She picked up the pail. The spotted frog blinked at her once. She turned back toward the shed with the jar in her pocket and a name she did not have yet at the front of her mind.