Delphine Silt's Arc

Chapter 3 of 3

Delphine came over the last rise with the jar in her pocket and saw the sky had gone the color of wet slate. The wind had already turned. It pushed the reeds flat and carried the smell of rain off the far end of the swamp. She broke into a run. The shed sat low on its posts with one wall braced by a stack of feed sacks and a roof of tin held down by rocks. It would not hold in a real blow. Inside, the trough of rescued frogs waited, and every gust that lifted the tin would drop cold rain straight onto them. She set the pail down by the door and looked at what she had. Two tarps. A coil of rope. The dam sacks she had not used. A shed that would come apart before the storm did. She made her choice fast. She would not save the shed. She would save the frogs by taking the shed apart before the wind did it for her. She dragged the trough out and pushed it against the low bank where the ground dipped, then rolled two empty barrels beside it as a windbreak. She pulled the tin sheets off the roof one by one and laid them over the trough like a lid, weighted with rocks and lashed down through the handles with rope. She stacked feed sacks along the upwind side until the trough sat inside a low wall of grain. The olive tree frog from the pail she tucked in with the others under the tin. Then the rain came, hard and sideways. The shed walls flexed once and folded inward with a dry crack. She crouched against the sack wall with her arms over her head and listened for the trough. The tin rattled but held. When the first pass of the storm eased, she lifted a corner and counted throats pumping in the dark. Thirty-one. She had lost the shed. She had kept every frog. She sat back in the mud and understood that a shelter made of scrap would not do this again. She needed walls that were built, not stacked, and she needed them before the next storm found her.