The excavator idled at the edge of Hollow Creek Farm just after eight on a cold October morning, its yellow boom held above the ground like the neck of some prehistoric animal that had not yet decided whether to lower its head.
Mist hung in thin ribbons over the pond behind the barn, and the cattails along its southern bank bowed under the weight of last night's frost.
A dozen people had gathered beside the eastern fence, though Adele Fenwick had invited only two of them. They stood with their coats buttoned and their hands wrapped around coffee cups, waiting to see whether a fifty-eight-year-old widow was really about to empty a pond that had never gone dry in anyone's memory.
Frank Doyle was the loudest of them, which was unusual only if you had never met Frank. He had farmed the neighboring property for twenty-six years and believed there were few problems that could not be improved by stating his opinion of them at considerable volume. His pickup sat crooked beside the gravel lane, the driver's door still open, and he leaned against the hood as if he had come to watch an auction. "You're pulling the plug on the one thing that's never dried up in a drought," he called. "Everett would have told you to leave that old pond alone."
A few men laughed, not cruelly, or at least not in the way they would later remember it. In farming country, laughter often served as a substitute for saying that someone had made an expensive mistake. Adele heard it, recognized the nervous affection beneath some of it and the certainty beneath the rest, and kept her attention on the water. She wore Everett's old green canvas jacket over her sweater, rubber boots that had been patched twice, and work gloves too large for her fingers. On the ground beside her lay a clipboard holding the authorization forms she had signed, read, and signed again.
Warren Stokes, the excavator operator, stood near the pump trailer and checked the hoses one final time. He was a patient, spare man whose beard had gone almost entirely white before his fiftieth birthday, and he held a voluntary advisory position with the county soil and water district in addition to running his excavation company. That combination made him especially careful about permits; he had refused to bring his equipment onto the property until an independent county employee had reviewed the temporary dewatering plan. The plan called for