The property taught her an unpleasant lesson during that week. Clearing was not an event. It was maintenance. Left alone, the living vegetation reclaimed the space almost as soon as she made it, and every day of rain gave it another advantage.
When Wade came to inspect the exposed trunks, Nora had to push wet canes aside just to find the numbered tags. He crouched beside the first tree, examined the bark, and pressed a thumb lightly against the thickened seam near the base. He studied the leaves overhead, then walked to the second trunk with the patient seriousness of a man who had worked among trees for most of his life.
"What do you think?" Nora asked.
"I think somebody planted at least two of these on purpose."
"An orchard?"
He shook his head. "Not yet. They could be shade trees. People used to plant good trees around houses, and this parcel might have had a home on it long before the county map was drawn. The swelling could be an old graft union, but vines do odd things to bark. I want to see more."
Tess showed him the spacing measurements. He read them without comment, asked her to repeat one, then looked down the line. "That's interesting," he admitted.
"Interesting enough to change our plan?" Nora asked.
"Only if your first plan was to cut every trunk down without looking."
She almost smiled. "It wasn't."
"Then keep clearing. And keep those animals off the bark."
When he left, Nora lowered her acreage target for the week. She still intended to reach the culvert, but she accepted that the route would include diversions around live trunks, wire removal, and repeated grazing. At dusk she found the first numbered tag partly hidden beneath new leaves. She brushed the mud from it, checked that the guard was sound, and pushed the nearby reference stake deeper into the ground.
The next morning, the goats came back. They entered the new narrow lane with such enthusiasm that Tess accused them of pretending they had never seen a leaf before. Nora walked ahead of them, testing the ground with the probe and lifting fallen canes away from their feet. Rook followed, pausing occasionally to sniff beneath the larger trees and then trotting on. The dog seemed more interested in the newly opened earth than in the goats' appetite.
The fourth trunk appeared before the end of the week. It stood exactly where Tess's rough spacing suggested another tree might have been, although vines had bent its lower branches and left a long pale scar where a heavy cane had rubbed against it. The next expected position looked empty. Nora walked it twice, searching for bark beneath the brush, and found only a low mound covered in moss.
Tess crouched to examine the mound. She pulled loose soil aside and uncovered the dark, soft remains of a stump. It was rotten enough that a fragment crumbled between her fingers. She stood, stretched her carpenter's line between the surviving trunks, and found the stump almost directly beneath it.