“Why don’t I hold her and you jab her,” Hester said, abruptly handing Dellarobia the blue-handled syringe while she struggled with the thrashing animal. Hester gripped one of its horns in each hand and used her hip to pin Hanky against the barn wall. “Now,” she grunted, not a question, and Dellarobia moved without thought, aiming up on the shoulder, following the point-squeeze motion she’d watched in infinite repetition. She felt the needle sink, then stepped back as the big ewe struggled free and leaped away, landing hard but scrambling to her feet. Her eyes rolled hard, showing the whites.

“You didn’t make too bad a job of that,” Hester said.

Dellarobia replayed the event as if watching it from the outside: herself in a green windbreaker, red hair swinging as she leaned down to deliver the injection. I see how you take to this. She did this all the time now. Imagined how he would see her while she stood at the stove cooking supper. While she read to the kids, putting them to bed. For no good reason, it made these routine parts of her life seem consequential.

She asked Hester, “How’d you learn to do all this vet stuff?”

“Well, you know. Dr. Gates won’t come till death’s at your door, and Dr. Worsh won’t come even then. They both charge sixty dollars to step out of the truck. I’d say I got tired of paying sixty dollars to hear that I had a dead sheep.”

Hanky milled with a few others near the hay manger, eyeing her options. One of which might be to leap over the waist-high wall of the stall. “There ought to be more vets in this county,” Dellarobia said. “As much livestock as people have. That’s crazy.”

“I’d say it is,” Hester agreed. “Steady work for the asking. Worsh and Gates are old men. Kids ought to be lining up to take their place.”

“Oops.” Dellarobia pulled out the grease crayon she’d stuck in her pocket while sorting out the takeaways. “We forgot to mark Hanky.”

Hester laughed. “Think we’ll forget and chase down that she-devil twice?”

They finished by midmorning and turned out the ewes to settle down again in their muddy country. Dellarobia could see now how they assembled along family lines. A hole had broken in the clouds overhead, a ragged blue scrap ringed with cold white that made her want to bellow her small relief. This last week of rain had stacked up more layers of crazy on folks who had lost whole harvests and the better part of their minds to a year of drizzle. Water torture, they were calling it on the radio. This morning she’d heard about a man in Henshaw who walked outside and unloaded his Smith & Wesson into his old horse, claiming he’d seen a vision of it drowning in mud. The vision was familiar to most by now. Dellarobia had never known to be thankful for so simple a thing as a dry, white snow.

She and Hester passed through the upper pasture gate with its empty donation bucket nailed to the post. If someone could find the time to watch this gate, it would help. Maybe pass out leaflets, like Leighton Akins. Dellarobia considered what she would put on her questionnaire: How ’bout this weather? Do you know the difference between correlation and causation? Do you have thoughts of shooting your horse?

“Do you ever find yourself just thinking about the sun?” she asked aloud. It was not a Hester kind of question, so she didn’t expect an answer. Her mother-in-law had agreed to help her look for nectar flowers that might be blooming the last week of February. Both struck Dellarobia as long shots: winter flowers, and Hester’s cooperation. But she’d promised, and now here they were on the High Road, with no idea how to talk to one another. After a minute Hester paused on the gravel, turning this way and that.

“Yes,” she finally answered emphatically.

“About the sun?” Dellarobia asked.

“Yes,” Hester confirmed, now striking downhill away from the traveled road. To Dellarobia’s surprise they were on a path, faint and steep and not at all well maintained but definitely a path. She’d never noticed it, in all her days up here.

“They say this might be permanent,” Dellarobia said, and then corrected herself. “Scientists say that. The weather will just get all wild instead of settling down.”

Hester walked ahead of her in the path and made no response. The tail of her red kerchief bobbed with every step.

“Some places it’s gone dry,” Dellarobia plowed on. “Where they had to abandon farms, I guess, for the drought. Like Texas. One big fire sale. I don’t know what’s worse, to burn up or drown.”

“Burn up,” Hester said decisively. “That’d be worse.”

“But look at all the crops here that molded on the vine. And us, having to buy hay for our sheep. You have to wonder, you know. Who’s going to feed who?”

“What do they say is doing it?” Hester asked.

Dellarobia considered possible answers. There was no easy way to talk about the known world unraveling into fire and flood. She came up with a reliable word. “Pollution,” she said. “You pollute the sky long enough, and it turns bad on you.”

“Stands to reason,” Hester said.

“Where are we headed?”

“There’s a bottom over south that gets more sun, where Cub and I used to go hunt chicken of the woods when he was little. I’ve seen the harbinger flowers out there. Not at the same time, though. Chicken of the woods is in fall time.”

“What is that, chicken of the woods?”

“It’s a mushroom you eat. It’s good. Like chicken.”

Dellarobia recalled Hester collecting bark and such for her dyes, years ago, before everyone’s tastes ran to the bright, fake colors. But she couldn’t picture the young mother taking her boy on scavenger hunts. “Where’d you learn all this woodsy stuff?”

“My old mommy,” was all she said, an answer Dellarobia had heard before. She knew little of Hester’s family. They were poor, they’d died off. One brother and a slew of cousins remained over in Henshaw, but Hester had cleaved to Bear’s family and left her own behind, it seemed. The sky grew a notch brighter. They passed through a stand of walnut trees with branches angled like elbows, still hanging on to last year’s walnuts. Like skeletons fixing to play ball, she thought. The steep ground was eroded everywhere from the rains. Leaf-lined troughs ran down the mountain, parting the soil between banks of detritus they’d carried along the forest floor. Among the clumps of leaves were dead monarchs, not so thick as at the study site.