Our backs against the boulder, we worked desperately to seat the odd-size planks across the stream’s mouth. The water was glacially cold; in a matter of seconds hands and feet were numb. Wood slipped easily from frozen fingers, forcing us to grapple with it again and again.
When we had built an unsteady, shifting, four-foot wall, the others plunged into the stream with us, forming a human brace against the water. Only Doc was left on shore, ferrying materials from the mill.
It was working, but so damned slowly. And the stream was stubborn. It breached the wall in a dozen places and foamed over the top, blinding us. The roar of the water bled into the Storm chaos until I couldn’t tell one from the other. We needed more wood.
I glanced up to where Doc hovered on the bank, a short piece of board in his hands. “Too small!” I shouted. “Longer!”
He hesitated, then dropped the board and scrambled up the bank. It seemed an eternity before he was back, struggling with several longer pieces. He was trying to pass one of them out to us when he missed his footing and toppled into the stream just above our would-be dam. The force of the water slammed him into the leaking wall and sent Kevin Elk Sings tumbling backward into the dwindling millpond. Water shot through the unmanned gap.
Delmar shouted and lunged to cover the hole. Kevin scrambled as well, out of the water and around the end of the dam to help Doc clamber out of the water. The cavalry arrived, after a fashion; several more people hurried down the slope to tackle the pile of wood, pass us lumber, and lend brawn to the dam.
While Doc sat watching them, gasping for breath, Kevin turned to the millpond. “It’s falling!” he cried after a moment. “Water’s falling!”
He was right. The water was at my waist, then at my hips, then at mid-thigh. I had no way of knowing if it was enough, but we couldn’t wait any longer. I could distinguish between the sounds of stream and Storm now, and the Storm was the louder of the two.
I pressed a shoulder into the wall and waved at Kevin, shouting to get his attention. “The wheel! The wheel!”
He got it, turned and ran, slipping and sliding in the water that now lapped up the bank. Doc was nowhere in sight.
I worked myself around so the dam was at my back and I could just see the mill past the curve of the boulder. Beside me, Delmar did the same. Along the ridgepole stood eight men and women intent on an array of tethers that ran down to and around the wheel’s massive hub. At some signal I could neither see nor hear, the phalanx of brawn leaned into the cant of the roof; ropes went taut.
From inside the mill there was a crack like the breaking of a tree limb. The top of the wheel tilted back toward the mill as the nether end of its shaft dropped into the inland cradle. A moment later there was a second crack and the wheel sagged toward the creek bed. Its weight hit the lines hard, pulling the team on the roof forward.
Breath stopped in my throat and I mentally pulled with them. Who knew? In this mangled reality, maybe willpower had a real effect.
The wheel stopped moving, suspended by the ropes. Then ponderously, a few inches at a time, it slid downward, groaning like an aged dinosaur, and slipped into its cradle. The water lapped at it but lacked the power to move it.
On the millhouse roof the rope team stood down, except for a lone figure that straddled the ridgepole, apparently waiting to signal us when the gears were engaged.
“Problem!” Delmar yelled in my ear. Water cascaded over his head in a foamy veil. “We just let go this stuff-it hits the wheel-could damage it!”
Damn. He was right. We’d have to dismantle our dam piece by piece, and try to lose as few of those pieces as possible.
I opened my mouth to shout back when I heard music. Flute music. Kevin stood above us on the stream bank, trilling out a melody that cut through the shriek of the Storm in gentle defiance. Around us the roar of water diminished. Less of it poured over the top of the dam. What did come over cascaded in slow motion-lazy banners of foam.
With the Storm winds pressing low enough to whip the treetops, I trained my eyes on that ridgepole silhouette. Praying it would move, would tell us we were ready to put the Storm to flight.
A second later my prayers were answered. The man pulled himself to his knees and waved both arms at us, shouting as he did: “Away! AWAY! NOW!”
We hauled scrap lumber out of the water as fast as humanly possible. I still had one foot in the stream when Kevin stopped playing and water exploded back into the pond, carrying away the few small pieces we’d missed.
I crab-crawled up the stream bank, panting, and watched as the flood rushed around the boulder, catching the wheel and turning it. There was a great creaking and the clatter of meshing gears, then lines moved on their wheels and the wind chimes stirred. All around the camp’s perimeter, they sang- loudly enough to be heard above the Storm’s fury.
Another sound carried down to us there on the bank of the millstream-a roar of celebration from the millhouse. The men around me echoed it.
Delmar pounded my back and laughed in my ear. “Look!” He pointed to the sky. “Look! It goes!”
I looked. My own laughter bubbled up from someplace hidden, catching me by surprise. I pumped my fist at the sky. Already the Storm was retreating, being replaced by the burnished gold of the Preserve’s strange mist. We had, with a perfect synthesis of the physical and the metaphysical, averted disaster.
“Nice work.” Goldie squatted beside me, grinning like the Cheshire cat. Kevin Elk Sings hunkered next to him, flute still clutched in his hands.
Yeah, it was good work. “Kevin, you really came through there. Thanks.”
He gave me a self-conscious smile. “I didn’t want to let you down. You were all putting yourselves on the line. I don’t have lots of muscle; this is the only thing I do well.” He turned the flute in his hands, then smiled again, rose, and moved away toward the mill.
“That was quite a piece of work,” I said.
Goldie nodded, eyes speculative. “Wasn’t it, though?” He got up and followed Kevin, leaving only his grin behind.
I pulled myself to my feet amid celebratory and congratulatory chatter and looked around for Doc, afraid he might have hurt himself again. I didn’t see him, and before I could go looking, Mary caught up with me.
“I suppose I should thank you,” she said. “You pulled off one hell of a save, Mr. Griffin. Something I doubt I could have done, under the circumstances. This thing blindsided me.”
“I didn’t save a damn thing, Mary. We did it, all of us. And we’re not safe-not yet. This is a temporary fix, a salve. It’s not the cure.”
She nodded, looking away toward the mill, her arms folded defensively over her heart. “The cure is defeating the Source.”
Neither of us spoke for a moment. Then she said, “You were right, Cal. Enid is dying. I don’t pretend to understand why, but I doubt it’s any natural disease. Whether I can afford for him to leave us or not, the simple fact remains that he’s going to leave us.” She turned to look up at me, her frosty eyes bright with tears. “If there were some way you could save his life, Cal Griffin, I would gladly let him go with you.”
I was stunned. “I’m not a miracle worker, Mary.”
“No? What do you call what you just did?”
“We did. And I don’t know. But it wasn’t a miracle.”
“It might as well have been. I can’t do what you do. I can’t …” She groped for words, her hands making futile gestures in the air. “I can’t drive people the way you do.”
“Maybe not, but you’ve already done something I know I couldn’t do: you’ve molded an incredibly diverse group of people into a thriving community. To me, that’s a miracle. One I doubt I could reproduce.”