“We’ll see about that, now won’t we.” Sarah squelches her heels out from the mire, swatting at mosquitoes with one hand and discretely dabbing her rage froth with the thumb of the other. I watch as something new emerges from her aura swamp. Something dark and sharp and thorny. Moving fast. “August thirteenth, we start drilling. And in a few days, all of this, all of you people, will be gone.”

“The people will lay our bodies on the line!” Char starts raving from her perch. “To protect our Mother, we will root ourselves to the land. Your metal monsters and the demons of greed and destruction are no match for the immovable forces of nature!”

But Sarah Spenser isn’t listening. She’s getting back into her SUV and driving away. No doubt she’s calling her Alberta business partner to reassure him that all the proper political strings are being pulled. And she’s likely transferring a gob of money to a private security firm in Ontario that’ll send steely-eyed muscle heads out into the woods of Cape Breton to protect and secure her precious assets and investment from a little band of backwoods ne’er-do-wells.

Char is too loopy, Peggy’s too old, Willy’s too hemiplegically palsied, and I am too pregnant to be camped out in the woods, getting eaten alive by bugs, kept awake at night by the sweltering late July air, and screamed at by the birds before sunrise. But here we are. Watching. Waiting.

At night, I dream about my great-grandmother, the infamous Black Agnes O’Toole, kissing the dirt floors of the house on the Halfway Road, praying that her hellish journey — from the laundries in Ireland, to servitude in the sticks of Newfoundland, to taking the hand of a man they called Black Bernie — had reached a happy end. I dream about my nanny and the miners’ strike in 1925, how she sat cocked on her mother’s hip when the company goons opened fire on the crowd of starved and desperate men, women, and children. I dream about Mama, her body and mind buoyed by a blessedly painless limbo even before her car hit the water. And of course, my eyes snap open when I hear Mama whisper, Get your bony arse out of bed before I kick it out.

My bony arse hurts, Mama. Everything hurts. A couple of nights of sleeping in the woods, keeping vigil over Char and her baby in their treehouse, waiting for Sarah’s next move, praying to anything that’ll listen for the Crann Na Beatha licence to be approved before some crook in a suit can rubber stamp the drilling. It’s enough to make a body ache. Some days, I feel like dying. But not today. Today, there’s shit to do.

They roll in just before dawn, in quiet black waves. A dozen of them stood on the edge of the property line by the time the sun had stretched over the mountain. They didn’t say a word. Just stood there, with their batons and shields and an air of authoritative arseholery. The hired guns from Ontario came dressed for a riot. Me? I’m still in a flowery muumuu and rubber boots.