‘There’s a first time for everything. Weather like this has never happened before – not in conjunction with this much snow anyway. The biblical rain is bad enough, but coupled with the six-ish foot of snow that had settled all liquefying at once as the rain melted it … no watercourses could cope with this torrent. Put the news on when you get back – everyone will be in the same position as us.’

My coat is so heavy that it’s weighing me down and I understand why Noel got rid of his. I shrug it off and throw it out of the way, and keep digging, trying not to make it obvious how worried I am about him. If he loses his footing, he’ll be swept away.

I’m trying to dig the trench as fast as I can, slicing through the grass, the water following along with every shovel of earth I remove, cutting a line across the top of the Balsam fir field. We work in silence. The wind is still screaming past my ears, dragging my hair out of its tie and flapping it around, and the rain turns to hailstones that sting everywhere they touch. It’s too loud and the few words we do say have to be shouted to be heard, but I want to talk to him. I want him to explain. I want to say that the trees don’t matter as much as getting him out of that sodding river before he drowns.

I drive the shovel into the ground and watch as the overflowing water follows, each shovelful of earth taking it further away from the Balsam firs. Noel overtakes me in the river, moving slowly, using the shovel as a walking pole to stay upright against the flow of water. His face tightens in concentration every time he stops and scrapes the shovel up the left side of the bank, again and again. He gets to the edge of my land where the river disappears underneath a bridge of wire fence and earth, worn away naturally by the flow of the water, and uses his shovel to hammer at that and widen it too. When he’s satisfied, he turns around and trudges back, heaving earth from the right side of the riverbank now, and I can tell that what he’s doing is working. The water is flowing faster, and even though it’s washing back in some of the mud he’s piled at the edges, the extra height is slowing down the spill.

I wipe rainwater and sweat out of my eyes, only succeeding in spreading the mud from my hands further, and try to concentrate on the trench, the overflowed water now pooling so deeply in it that it’s started to rise above the edges.