“Yes!” Almost everyone was crying. Even Bay’s face glistened.

“Or have a protest for self-expression, or have a protest to live differently for a little while.” When I blinked tears fell onto my cheeks too. My heart pounded as though I was scared, and I felt that hot undifferentiated emotion, and it took some time to untangle what I was feeling: fear, regret, but above all, elation. “Any of these five forms of protest can have real outcomes, and we are three for five, and this is a success if we are willing to call it one. Even one would be enough.”

He spoke as though he hadn’t noticed he’d brought a roomful of people to tears. “We’ll plan another,” Dice said. “We’ll step up. Cooperation is just as important as competition. This is dangerous knowledge. Cooperation, consistency.” He said that the migrating monarch butterflies zigzag over Lake Superior to avoid a mountain that vanished millions of years ago. And this wasn’t a failure. The more efficient you are, the more fragile. Dice had told me that all of life is storytelling, and now I saw how the protest hadn’t been a failure at all, but a step toward justice.

We sang the song called “China.” Sara led it. Her hand wavered as she beat time.

Why do we mourn departing friends?

Or shake at death’s alarms?

The floor shook. I remembered seeing the family at the breakfast table my first morning, less than a week ago, their peaceful communion. Now I saw how that communion could be unpeaceful, ungentle. They all felt the same emotion at once; they had that mass brain like the monarchs. Dice said, Cooperation is just as important as competition. If Dice had asked me to run back to the mountaintop just then, I would have done it.

While we sang, Sara opened the doors and the windows of the long house, so the songs could go out and the stars could come in. Light snow was falling. The wind came in strong and the snow came in too, as though nature itself were penetrating, invading, shuffling in, leaving its tracks all through the house.

winter

CHAPTER 7

I spent that winter getting to know the sheep, laying down straw for their beds, mucking out the stalls in the morning, herding them out in fair weather, distributing silage and dusty hay into their long troughs, and then, soon enough, helping with the lambing. I’d find lambs in the ewes’ enclosure in the early morning, staggering around and bleating.