Sara rubbed the horse on its blaze, and it sampled her shirt collar with its dark lips. “Dice knew this cold was coming, and we put the blankets down on the fields. He let it come. He can change the weather with his mind.”

I wanted to believe her. She was polite and stern, like a nurse; there was something entrancing about her easy kinship with the horses, her strength, her calm. “He actually used to work as an engineer at a power plant,” Sara said. “When he realized that all the fish downstream from the plant had died, he quit and went to the Arctic to learn from the glaciers. But he felt he couldn’t keep propping up the fake world forever.” She laughed and shook her head, like we were both in on a joke. “He wanted a new world, where he could live the right way. So he moved here, and I came along.”

We approached the three henhouses, where dozens of hens burbled and squawked. She showed me their water and grain, and moved from task to task without bothering to make conversation. “By the way,” Sara said suddenly. “Did you know that glaciers roar and thunder as they melt?” Her lack of etiquette made me trust her. She said the cooks rose at five and everyone else at six, something like that—“Only Dice has a watch.” Work started at seven and continued for four hours. Then lunch, and break, and work till dinnertime, then singing or a story.

For the next short while, she said I was going to look after the sheep and the chickens and the pigs, while most of the family prepared for the action on the mountaintop. Dice found out that a coal company had planned to burn thousands of acres of forest nearby, in Tennessee.

“They’re burning the cottontails off, the flying squirrels off, the wolves off, the pumas, the bears, the salamanders, the spiders, the deer, all off,” Sara said. “In less than a week, now, the coal people are going to blow the top off the mountain with millions of pounds of dynamite, blow off five hundred feet of what they call overburden, right down to the coal.” I took pleasure in a moment of imagining how my mother would think Sara was crazy. Here I was, talking with Sara: my mother would think I was crazy too.

“They keep getting closer and closer to us. The old forest is almost all gone,” Sara said. “But they can’t get a good price for the soft coal. The industry is dying. You know why they’re doing it?” She fixed her large eyes on me.

I shook my head.