A Clearing in the forest by Gloria Whelan Page B

tried to get into a more comfortable position, a searing spasm shot through her leg. It was all she remembered until she came to, cradled in the arms of the large man who had drilled the holes for the explosives.
    â€œAre you all right?” He sounded nervous, like someone who has just had a strange baby thrust into his arms. “I felt your leg before I moved you and I don’t believe there’s anything broken, but you should see a doctor.” The other men were gathered around her, peering down, worried looks on their faces.
    She felt like a senile Snow White surrounded by outsized dwarfs. And the clumsy oaf had had the impertinence to feel her leg! “Just put me down,” she told him. “I can manage the rest of the way myself.”
    â€œI don’t think you ought to put any weight on that foot, ma’am. It looks pretty swollen.” The man was frowning.
    When she began to wriggle in his arms, he reluctantly lowered her. The other men moved back as though she might explode when she touched ground.
    And she did. She yelped with pain. Two of the men made a sling with their arms and silently waited. Without a word she lowered herself into it and put a reluctant arm around each man to steady herself. The procession moved toward the cabin.
    â€œHow did you know where I lived?” she asked.
    â€œThey briefed us before we came out. This was volunteer duty, like cleaning out a machine-gun nest. They said you might take a potshot at us,” The big man laughed; the others grinned.
    She felt better. She might be helpless now, but she had made them think twice about tramping through her property. “I don’t suppose you can control the results of your tests, what they say?” For that she would be happy to play the pathetic old lady and even whine a little.
    â€œNo ma’am,” the man said apologetically. “We don’t have nothing to do with the results. They go right into a computer and then we send them off to the company. We never see the results.”
    So much for that.
    They were at the cabin. “Can we call the doctor for you? Or we could bring the truck over and take you right to the emergency room at the medical center.”
    The thought of riding into town in one of their trucks was odious. “Thank you just the same, but I don’t have a phone. If you’ll put me down in a chair, I’ll be fine. I feel much better.” And then, with a terrible effort, she added, “I’m glad you gentlemen came along. There’s some lemonade in the icebox if you’d like some.” But the men seemed anxious to be on their way. Did they imagine that she had booby-trapped the icebox, she wondered, or put rat poison in the lemonade?
    She hobbled over to the window and watched them squeeze like Keystone Cops into the small car and the truck and take off. What angered her most was that having tramped that land for fifty years, winter and summer, she had believed there was nothing she did not know about it. Now they had come with their fancy paraphernalia, and the fickle land had immediately yielded secrets she would never learn.

10
    While Frances made a grumbling recovery from her sprained ankle, Wilson brought groceries to her and took over the delivering of her preserves to Elkins’ Market. Even after her ankle had healed, he found himself turning down the sandy, rutted trail that led to her cabin. His days were spent at Mrs. Crawford’s and his nights on the rig. He was amazed he could pass so easily between two such different worlds.
    Today Wilson and Frances were sitting at the kitchen table. Spread out in front of them were some fossils he had found in the gravel pit and a pile of her reference books. Holding the fossilized pieces of coral in their hands, they tried to imagine from the illustrations in the books what the land had looked like millions of years ago covered by a sea of salt, a sea crawling with undulating animals that