Eleven Little Piggies by Elizabeth Gunn

didn’t want to let him back into the corporation because the folks always treat him like a star, he says, at least the mother does, and he doesn’t pull his weight. But Owen says, “He’s our brother, he belongs here. I’m the one doing all the hard work so butt out”, and Ethan says, “I’m doing the legal work that makes it pay so I’ve got every right to an opinion”.
    â€˜He told me something else – maybe this accounts for the feeling Rosie got. He said the farm has had a strange run of bad luck lately: the horses getting out are just the latest in a string of bad things happening.’
    â€˜Like what?’
    â€˜Um . . . a whole load of milk spoiled before the hauler could pick it up – somehow the power failed on the cooling station where they hold it. Let’s see, what else? Oh, yeah, a good horse pulled up lame in the pasture, they never could find out what happened to it. And then in the last rainstorm a tree fell on the house at River Farm, so now they’re all fighting over whether to repair it or tear it down and build a new one like Matt wants.’
    â€˜So does your gossip see some sinister plot behind all this bad luck?’
    â€˜No, but he says the old hands are shaking their heads and saying these things never used to happen when Henry was running the place. Henry’s the old man – he’s retired now.’
    â€˜You and Maynard must have really hit it off.’
    â€˜Well, he likes to talk and I like to listen, so it’s a match made in heaven. And listen to this – there’s a new fight that’s getting really hot this year, because the family got an offer from some Canadian company for a piece of land they call the River Farm – the one I’ve just mentioned – over near Red Wing.’
    â€˜Another farm?’
    â€˜Mostly hay land, Maynard says – he hauls a lot of hay from there to the dairy farm.’
    â€˜OK,’ I said. ‘What’s the issue?’
    â€˜The company making the offer is a sand-mining firm. Apparently River Farm has huge deposits of silica sand.’
    â€˜Ah. One of those money-versus-ecology fights. Nasty.’
    â€˜You lost me about two sentences back,’ Andy said. ‘What the hell is silica sand?’
    â€˜Andy,’ Clint said, ‘come on, you know what silica sand is.’
    â€˜If I did would I ask and give you a chance to sneer at me?’
    â€˜It’s those perfectly round quartz crystals we have in the Jordan formation,’ I said. ‘And the, what’s that other name? Wonowoc. Big deposits underground. Good for making glass.’
    â€˜Only now,’ Clint said, ‘the big demand is for fracking.’
    â€˜Oh, fracking, I heard about that.’ Andy scratched and stretched. ‘But that’s over in the Dakotas, isn’t it?’
    Andy doesn’t follow the news very closely because he thinks most of what’s happening in the twenty-first century is utter nonsense. Every time he turns on his TV set, he says, he sees something sillier than the time before. ‘One day last year I came across this program called
Dancing With the
Stars –
you ever see that?
Jesus. There was a guy on there, used to be in the US House of Representatives, now he’s on that show dancing the tango. Making a horse’s ass of himself – a Republican, can you beat that?’
    â€˜Andy,’ I said, ‘about the fracking?’
    â€˜Yeah, OK. They mix that sand with water, right, and pump it into the ground?’
    â€˜Along with certain chemicals nobody wants to talk about,’ I said. ‘It breaks up the rock and lets the gas and oil percolate up where they can pump it.’
    â€˜So we can have our own oil wells,’ Clint said, ‘and tell Iran to take a flying leap.’
    â€˜Which is probably a good thing,’ Rosie said, ‘but the big question is, what’s