The Dig

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HE PULLED THE van into the gateway and dropped the lights. It was a flat night and the van looked a strange, alien color under it. For a while he sat there carefully.

It was lambing time and here and there across the shallow valley and variously on the hills there were lights on. And while it looked to him from this distance like some community at work, he knew that all those farms were involved in their own private processes, processes in their nature give or take the same, but in each space of light carried out in isolated private intimacy.

He looked out across the scape and recalled in those wells of light those farms which were sympathetic or against this thing he did. In his time he had covered most of this ground and in his mind he drew vaguely the shape of the lands that attached to each farm and called back the names of each property he knew as if he were noting constellations.

It was a time of mixed certainty for him, with these people awake at night; but they were also busier and distracted, and with that general busyness disregarded noises more readily, accepted them as products of another’s work. Attributed more readily the distant bark of dogs.

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