"You don't even have your harvest booms in place! Where do you think those berries are going?"
The young woman stopped turning.
For a moment, she looked across the water toward the men.
Her blue eyes were tired.
Her face was pale.
But there was something in her expression that made the third farmer stop smiling.
"I opened it exactly when I was supposed to," she said.
The largest farmer threw back his head.
"Oh, that's rich!"
He stepped closer to the channel, scooped up a handful of floating cranberries, and held them toward her.
"Then why do you look so nervous?"
The young woman didn't answer immediately.
She was looking past his shoulder.
Past the muddy boots.
Past the grass-covered embankment.
Toward the dense wall of pine trees at the far end of the cranberry fields.
For three days, she'd been listening for a particular sound.
A sound her father had described in a weathered notebook.
A sound nobody else in the valley believed she would ever hear.
Now it was coming.
At first, the forest appeared perfectly still.
Then the treetops began moving.
Not swaying in the wind.
Moving against it.
The pines closest to the old service road trembled, their branches shaking while the surrounding trees remained motionless.
A flock of blackbirds exploded from the woods.
Then a deer burst through the undergrowth, racing across the distant field.
Another followed.
Then four more.
The third farmer straightened.
His smile disappeared.
"What's that?"
The large farmer looked over his shoulder.
For a moment, his expression remained amused.
Then a deep rumble rolled through the ground.
The water in the cranberry channel shivered.
Tiny ripples spread across the surface.
And somewhere beyond the trees came a sharp cracking sound, like an enormous beam breaking under impossible weight.
The young woman released the floodgate wheel.
She looked directly at the three men.
Then said quietly, "I'm not nervous anymore."
The largest farmer stared.
She pointed toward the forest.
"You should be."
The ground trembled again.
This time, everyone felt it.
The farmer in green stumbled backward.
The third man turned toward the old logging road.
And the largest farmer watched in disbelief as an entire section of the distant tree line seemed to rise, shift, and collapse into a cloud of brown spray.