Then went directly toward the old apple tree.
About fifteen feet from it, he stopped.
Barked at the ground.
I saw several small depressions.
Mouse holes.
Maybe groundhog tunnels.
Daniel found a shallow trench hidden beneath weeds.
“Drainage?”
He asked.
“Maybe.”
We searched.
Nothing obvious.
No dead animal.
No bees.
No snake.
Daniel stomped the ground lightly.
Sunny barked harder.
“Okay.”
Daniel said.
“That’s something.”
“What?”
“I don’t know.”
He moved closer.
Sunny grabbed Daniel’s pant leg.
Daniel stared at him.
“Well.”
I said.
“So it isn’t only Lucy.”
But it was not the same.
Sunny resisted Daniel.
With Lucy, he became frantic.
That bothered me.
Maybe he was protecting her specifically.
Maybe he believed the spot was dangerous.
The question was why.
We called my uncle Frank.
Dad’s older brother.
Frank had moved to Florida twenty years earlier but grew up on the farm.
I sent photographs.
“Anything buried in the lower orchard?”
I asked.
“Define buried.”
He said.
“Anything dangerous.”
“Old fuel tank?”
“No.”
“Septic?”
“House septic is north side.”
“Old machinery?”
“Granddad dumped a plow frame somewhere.”
“Not dangerous.”
“What about a well?”
Silence.
“A well?”
I repeated.
Frank said:
“There was one near the original barn.”
“Where?”
“Not the orchard.”
“You sure?”
“Pretty sure.”
“How deep?”
“Rachel, half that farm used to have little hand-dug wells and cisterns.”
“That was normal.”
“Your grandfather filled most.”
“Most?”
Another silence.
“Call me later.”
He said.
That was not reassuring.
I went through Dad’s papers.
Property maps.
Old aerial photographs.
Tax cards.
Nothing showed a well in the orchard.
The original farmhouse, built before ours, had stood closer to the road and disappeared after a fire in 1948.
There had been an older barn.
Smokehouse.
Springhouse.
But everything clustered north of the modern barn.
The orchard site looked empty.
Daniel decided Sunny was probably reacting to an animal den.
We put up temporary orange fencing around the old tree.
A simple plastic barrier.
Not strong enough to stop a determined adult.
Enough to tell Lucy:
Do not enter.
Sunny seemed relieved.
For almost two weeks, nothing happened.
Then the rain started.
October that year was unusually wet.
Three days of steady rain softened everything.
The creek filled.
Fields became saturated.
The orchard turned slick.
Sunny became restless.
He began sitting beside the back door staring toward the orchard.
At night he paced.
Once, around two in the morning, he woke us barking from downstairs.
Daniel went down.
Sunny stood at the door.
Daniel let him out.
Instead of relieving himself near the porch, Sunny ran toward the orchard.