Location:Wild Confederacy — Settlement Windbreak; the Speaker's roof; the old drying ground
Date/Time:TC1858.03.21
Bells, first, from the old drying ground at the east end of the settlement, where the stock had been penned since the herders came in. A goat's bell and then a dozen, and under them the low complaint of cattle that hadn't been watered since the afternoon before.
Silas heard them sitting up at the smoke-hole frame, where he'd been since the house next door settled in the night, his strapped arm held in against him because there was no way to lie on it that let him sleep. The house didn't fall. It made the sound a thing makes when it has given up holding its shape and is deciding where to lie down, a long creak of poles and then the soft tearing of sod, and then nothing for an hour, and then the creak again.
