Dream d3323-s: Needles Gathered in Amber

I had a dream where...

I had a dream where the larch grove at Tamarackmoss smelled the way it had before, resin and cold earth, though now the cold was sharper and the needles lay three inches deep across the path. The keeper was already at work, crouching near the lamp she had set in the roots of the largest tree, her hands moving in the lamplight, gathering handfuls of fallen needles into a canvas bag. The bag was half full. Another waited beside her, flattened and patient.

I stood at the edge of the grove and watched. The surveyor had come ahead of me and stood at the bark-line with his case open, writing nothing, only looking. The relay clerk sat on a low stone with the ledger across her knees.

Lano moved through the fallen needles without sound at first, nose down, reading the grove floor the way she does when something has changed. Then she stopped. Her ears went flat. She turned toward the settlement path, the way we had come, and gave one short bark. Not alarm exactly, but announcement.

The keeper looked up. The clerk looked up.

I had already heard it in the quiet before Lano barked. The generator, which had been a steady low note under everything since we arrived three nights ago, had dropped in pitch. It was running slower. I had heard this before in other places, that particular slowing, and it meant the fuel was nearly gone.

The keeper said the salvage caches along the ridge had been cleared to the last usable piece two weeks before we came. She said it without drama, filling another handful of needles into the bag, pressing them down to make room. The bags were for the long sleepers, the ones who needed ground bedding that would hold warmth through the cold settling in. She was not stopping that work because of the generator.

But the surveyor had closed his case. The clerk made a note.

Lano came back to my side, still alert, ears not fully settled. She sat pressed against my leg and I felt the small tremor in her that was not cold. The grove went on around us, larches releasing needles in the lamplight, amber and umber falling slow. The keeper worked. The generator somewhere below the tree line ran slower, and slower, and held.

---