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follow.
First off, this is my land. My prop'ty. My rules. You live in the
barn and you don't bother me."
    Porkchop and Bull
nodded.
    "You're a hunter,
eh boy?"
    Bull nodded.
    "Well anything you
guys catch, I get dibs on the best parts, unnerstand? That's called
paying rent. I don't care if you farm or not but I get dibs on the
best stuff. It's my prop'ty, my land, my rules. Unnerstand?"
    They nodded
again.
    "I may think up
other rules, he said. Let's get this over with." He made a shooing
gesture at Porkchop and Bull. Confused, they backed up. Pater
pointed to the barn. "Might as well get this over with," he said
again.
    Pater followed
them back. The others quietly assembled into a line. Porkchop and
Bull stayed to one side as Pater walked up and down, peering at
each of them. He looked only briefly at Santa but his gaze lingered
on Mixer in her arms. Mixer waggled his fingers at him. Pater
frowned. He turned to Titania on the end. As always she wore a
shawl over her head to cover part of her face.
    He stared at her.
Her eyes were an instant reminder. They were a painting thrown up
in his mind of the girl who had tried to trap him. His misjudgement
had caught up with him and now the grandchildren of that
misjudgement had found him too.
    "I got rules," he
said to her.
    "Rules," she
repeated.
    ___
    Spoon Valley was
quiet. Splayed face down on a thick bed of moss at the base of a
cliff was a man. He was covered in mud and grass and his hair stood
out in wild knots around his head. His arms and face were covered
in welts. The only thing in his pocket was a small, fold-up
knife.

Winter

    True to Pater's word,
so long as the children stayed out of his way, he stayed out of
theirs. During the first days on the farm Porkchop worried that
Pater would change the rules; that he would suddenly want to tell
them what to do and how to do it. But as the days progressed and
Pater ignored them, she relaxed. Bull often smelled Pater slinking
off. He was gone once for three days.
    In the weeks
before the snow arrived, the children made themselves at home and
the days were spent investigating the fields, the woods, the creek
and the barn.
    The loft was empty
of furniture, tools or anything else except a good store of thick
wool blankets and dozens of hay bales stacked against the wide
doors that faced the fields. Porkchop and Bull dismantled two bales
to use as bedding but left the rest against the doors to block the
wind. The only addition they made was a gate at the top of the
ladder that they latched closed each night at bed time. Jelly had
almost fallen off the opening to the wood floor, fifteen feet
below, on their second night. Narrow fashioned a gate from an empty
crate and attached it to the thick railing that ran the length of
the open loft.
    Titania slept in
most mornings, climbing down only after everyone else had eaten
their breakfast and only Santa was around. Sometimes, she would get
up and sit quietly by the railing, watching her sisters and
brothers from above. At others, she would move a hay bale to one
side and peek out through the crack in the loft doors. She could
see the fields beyond and the creek and, looking down along the
side of the barn, a tall wooden ladder leaned up against the right
side loft door.
    They slowly made
their way through the boxes and crates that lined the walls,
finding tools, clothing and equipment, some of which even Narrow
couldn't identify or figure a use for. Santa tailored the clothing
to fit her siblings. For the first few weeks, they found new things
about the barn almost every day, including six cold storage dugouts
that were hidden beneath floor boards and were filled with seed
potatoes, onions, bags of salt and ears of dried corn. The barn was
cavernous and as they slowly emptied the crates, they found
themselves having to shout to be heard from one end of it to the
other.
    Narrow, Porkchop
and Santa spent a day shearing off the kernels and grinding them
down for meal and flour. Forest and