19th september 2003
ramblin'

Crows, or a crow, had been at the windlass again. Sometime between dawn and the people in the house waking up, they'd messed with the rope and pushed the bucket down the well. The rope was now a horrible tangle around the wooden shaft, and the bucket, it turned out, was jammed between the corners of two stones near the well bottom. Thanks, pal.
Eddie looked over the fence from next door.
- Crows, he said.
- Yeah.
Having sorted out the rope's spiderweb, the only thing to do was to go down - not so difficult because there are projecting stones and handholds all the way down, and the width of the shaft is just right for a human. At the bottom, however, things were trickier. Freeing the bucket was easy, but now it looked like the treacle that normally forms a pool in the bottom had stopped oozing from the crack in the pipe and what was there had congealed into a hardened mass about the size of a baby.

(The editor can admit no responsibility for the above: it came out of the hopper during the night and is presented in the absence of other material).

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