7th Sigma Read Online Free PDF

be easy to clear out the junk by the road,” Ruth said as they waited for the water to boil. “The best thing would be to snag it with a rope and drag it out of the dirt and up onto the asphalt where the bugs can eat it proper.”
    â€œA very long rope,” said Kimble.
    â€œWhy long?”
    â€œYou could catch a bug between something hard and the metal—accidentally pop it.”
    Ruth exhaled. “And they’d swarm, right?” She swallowed and Kimble knew she was remembering that moment on the road again.
    Kimble pulled up his right sleeve and showed her three scars striping his upper arm. “It’s not always fatal. But I wasn’t that close.”
    â€œOkay. A very long rope,” she conceded. “But what about the tractor? From the number of bugs there seems to be a lot more metal there. Maybe the engine block is sunk into the wash or the chassis or axles.”
    â€œOr all of those,” agreed Kimble.
    â€œThere could even be a disc-harrow or a plow behind. I doubt we can pull it up with rope. I mean, not without a team of horses or oxen. If it weren’t in the wash, we might try burying it, until it had enough dirt over it the bugs stopped sensing it. Maybe if we diverted the stream to keep the water away, we could bury it then without having it wash away.”
    â€œI don’t think you need to keep water away from it,” said Kimble. “Just the opposite.”
    Ruth looked at him with her head cocked to one side.
    â€œWhat we need, Sensei, is a dam.”
    *   *   *
    ONE of the reasons the wash was so shallow was because the same layer of volcanic tuff that floored the southern dry wash tilted up at an angle across the property. When they’d dug two feet down, twenty feet downstream from the tractor, they hit the rock layer.
    â€œGood,” said Ruth. “We’ll have a solid base.”
    Her first inclination had been to buy some cement in the village. But Kimble, doing their laundry in the river, turned up deep red clay in the bank and, while it resulted in a badly stained shirt, it saved them the cost of the cement. They used the travois to drag damp clay from the bank to the foot of the bluff where they lifted it up the cliff by rope a bucket at a time.
    They trenched down to the bedrock and made the dam, bowed upstream, out of large rocks set in the clay. Though they’d left the stream edge of the wash unobstructed while building the remaining part, the subsurface water, now obstructed, increased the surface water from a slow trickle to a gushing flow. The sand was wet everywhere in the wash and puddles were forming in the low bits.
    The bugs, almost as if irritated, lifted off frequently into the air, buzzing on their crystalline wings, as the water touched their six, eight, ten or, if it was right before budding off, twelve legs. They flew farther and farther from the buried tractor as the water crept higher, and more than once Ruth and Kimble had to retreat down the wash to avoid them.
    Ruth and Kimble prepped carefully for the final bit of work. The dam or “Damn dam” as Kimble called it, was three feet high, a full two feet higher than the spot where the tractor block emerged from the wet sand. They had a stack of large rocks and a pile of clay set on the bank, and hollow reeds stuck in their belts in case they needed to retreat under the water.
    â€œReady?”
    â€œYes, Sensei.”
    They stuck clay on the rocks before shoving them down into the gap, knowing that a large portion of it would be washed away, but they pushed more handfuls of clay into the gaps as they built. The water stopped dead and then perceptibly began to rise. They built above it, overbuilding, really, putting a thick layer of clay on the upstream side and then sticking a woven grass mat onto that, to reinforce it.
    As the water rose, the buzzing from flying bugs increased, neared. The bugs were zooming back and forth,