Free Free Falling by Susan Kiernan-Lewis Page A

each of the pockets of her jacket. She felt as proud as if she’d laid them herself. Fresh eggs meant a decent meal even if there was nothing in the rabbit traps today. She heard a noise behind her and whirled around. David stood in the door, cradling his hand to his chest.
                “Oh, my God, you gave me a start,” Sarah said, double checking that her jerking hadn’t broken the eggs.
                “I saw the coop door opened and just wanted to make sure it hadn’t been left open accidentally,” David said as they both moved out into the sunshine.
     “Why aren’t you with John?” Sarah asked. “I thought you were going with him to check on the sheep.”
                “Sarah, he doesn’t need me. He’s fine.” He held up his bandaged hand. “With this, it was more trouble than it was worth to get up on the horse. He didn’t have the patience to wait and I didn’t think it was necessary.”
                “This is not a safe place to be wandering about anymore, David. I thought Dierdre made that clear to you.” Sarah tried to fight down the surge of fear that began to radiate from her.
                “We can’t live like scared rabbits, either, Sarah.”
                “ Alive scared rabbits,” she said, suddenly furious with him. “He’s barely ten. You let him do too much. And why didn’t you tell me about the gun?”
                “I thought you’d do pretty much what you’re doing right now. You tend to be jittery. I didn’t want to add to your anxiety.”
                The arrogance of him thinking he was less anxious than she was! Sarah was a second away from cracking one of the eggs on his head when they both heard the staccato pounding of the pony’s hooves on the hard packed dirt road behind them.
                “He’s back,” David said, frowning, as he looked over her shoulder.
                Sarah emerged from the coop to see John ride up to them, wheel his pony around and slide to the ground. His hair was wild and blowing, his eyes huge and his cheeks red from the cold.
                “Dad!” he said. “You gotta come!”
                Sarah grabbed his arm.
                “What is it? What’s happened?”
                “It’s the sheep. Something’s got at ‘em,” John said, his eyes wild and darting from parent to parent. “One of ‘em’s…one of ‘em got killed.” Her son looked like he might cry and Sarah felt her stomach tighten.
                “Okay, show me,” David said heading toward the barn to saddle Rocky. John shoved his pony’s reins to Sarah and ran after this father.
                Sarah stood there with the two eggs in her pocket and the pony’s reins in her hands. She watched them enter the barn and wondered when it was that John had stopped wearing his hard hat.
     
     

 
     
     
    CHAPTER NINE
     
     
    “Why, exactly, do you have to spend the night out there?”
    “Because if I don’t John will do it and I’m sure his mother doesn’t want him out all night armed with a rifle waiting for sheep killers to show up. Besides, he’s right. We have to protect the sheep.”
    David was mounted on Rocky. Sarah handed him the rifle and a small bag of cold biscuits with goat butter.
    “So you’re going to be doing this from now on? Are a few sweaters really worth it? Because I thought we agreed the sheep aren’t really of value to us beyond their wool.”
    “Look, Sarah, I don’t know what their value is to us. But if we have to end up eating every fluffy one of ‘em or starve to death come January, I’ll be glad I didn’t throw them away in October.”
    The dead sheep had been savaged. It looked to David as if it had been killed by a wild animal, so he mentally checked marauding gypsies off the list of suspects. Even so, the flock needed protection.
    That first night, he