The work must have required patience and considerable physical effort.
Four hundred feet of timber.
Dozens of individual sections.
Hundreds of careful measurements and adjustments.
And all of it completed in a time when the most important tools were human hands, iron, and an understanding of the land.
Glenn looked downhill toward the barn.
The water was moving beneath the fields.
Quietly.
Continuously.
Just as Ezra had intended.
Then Glenn remembered the old auger.
He stood and began walking back.
Inside the barn, he approached the south wall.
The hand-forged pod auger still hung from its nail among the tools left by his father and grandfather.
Glenn reached up and took it down.
The iron head was cold.
He examined the spiral flutes.
Twenty-four inches long.
Two inches across.
The handle was newer than the metal, but the boring head was clearly old.
He had passed that tool thousands of times.
He had always assumed it was used for fence construction or some other ordinary farm work.
Now he carried it outside.
Beside the lane, the first split chestnut log still lay on the grass where he had placed it in April.
It was the piece the tractor blade had broken.
The piece that had started the entire discovery.
Glenn crouched beside it.
He positioned the auger's two-inch bit against the circular opening.
Then he pushed gently.
The iron entered the bore.
Without resistance.
Glenn stopped.
He looked at the fit.
It was exact.
Not approximately correct.
Not merely close.
The tool matched the opening perfectly.
He slowly turned the handle.
The spiral flutes rotated inside the old chestnut.
A small curl of compressed wood rose from the opening and fell onto the grass.
Glenn watched it.
Then he turned the handle once more.
The iron moved through the bore exactly as it would have when the log was first prepared.
For a moment, the years between 1887 and 2003 seemed to disappear.
Glenn imagined Ezra Trivet standing beside a fresh chestnut log.