Another Job for the List

Posted on Wed Oct 21st, 2026 @ 9:58am by Pine Hollow Leader Amythyst & Department Leader Jordana Venturi

820 words; about a 4 minute read

Mission: Pine Hollow
Timeline: October 21st 2010 - After 1pm

Amy had intended to sleep. She really had. She had even made it upstairs. Then she'd remembered the animals. "Dammit." Five minutes later, Amy was back outside.
She told herself she was only checking that everything was settled before she went to bed. The cattle had water. The goats were contained—which Amy was beginning to consider a minor miracle—and the chickens appeared perfectly happy with their new accommodation. Good. She could go to bed. Then she noticed the smaller building attached to the far side of the main barn. They had cleared it earlier. At least, Amy thought they had. Everything was beginning to blur together. She walked across and pulled open the door.

"Oh." This wasn't another animal enclosure. It was storage. Proper farm storage. Shelves lined the walls, holding containers, buckets and supplies. Sacks were stacked neatly on pallets to keep them off the ground. Hand tools hung from hooks. Several large sealed bins stood along one wall. Amy stepped farther inside. Feed. Lots of it. At least she assumed that's what most of it was. Some containers were labelled for chickens. Others for goats. There were mineral blocks, supplements and things Amy couldn't identify at all.

Then she spotted a clipboard hanging beside the door. Amy lifted it from its hook. Her eyebrows rose. Someone had kept records. Feed inventories. Veterinary supplies. Pasture rotations. Breeding information. Planting dates. Harvest records. There were even diagrams of the paddocks and notes about which fields had been used for what. Amy stared at it.

"Well..." This was potentially more valuable than half the equipment they'd found. They could figure things out by trial and error. But trial and error with crops meant going hungry.
Trial and error with livestock meant animals dying. Neither was particularly appealing. Amy tucked the clipboard beneath her arm and stepped back outside. She could deal with this tomorrow. She really could. Amy looked at the barn. Then towards the fields. Then back at the clipboard. No. There was someone who needed to see this. Amy raised her voice.

"JORDANNA!" She waited. "I FOUND SOMETHING YOU'RE GOING TO WANT TO SEE!" Amy leaned against the barn doorway, clipboard in hand. Maybe after this she would finally get some sleep.

Someone's yelling? Did someone scream her name? Oh yes. Sounded close. Jordanna jerked upward from her nap. A very quick brief nap. Looking around in the little pasture, she'd fallen asleep against the tree. Exhaling a sigh, her breath blew a stray hair out of her face. At least, she did something. Tucking the strand behind her ear, she quickly followed the shout. Seeing Amy with something under her arm, she inquired, "Hey, what's up? I was just checking out a fence somewhere. Might need to get it checked out."

Amy held the clipboard out towards Jordanna, the tired smile on her face widening despite herself. “Sorry. I know you were resting, but—look at this.” She waited until Jordanna took it before tapping one of the pages. “Records. Proper records. Whoever was running this place wrote everything down.” Amy flipped through several sheets as she spoke. “Feed inventories, veterinary supplies, pasture rotations, breeding records. There are planting dates, harvest records, diagrams of the paddocks…” She shook her head, still looking slightly amazed by what she had found. “There are even notes about which fields they planted and what they were using them for.” She gestured back towards the storage building. “And there’s feed in there. Chicken feed, goat feed, mineral blocks, supplements—probably cattle feed as well, although I’m not pretending I know what half of those containers are yet.” Amy rubbed one hand over her face. She looked exhausted, but there was a spark of genuine excitement beneath it. “I was going to lie down. I swear I was. Then I found this.” She tapped the clipboard again. “Jordanna, we don’t have to work this whole place out from scratch.” Her expression became more serious. “If those records are recent enough, they could tell us what needs planting, when fields need resting, how much feed the animals were getting and maybe even what livestock were being bred and when.”

Amy looked out across the paddocks, bright beneath the daylight. “We’ve spent so much time worrying about getting through today and tomorrow. This…” She looked back down at the clipboard. “This could actually help us figure out how to still be here next year.” Then she gave Jordanna a sheepish smile. “Which is why I yelled your name across half the farm.” A beat. “Sorry about waking you.”
She pointed towards the pasture Jordanna had come from. “And you said something about a fence needing to be checked?” Amy glanced at the sun, then back towards the farmhouse. “Please tell me it can wait until after I’ve had at least an hour where nobody discovers anything else important.”

OFF

 

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