Catching them so they would not crawl from where they fell into the vines again, to feast upon the leaves. Crawling up and down the rows on his hands and knees, with his muscles screaming at the punishment, with a pitiless sun hammering at him so that he seemed to creep in a miasmatic fog composed of dead and heated air mixed finely with the dust that his crawling raised. At intervals, when the bark container was nearly full of the squirming, confused and deprived bugs, he'd go down to the riverbank, first marking the spot where he had ceased his labor, with the stick planted in the soil; then, squatting on the bank, he'd reach far out to empty the container into the flowing stream, shaking it vigorously to dislodge the last of the beetles, launching them upon a journey that few of them would survive, and carrying those few that would survive far from his potato patch.

In his mind, at times, he had talked to them. I wish you no harm, he'd told them; I do this not out of malice but to protect myself and others of my kind, removing you so you'll not eat the food on which I and others count. Apologizing to them, explaining to them to take away their wrath as ancient, prehistoric hunters had apologized and explained ritually to the bears they had slaughtered for a feast.

In bed, before he went to sleep, he'd think on them again, seeing them once again, a striped golden scum caught in the swirl of water and carried rapidly away to a fate they could not understand, not knowing why or how they'd come to such a fate, powerless to prevent it, with no means of escaping it.

And having dumped them in the river, back to crawling between the rows once more to gather other bugs to consign to the selfsame fate.

Then, later in the summer, when days went by with no rain falling, with the sun striking down out of the cloudless blue bowl of the sky, carrying buckets of water from the river on a yoke slung across his shoulders to supply the thirsty plants the moisture that they lacked; day after day trudging from the river's edge up the sharp slope to the bench, lugging water for his crop, then going back again to get two more pails of water, on an endless treadmill so the plants would grow and thrive and there would be potatoes stored against the winter.