The equipment yard was on the high ground behind the main stable — above the flood line, dry, accessible.
Thomas moved quickly through the rain, unlocking the yard gate and running his flashlight across the timber stacks. Three pallets, each holding eight four-by-six blanks. Forty-eight pieces of hardwood. He needed eight or ten positioned at the berm's toe to create a sufficient buttress against the eroding base.
The problem was weight and distance. Each blank weighed sixty kilograms. The distance from the equipment yard to the berm toe was approximately eighty meters, across ground that was wet and increasingly soft.
He could carry one blank at a time. That would take forty minutes minimum and leave him completely exhausted before he had placed half of what he needed.
He could use the quad bike — but the quad's tow capacity on wet grass was unreliable with loads this heavy, and the approach to the berm from the high side required a turn that the quad handled badly under load.
Or he could harness Barnaby.
The draft harness was hanging in the stable tack room — the full working set Thomas had invested in when he acquired Barnaby, and which he had used regularly for the first six years and less often as the ranch's mechanized equipment improved. But the harness was maintained. Every spring he oiled it, checked the stitching, replaced anything that showed wear.
Barnaby had not worked in harness for fourteen months. But harness was not a learned skill for a Clydesdale. It was instinct.
Thomas had the harness on in twelve minutes, working by flashlight, his hands cold but steady. Barnaby stood without moving — not with the resigned patience of an animal enduring something unpleasant, but with the focused stillness of an animal that understood something purposeful was happening and was making himself available for it.
Thomas attached the single-tree and the drag chain. He ran the chain to the first timber blank, secured it with two hooks through the pre-drilled chain holes at the blank's end, and checked the connection twice.
"Okay," he said.
Barnaby leaned into the collar.
The blank moved. Not easily — sixty kilograms of hardwood on wet grass with chain attachment friction required serious force to break free of the static resistance — but it moved. Barnaby took three powerful strides and the blank was clear of the pallet, sliding across the wet ground behind him at a steady pace.
Thomas walked beside him, guiding the direction with a light hand on the lead rope. They did not need to speak. They had worked this way before, years ago, and the mechanics returned immediately — Thomas directing the line of travel, Barnaby providing the force, both of them moving at the same unhurried, productive pace.
The first blank reached the berm toe in four minutes.
The equipment yard light was on a motion-sensor switch, and it triggered as Thomas came through the gate, flooding the yard with yellow light and turning the rain into a shower of bright needles.
He moved to the timber stack and crouched to examine the chain attachment points on the first blank. The timber was old-growth oak — dense, heavy, and extremely rot-resistant. It had been used originally for the replacement of the lower barn's floor joists and had been leftover stock, too good to dispose of.
It was exactly the right material for emergency berm reinforcement. Oak did not compress under water pressure. It did not swell and split the way softer timber did. It held its shape under sustained hydrostatic load, which was precisely what the berm's toe needed.
Thomas ran his flashlight along the pallet counting pieces. Forty-eight blanks. He needed ten to twelve at the berm toe for a double-layer staggered buttress configuration. The rest could stay on the pallet.
He pulled the draft harness from its peg and carried it to the yard entrance where Barnaby was waiting.
The harness fit the same way it always had — the collar settling onto Barnaby's neck and shoulders with the practiced ease of an item shaped to a specific body by years of use. Thomas worked the buckles by feel in the dark, checking each one by touch rather than sight.
Barnaby stood with his head slightly forward, neck relaxed, feet square on the wet yard surface. The posture of a horse that knew it was about to work and had no objection to this.
Thomas clipped the lead and checked the chain. "First one," he said.