By SHANE CASTLE
Laughlin learned to hear on the hobby farm in Montana. One late afternoon, the summer he and Cassie bought the five hillside acres outside Helena, he was setting wood posts for the new corral when he heard a sound among the ponderosas toward the top of their property. It was like nothing he’d heard before. He walked up the drive toward it. A breeze was swaying the tops of the trees, and he heard it again and imagined some kind of Mylar weather balloon, blown off course, deflated, stuck in a tree. That’s what the sound was like: someone blowing a taut edge. He remembered being a kid, his family visiting Meema and Peepa at their old place on Animas Creek. He remembered Peepa teaching him and his little brother, Tyler, to blow blades of grass like kazoos. Laughlin looked and looked but found nothing. He walked a while among the tall ponderosas, at times certain he was right under it, only to look up and see nothing, and it went on this way until that moment when dusk turned to dark, when, abruptly, the sound stopped.
