The Incident

February 19th 1997 was not really the beginning, but that was the day it all happened. For Mandy Mitchell, it started as just another day. She and Tom had bought the 400-acre farm three years ago, just as the younger of two boys had started school, on the basis that she would do the light daily chores and that he would continue his job with the stock and station agents. Heavy tasks, like re-swinging a gate, would wait until the weekend when he and the boys were home.

Raised on a farm herself, the jobs were largely routine -- shifting stock, checking the water, minor repairs to fences, adjusting the electric fence for pasture control, spraying the detested thistles, so the days usually passed in an uneventful procession. Today, the household chores were all done, and she thought she would check the water supply at the far end of the farm before the real heat of the day made moving about unpleasant.

The farm was relatively long and narrow and they shared a small stream with their rear neighbour, that meandered more or less along their rear boundary. Because the stream was not in one property or the other, each had fenced the stream off so that stock could not wander up and down it and cross into neighbouring properties. But this meant that an alternative water supply had to be provided at this extreme point by means of a small boat pump set in a sump near the river, and powered by a car battery.

Mandy went into the bedroom to change, slipped off her dress, unhooked her bra and removed her panties. She glanced at herself in the mirror and was pleased that the tan was nicely even at last. At thirty-nine, Mandy was still in good shape -- firm nicely rounded breasts, reasonably flat stomach in spite of two kids, good legs, and weight only a whisker more than she would have preferred. The emphasis on the tan occurred in mid January, on her return from their recent holiday. Catching herself in the mirror, she thought she looked grotesque with two white boobs, a snow white bottom and a white Y on each foot from the sandals she had worn, contrasting sharply with an otherwise evenly tanned body.

So for the last six weeks, whenever she had work to do on the middle of the farm, she took the opportunity to slip her sun frock off for ten to fifteen minutes and to do whatever work was required in the nude. Mandy had the theory that she would tan more evenly if she constantly moved around in the sun rather than just lying on a towel in one position. She had even bought three new pairs of sandals, which she wore on alternate days, each with thin straps or strings in different positions, so that her feet now had an even tan.

The sunfrock she slipped over her head was a medium length, buff coloured cotton tube with a drawstring that tied in the front and secured it under her arms. Mandy selected sandals, a hat and headed for the door remembering to pick up the battery voltmeter as she went out.

It was a bit hot to walk the whole distance, so she put her weed wand in the pannier of the four-wheeler and decided that she might as well ride until she struck a gate that wouldn't open easily.

As she bounced along the track, she became conscious of a butterfly sensation in her stomach and a vague sensitivity in her breasts and she imagined that she could see her nipples sticking out through her cotton frock. After fifteen years of marriage, she was pretty laid back about sex and very comfortable in her relationship with Tom. It did not have the fire of the early years of marriage but that was normal, wasn't it? Nevertheless, she had been disturbed by these feelings on several other occasions this year but put it down to anticipating the sensuality that working in the buff could induce. She always got a tingling sensation in her groin when she slipped her dress off and the waves of fresh air first flowed over her body. You're just an exhibitionist getting a cheap thrill, she kidded herself. But the occasional waves of sexual longing perplexed her and thoughts of a self-induced sexual release, had a certain attraction.

No wonder she was tense. The gentle movement of her unrestrained breasts against the dress had stimulated the nipples so that they were now quite hard. She braked to a standstill, switched off the engine and clambered off. After a quick glance around just to make sure that no one was striding across the paddock, she slowly undid the bow, pulled the string loose and let it slide over her breasts to the ground. The fresh air caressed her body and there was no doubt about it -- her breasts were full and tight, her nipples erect, and to her surprise, she felt a slight wetness between her legs.

What was happening to her? It was crazy, so she vigorously attacked the defenceless weeds in the immediate vicinity with her weed-stick, giving each a fatal dose of herbicide. After about ten minutes, she found that the tension had left her so she stood over the dress where she had let it fall, and drew it up and tightened the drawstring.

When she reached the last gate, she parked the four-wheeler in the only shade for some distance around, grabbed her voltmeter and climbed over the gate. She could hear the stream bubbling away and she soon came to the little valley it had cut for itself. She climbed over the last gate that guarded the streambed from the stock and found the sump in which the boat pump was located. A two metre concrete pipe had been sunk into the ground so that the pump was always immersed in water and the delivery pipe snaked out of it and soon went underground back to the trough on the farm side of the fence. A cable followed the pipe and was connected to a float in the trough, so that when the water level dropped it switched the pump on and refilled it. The battery, however, was beside the trough -- well out of the way of the raging winter floods and encased by a louvered box. She lifted the lid of the sump and verified that there was plenty of water in the bottom, then walked back to the gate, hopped over it and tracked down the trough. It was full, so it had been working all right. She removed the cover from the battery, clamped the leads from the voltmeter to the terminals and saw that it was only two volts dawn. Then she depressed the float, which activated the pump immediately and was pleased with the steady flow of water that soon erupted from the delivery pipe. The voltage dropped another three volts as the pump laboured and that suggested that it would last another week at least, before the battery had to be exchanged or taken back to the shed for recharging.

Having replaced the cover, she thought that she had done enough manual work for the moment, so climbed back over the gate and wandered back to the stream. Since the area was free of stock, the grass on the bank was quite long so she undid her bow again and slipped off her dress and rolled it into a ball for a headrest. She took off her sandals and lay in the sun with her hat tipped over her eyes. She spread her legs so that the sun could tan the insides of her thighs but was immediately unsettled by the surge of tension again. The long grass, like a tender lover, had caressed her bottom, her ankles, the lower part of her legs and inside her thighs and she felt a fluttering excitement within as her breasts tightened and her nipples hardened.

It was not long before she felt overwhelmingly hot in the sun in this windless valley and decided that the only solution was to cool-off with a swim. At this time of the year the stream had a very low flow of water, but it was quite warm. There were no really deep pools, just short pockets of water up to your waist in places trailing off to shallow patches up to your knees. She selected a pool that looked inviting and which was partly shaded by an overhanging shrub on the bank. Mandy lowered herself into the velvety water, but found that while the gently swirling water cooled her body, it also stimulated her fantasies -- swimming with nothing on always aroused a special feeling within her. She sat on the bottom, wedged against the bank with just her head showing, and wondered whether she was missing something in life.

OooOOOooo

Thursday February the 19th, was shaping up to be much the same as any other for David. David was twenty-three years old and was living and working with his parents on a farm that they had owned in the Valley for the last fifteen years. Although it was one of the larger farms in the area, the returns were not such that it was likely to support another family if he chose to marry and stay there. Michael Carr was only fifty-five, and at least ten years off retirement, so David had decided that he better obtain some other qualification in the meantime. David thought that he might do an Ag science degree, since he was interested in farm technology and things mechanical, and see what opportunities were available when he qualified. Two of his friends had that degree and both were now in excellent positions in industry and while he was keen on farming, he knew he would enjoy doing either of their jobs. One option was take all the papers in the science part of the degree and see if the marks were good enough to qualify him for entrance to the medical degree, at either Auckland or Otago and to test whether he was a natural enough student to do the hard grind for that degree.

So David's parents had agreed to support him at Massey, rather than use a student loan, provided that he worked the farm in the holidays, particularly in the month of February when his parents liked to spend as much time as they could at their bach on Taupo. He had arranged to go into a flat in the City with some senior vet students and he was really looking forward to that.

David's social life had been pretty limited. The extraordinary social activity for which the rural areas were famous fifty years ago had changed completely and circumstances had led him into a bit of a social backwater. A far-seeing county council had bucked the fashion and encouraged subdivision and life style blocks, but the young women were just kids or widowed and he had not found many that were eligible in between.

He gathered up the breakfast dishes, put them in the washer and decided that it was going to be a scorcher. Not a day for digging postholes anyway. A better option would be to slash some of the overhanging bushes along one of the permanent fence lines at the rear of the property to ensure that the electrified top wire was not shorting out when it rained. He had noticed that the voltage was down a bit over the last section and it was probably the bushes that were causing it. He loaded up the little trailer attached to the four-wheeler with everything he might need since it was a long way back if he forgot anything, and set off.

As he rolled along he thrilled again at the prospect of moving into town. For his age, he thought, his sexual experience was practically zero. He had no difficulty with socialising. It was just that the opportunities had not been there to date. He didn't see himself as a raving stud after every skirt, but he had felt sexual pressures increasingly over the last few months. Subtle at first. He would wake with an erection if he had been laying the wrong way. He seemed to have an increased interest in the glossy photos in his mother's magazines, and he found that he kept recalling the details of his last sexual encounter some months earlier.

He had been at a party on a neighbour's farm at which there was quite a crowd, a great number of whom he had never met before. One quite attractive young woman had engaged him in conversation and captured his attention as she described the subject of her thesis for a masterate in social work. The evening was quite hot and the drinks that they had, instead of cooling them, made them feel suffocated. They had wandered out into the garden area around the homestead and found themselves at the end of a line shelter bushes that looked across the valley. The sky was dark, but the stars were bright and the lightest of warm breezes gave them a sense of well being. She knew that he lived nearby and said how lucky he was to live in such a romantic atmosphere. That had not been his experience to date but it looked as if it was all changing for the better. He touched her hand and she had turned to face him. Now kissing was something he had had a bit of practice at and they were soon locked in an embrace that really wound him up. The kisses went on and on as tongues and lips explored, and he became aware that she had twisted her body so that the hand that had previously been on her back, was now perilously close to her left breast. He had very tentatively inched it around until his hand completely covered her breast and was rewarded by a sudden intensification of the kisses. This soon lead to a frenzied fumbling of clothes and buttons and zips, and the thing that annoyed him so much now, was that it had all happened so quickly, that he could not recall all the precious details of the experience. However, he could remember the overpowering sensation he had when their naked bodies first touched. It made the shock from a powerful electric fence pale to insignificance. David also recalled how strong the drive to climax was, versus his desire to make those wonderful moments last forever. In retrospect, he thought that she had had a bit more experience than he had, because she seemed to know what she wanted and how to go about achieving it. He would never forget his climax, or hers come to that, because his was accompanied by four muscular spasms that he thought would make him an invalid for life, that thrust him into her unfathomable depths. Hers was signalled by a sharp cry as she arched her back and gripped his bottom. The marks of her nails on his skin were there for days. They lay enmeshed and entranced by one another for some time as they gathered their breath, but in the end his elbows were screaming in protest and she became conscious of a sharp stone that was sticking into her back. They had walked back to the house in warm togetherness, promising to make contact in the near future. He phoned her and left a message, she phoned back and left a message, then there were her exams and then she went home to Te Awamutu for Christmas and the looked-for meeting never happened.

However, he had relived those moments very many times, but it was so dark that he could not even properly recall what her body looked like without clothes on. He also wished he had been a better lover and had been more innovative, like he had read about in the occasional novel.

His reverie ground to a halt. The offending bushes beckoned and he realised that he had opened and closed five gates in a complete dream. He parked in the shade of the bushes near the fence line, disconnected the power to the fence so that the falling branches would not short out the rest of the paddock, and squinted down the fence line. It wasn't too bad after all. Only about five large branches at various spots, which, once removed, would fix the problem completely. He backed the trailer upto the fence so that he gained a bit of extra height, fired up the chainsaw and lopped off two of the branches. The next three proved more difficult to reach, so he tied a pruning saw to a sturdy branch and hand-sawed them off. He used his machete to trim the cut branches up a bit so that when he threw them over the fence they settled down in a neatish pile to rot away over time. At the end of all these exertions he was extremely hot and sweaty so he thought he would ride to the end of the farm and check the water trough near the stream. David took off his shirt and hopped on the four-wheeler. The air flow was wonderful, but the hot sultry day seemed to inflame his sexuality and he was tempted take off the rest of his clothes and see whether he could find a mossy area where he could lie and have an orgasm by wriggling and squirming in the soft moss. Just thinking about it caused an erection that was uncomfortable within his tight underpants.

He reached the last fence and located the trough and checked that it was full of water. He wondered why the previous owner had not saved a hundred metres of piping by putting the trough at the other end of the paddock. He supposed that stock could smell the water in the stream and might knock the fence down if a trough was not in easy reach.

David could hear the water bubbling in the stream and thought he would see what its level was like, so he climbed over the fence, slid down the steep bank and stood on the narrow ledge on his side of the stream. The beach, if you could call it that, was on the other side so he kicked off his boots and socks and waded across to the other side. Just as he thought, pretty low, even for this time of the year, but there was a slightly deeper pool a bit further down in which he could swim. He glanced around, then undid the button and zip on his shorts and slipped these off with his underpants. The feeling was wonderful and he walked across the stones and sank upto his neck in the tepid water. He let the water current bounce him along downstream. This was the life, he thought.

OooOOOooo

Mandy heard the muted noise of a motorbike approaching and wondered where the farmer from over the back could be going. She had never met any of the rear neighbours -- what was their name, Carr? Then the noise stopped. She wondered if she should make a break for her clothes and risk being caught out in the open if whoever it was, was standing on the top of the terrace. She decided to stay put. Just as she thought she might risk a move, she glimpsed a young man teetering across the river, as people do with soft feet on river stones. Damn!

She pressed herself closer to the bank and sank lower in the water. He might not see me on this bright day if I stay in the shadow. She watched as he stared at the river. He was a nicely built young man -- typical farmer though, with white ankles and feet and the outline of his singlet showing through the tan of his upper body. Then to her astonishment, he slipped off his shorts and underpants and tossed them up the bank. He was in good shape. Even at the distance she could see a flat stomach, narrow waist, well-muscled thighs and buttocks and, surely not, either a large dick or one close to an erection. Mandy was suddenly conscious that she had risen higher in the water in her desire to see better, and that the butterflies were back in her stomach, along with the generalised feeling of desire.

He was going swimming tool He'd better stay up in his area, or -- or what? What could she do? Brazen it out? She settled lower in the water with just her nose above it, but thought that her face and hair will soon be obvious. So she took a breath and slowly sank beneath the surface to completely wet her hair and when she resurfaced, she turned her face away from him. She had just persuaded herself that he would soon get tired of this and go back because he wouldn't want to have to walk any distance across those stones, when she heard a fast approaching splashing sound and her hair was suddenly grabbed and she was jerked upright.

She squealed with shock and pain as she got her feet and legs to take the weight of her body as it was hauled upright. David let go of her hair and stared with stark disbelief. "My, God", he breathed, "I thought you were dead. You gave me a hell of a fright", he accused. Mandy regained her balance and raised both hands and swept her hair back and wiped the water from her eyes. "I was here first," she countered somewhat defensively and inadequately.

Oblivious to his own nakedness, he just stood there like an oaf, completely mesmerised by the vision of this beautiful brown body, glistening as the water streamed off it, every curve accentuated as she raised her arms to pull back her hair.

"I'm sorry I startled you, he blurted out. I hope I didn't hurt you. By the way, my name is David and I live on the property behind yours, he added somewhat inconsequentially." It's OK" she said, "I'm Mandy and I was just cooling off." "Yes, it's that sort of a day," he added nervously, "although the stream water is very warm even for this time of the year. I used to swim here a lot as a kid but haven't come here much lately -- you're newish in the district aren't you? Do you use the pool often?"