The rope broke just as we were moving the standing stone up the steepest part of the slope.
It had taken us the better part of two days to move the ton-and-a-half pillar of sandstone from its bed in the wall of the coulee—that's what they call a ravine around here—down into the coulee, across it, and then up the hill on the other side toward the shrine that we were building for it.
That's when the rope broke.
Hopefully, in years to come, we'll be moving more standing stones, probably larger ones than the Bull Stone, here at Sweetwood Sanctuary in southwestern Witchconsin's Driftless Country, and we haven't necessarily ruled out the use of modern machinery to do so. But we had decided that, for the first stone, we wanted to use the old ways to move and raise it.
So it was with ropes, poles, and the strength of our bodies (and minds) that we began moving it up the hill. At the top of the slope, we'd rigged up a pulley around the trunk of a tree. With its aid, we had already brought the Stone most of the way up.
As it happened, I was top man on the pull at the time. When the rope snapped, I had been tugging with my entire weight braced against it, so naturally when it went I flew, ass over teakettle, down the hill.
My first thought was for the guys behind me, now in the path of my momentum as I went rolling downslope. “Pull in your arms and legs!” I thought frantically; I was afraid of kicking someone in the head.