BELLEVILLE, Pa. -- Esle Hostetler was deep in his dreams, buried under blankets on a cold, blustery midnight last weekend in the Big Valley. This was Amish country, with only the bright moon for a night light in his home without electricity. Outside, the family buggy was parked and still. Cattle and horses slumbered in the barn.

But when the rumble of trucks awakened his family a half-hour later, Mr. Hostetler threw open his front door to a hot orange light. The barn was in flames, its roof collapsed, the walls soon to follow. Inside it, 31 of his animals were dead or dying. Firefighters swarmed from their trucks onto the lot, but it was too late.

Elsewhere in the valley, five other Amish barns were burning, set afire by unknown arsonists who completed an 18-mile route in less than two hours. Only one barn was insured.

The losses toted up that Sunday morning were more disastrous than the million-dollar price tag implied: 139 cattle, the main livelihood on these dairy farms; 38 horses, among them the big Belgian draft animals that pull plows and hay wagons; the plows and wagons themselves; seed for the upcoming spring planting; milking sheds and equipment; and four threshing machines that, while old and creaky, are almost irreplaceable because the Amish have religious rules against using more worldly technology.

Now a year of hardship is ahead for the Big Valley Amish, a community 60 miles northwest of Harrisburg. But the same values of passiveness, simplicity and community that made them easy victims last weekend began putting them back on their feet in the days that followed.

On Monday morning, bearded men in dark clothes and wide-brimmed hats began arriving with picks and shovels at all six farms, clip-clopping up the manure-dotted roads in buggy after buggy.

By late afternoon they had cleared the rubble and buried the animals. On Tuesday they marked and dug foundations for new barns, and scores of more bearded, hatted men began arriving in vans and buses from other Amish communities across Pennsylvania.

By the middle of next week, more than a hundred will be working at each site, neglecting the chores of their own farms to begin raising the frames of new barns, using oak beams sawed last week from the forests at the edge of the valley.

As Mr. Hostetler stood Tuesday on the ground where his barn used to be, he had nothing to say about who might have done such a thing. He offered only a shrug and a blank look, as if he had left such thoughts behind. It's the Amish way to do so, without retaliation, and it's the same thing that makes them conscientious objectors in times of war.

Normally on a late winter's day like this, with a dusting of snow on the hills and gray clouds hanging low, he would be hauling manure or getting in fodder for the livestock. Instead, he has tucked a green pencil into the narrow brim of his black hat and is thinking about the design of his new barn. Behind him 20 men are hacking at the ground with picks

and shovels, while two small boys and a round-faced girl watch from a gatepost. A bed of concrete is already drying in the foundation trenches.

"Tomorrow," says Mr. Hostetler, pointing toward the men, "three times as many will be here."

Swelling their ranks will be men like the eight who arrived for lunch Tuesday at the Honey Creek Inn, a country diner a few miles from the Hostetler farm. They had come 80 miles from Franklin County by van, which is allowed for longer trips as long as someone else drives. The elder man of the crew explained in English that he had packed along his framing tools for help in the barn raisings. He then turned back to his lunch, chatting with his sons and neighbors in the Germanic lilt of Pennsylvania Dutch, the language the Amish use among themselves.

The unity of the Amish in times of need is extraordinary enough given their modest means. Clair DeLong, who won the trust of the Big Valley Amish during his 30 years as Mifflin County's agricultural extension agent, said that some of the families are lucky to clear $3,000 from a year's labors, and that's without losing a barn full of livestock. So, dropping everything on the verge of spring planting to help a neighbor a few weeks is to risk financial ruin.

The cooperation is all the more amazing considering the many fractures that have splintered the Amish through centuries of debate over seemingly tiny differences.

Mr. Hostetler, like four of the other farmers whose barns were burned, is a white-buggy "Nebraska" Amish, a nickname that comes from a Nebraska bishop who moved to the valley in 1881. Of the 1,500 or so Amish in Mifflin County, about 500 are Nebraska Amish, and they adhere to the most rigid of rules regarding displays of worldliness. Their clothes are the simplest, fastening with hooks and eyelets. Their tools are the most primitive. Even their homes are simpler -- it is considered too fancy to have eaves.

But not all the Nebraska Amish agree. They are split into three sects, with a fourth sect taking shape in a 5-year-old dispute over whether hay can be machine-baled in the field or must first be hauled to the barn.

A bit more liberal, though not so one would notice unless one paid close attention, are the black-buggy and yellow-buggy Amish. The 700 or so black-toppers all live by the same rules. Their clothes can have zippers, and the hat brims are not quite as wide. They use more machines than the Nebraskas.

The sixth barn burned in the valley belonged to a black-topper, Samuel M. Yoder, and on Tuesday he, too, was presiding over a large team of workers. Among them were several yellow-toppers, who were easily set apart by their straw hats, which seemed almost festive on a morning where black hats were everywhere else. There are about 300 yellow-toppers in the valley, but they have been torn in recent years over whether diesel engines and compressors may be used to run milking machines and cool milk.

Add to these Amish groups the county's two Mennonite groups and its six sects that fall somewhere in between the Amish and the Mennonites, and you end up with what Mr. DeLong says is "more Anabaptist subgroups than in any county in the United States."

But binding the Amish together is farming, the occupation mandated by their belief that they must stay close to the land and out of the cities. So even as the number of sects has multiplied, their daily march of labor has proceeded by the same cycles of rain, sun and the seasons.

The Amish will bend a rule here and there in times of emergency, some more than others. So it was that backhoes and bulldozers helped speed the work at some of the farms last week. But no one in the valley expects the Amish to break their rule of not accepting government aid. When a U.S. senator's office called to ask what might be done, the locals answered, "Probably nothing."

That is one reason the non-Amish residents of the valley have been so quick to pitch in. The local bank is pooling donations, and everywhere people ask questions to show concern or offer help in the forms of meals, livestock or labor.

But in a community this closely knit, the biggest imponderable of the fires is still: Why? Mr. DeLong thinks that the answer has to be "Amish-bashing. It may not be Amish-bashing from a religious point of view, but these people don't have electric lights, they go to bed early and they're non-resistant, so they're an easy target on a moonlit night."

The history of the Amish is rooted in persecution. The branding and enslaving of their Anabaptist forbears is what first drove them to America in the 1700s, and they settled in Mifflin County in 1790.

Nowadays the Amish sometimes draw unwelcome attention simply by looking out of place, or by clogging traffic with the horse's pace of a buggy; a plodding culture of "we" amid a hurtling world of "me."

But unlike larger Amish settlements further east in the counties near Philadelphia, the Mifflin County Amish have been less besieged by photo-snapping tourists, allowing for an easier blend. One gets used to driving down the narrow highways and seeing the buggies and the one-room frame schoolhouses, where boys in hats and girls in bonnets run and play, and even the long clotheslines weighted by row after row of dark, dreary clothing.

Dave Semler, publisher of the weekly County Observer, may have best summed up local sentiment toward the Amish in a column last week: "The Amish are seen by those who have lived here for any length of time as nothing out of the ordinary. They are our neighbors and friends. We seldom look at them through the eyes of Wednesday tourists. They bother no one. They ask for nothing. They live with the basic teachings of respect and piousness."

The greatest harm the Amish get from their valley neighbors is unwitting, through the unbending rules of economic competition. Your average non-Amish dairy farmer in the valley might milk 50 to 60 cows a day, Mr. DeLong said. For black-buggy and yellow-buggy Amish, the figure might be 25, while the ultra-low-tech Nebraskas will be lucky to milk 15 in a day. As the years have passed, the lower productivity has translated into non-Amish farmers ending up with most of the prime land in the middle of the valley, while the Amish are more often toward the valley's fringe or at either end.

So far there have been no arrests in the arson of the barns, and authorities say there are no suspects, though it is not for lack of manpower. Seven state police investigators and four FBI agents have joined the case (the federal role is because of the possibility of a hate crime). But, as state police Cpl. Norman Gantz said Friday, "I think we'll be able to clear it up, but it will take a while."

Police expect to announce the posting of a reward early this week, and organizers of the relief effort report that checks and other offers of help have begun to trickle in from outside the county.

In the meantime, the Amish men will be sawing and hammering away, racing against their planting schedules, while predicting calmly that, come summer, their fields will again be green and full with crops, their barns alive with animals.

To send money to the relief effort, make checks payable to the Big Valley Barn Fire Relief Fund, and mail them to that name in care of Kish Bank, Box 917, 310 E. Main St., Belleville PA 17004.