The sky had gone hard and white, as if the blue had been burned out of it. For fifty-five days no meaningful rain had fallen on the country around Red Mesa, and the sun hung above the flat-topped rock like a coin held too close to a flame. It rose without softness and set without colour, dropping behind the mesa in a glare that left the eyes watering, and in between it hammered the earth until the ground cracked in patterns like the skin of an old man's hands. The wind came, but it brought no coolness. It carried only dust, fine as flour, that settled on everything — on the hides of the shelters, on the cooking pots, on the lips of children who had learned not to lick them, because a wet mouth only dried faster.
The streams had gone first. That was how the people remembered it, in the order of their losses, the way other people might remember the order of a family leaving a room. The little creek that ran past the camp in the spring had thinned to a trickle, then to a chain of puddles, then to a dark stain in the sand that even the dogs stopped sniffing at. After the streams came the shallow pools, the ones the women had known since they were girls, where frogs sang at dusk. After the pools came the small springs, tucked into the folds of the hills, that the elders had drunk from since childhood. One by one they failed, and each failure was marked in the same quiet way: a woman would walk out with a jar in the morning and come back with it empty, and no one would ask her what had happened, because they already knew.
The animals had left before the people understood they were leaving. The deer went first, drifting north in the night, and then the rabbits thinned, and then even the coyotes stopped calling from the ridges. The birds that had nested in the cottonwoods by the water were gone, and the silence they left behind was worse than any noise. At night the cold came down sharp and sudden, as if the desert remembered, after the day's burning, that it was also a place of frost. The people slept close together under thin blankets, and woke with their throats raw and their joints stiff, and the first thing each of them did, every morning, was look at the sky. The sky did not change.
The camp stood beside the largest basin in the country, at the foot of Red Mesa. It was a wide, shallow hollow in the earth, ringed with stones that had been set there by hands long dead, and in good years it filled twice a day — once with the morning seep from the rocks above, once with the evening flow that came down from the high ground after the heat broke. The old people could remember when children splashed in it up to their knees, when the women washed clothes on its edge and the horses drank with their muzzles deep and their ears flicking at flies. Now it was cracked earth, pale and curled at the edges like dead leaves. A man could walk across it and leave no print in the dust, because the dust was already his own colour.
Beside the basin stood Chief Nan-tan-lupan. He was sixty-one years old, tall and broad, his gray hair in two braids that fell past his shoulders, a scar on his left cheek where a Mexican lance had caught him long ago. He did not pace. He did not speak. He stood with his hands at his sides and looked down at the empty basin as if, by looking long enough and steadily enough, he might shame the water into returning. His authority had never rested on shouting or on force. It rested on this steadiness, on the fact that when other men hurried, he did not, and when other men despaired, he waited one breath longer than despair could bear. But steadiness, that morning, felt like a thin thing to hold against a sky that would not break.
He thought of the numbers without counting them aloud, because he knew them in his body the way a man knows his own age. One hundred and eighteen people. Thirty-four warriors, forty-one women, forty-three children, counting the infants who still nursed and did not yet know what thirst was. Twenty-six horses, eighteen cattle, nine dogs. Every container rationed to one cup per person per day, children first, even when the adults' mouths cracked and their heads ached. The band could not simply move. Old people could not travel far. Mothers had small children clinging to their skirts. Injured warriors could not walk ten miles, let alone twenty. Horses would founder if driven hard. Cattle would drop and not rise. Stores gathered over years could not be carried on backs alone.
And the directions were closed, each in its own way. To the east, twenty-five miles away, settler farms and cattle ranges spread along the old creek line, and Harlan Webb had diverted part of a creek for his cattle and closed his range to the band. To the south, fifteen miles down the southern trail, Coleman Murdock kept a walled well and guarded it with armed men, as if water belonged to whoever carried the biggest rifle, and sold what he had at prices that would strip a family of everything it owned. To the north lay the Old Trading Road, thirty miles away, and the trading post at Willow Crossing — too far for the weakest to walk, and no promise of welcome at the end of it. To the west lay Dead Canyon, ten miles off, and the scouts had gone there, and had not yet returned.