the weight itself were a question. Tahnee's gourd was filled from the seep, a small amount, and she held it carefully, as if it were something that might break, and gave Yana the first sip, and Koi the second, and kept almost nothing for herself. Ishtah went among the shelters, warning the mothers about sickness โ the children's bodies were weak, she said, and weak bodies took fever easily, and her medicine was already running low, the bundle lighter each week than the week before. She did not say what would happen if the fever came and the medicine ran out. She did not need to. The mothers looked at their children, and at the empty sky, and understood.
Ethan sat apart that evening, cleaning his notebook, turning its pages โ drawings of plants, of stone, of soil, his own system of marks, made over years of digging and guiding. Nakai came and sat near him again, and looked at the drawings without asking to touch them, which Ethan appreciated.
Are you going to find the water? Nakai asked.
I am going to look, Ethan said. "Looking honestly is all any man can promise."
The boy nodded, as if that were a better answer than a promise would have been. Above them, the sky stayed hard and white, and the sun set behind Red Mesa, and the camp prepared, in the small ways it could, for a morning that might change everything, or might change nothing at all.
They left at first light, when the air was still cool enough to breathe comfortably and the shadows were long and blue across the dust. The reading party was small, as the chief had ordered: Ethan, Besh, Kani, and Dzeni, who rode with his rifle across his knees and his eyes never far from Ethan's back. Sable walked at the rear, her sore foot tended and wrapped, carrying only a light pack, because Ethan would not load her heavily while she was lame. The camp watched them go in silence, and Nakai stood beside his grandfather, the wooden cup in his hand, and did not wave, because waving felt like saying goodbye, and he was not ready to say that.
The way west was ten miles to Dead Canyon, and they covered it slowly, because Sable could not be hurried and because Ethan stopped often, and each stop was a lesson, whether Dzeni wanted it to be or not.
Look, Ethan said at the first stop, where a dry wash cut across their path. He pointed to a line of shrubs along the wash, brown and brittle, and then to a place where the line thickened, just slightly, and the leaves were a shade greener. "The wash looks dead. But the plants are telling you where the ground holds damp longest. Follow the green, even when it is faint. Especially when it is faint. In a drought, faint is all you get."
Besh nodded, filing it away the way a tracker files a print. Kani crouched and touched the soil, and found it, as Ethan had said, a fraction darker than the soil a few feet away. Dzeni said nothing, but he looked, and looking was a kind of listening, even if he would not have admitted it.
At the second stop, Ethan showed them salt grass โ low, tough grass growing in a patch where nothing else grew, its blades edged with a white crust. "Salt grass means the ground is damp below," he said. "The water rises, leaves the salt behind, and sinks again. Where you see salt grass, you dig shallow, and you dig carefully, because the water is close but it is not deep."
At the third stop, he showed them ant mounds, clustered along a line that ran straight as a rule across a flat stretch of ground, though there was nothing on the surface to explain why the ants had chosen that line and no other. "Ants build where the ground is damp," Ethan said. "They follow the seam the way water follows it. A line of mounds is a line on a map the ants have drawn for you."
Kani laughed, a short, surprised sound. "The ants are better map-makers than most men I know."
They are, Ethan said, and smiled, the first real smile the party had seen from him. "They don't lie about water. Men do. Ants don't."
Dzeni did not smile, but the corner of his mouth moved, almost against his will, and Besh saw it, and said nothing, because some victories are better left unspoken.
Dead Canyon itself was as the scouts had described it: a dry canyon, its walls steep and red, its floor dusty, its stone basin empty. Ethan walked its length slowly, knocking on rock with his knuckles as he went, listening for the hollow sound Silvano had taught him to hear โ the sound of a buried stream running under stone. Most of the rock answered dead, a flat thud that meant nothing below. Ethan did not hurry past those places, and he did not pretend otherwise. He marked them in his notebook, honestly, and moved on.
It was in the side wash of Dead Canyon, a narrow cut branching off the main canyon to the northwest, that he stopped and went still.
Here, he said, very quietly.
The wash was dry, like everything else. But along its edge ran a line of cottonwood saplings โ young trees, thin as a man's wrist, their leaves green, truly green, not the dusty green of plants holding on, but the bright, living green of plants that were drinking. The line ran unbroken for a long way, and it pointed northwest, as straight as if someone had drawn it with a stick in the dust. Ethan knelt beside the smallest sapling and brushed the soil at its base, and the soil was dark, and when he dug with his fingers, it was damp, and the dampness went down, not just on the surface, but deep, the way dampness goes when water is moving below and the roots are following it down.