Cottonwood roots go deep, he said, his voice steady, though his hands were not quite steady. "They don't grow in a line like this by accident. They grow where the water is. And the water here is moving northwest."
Besh knelt beside him and touched the soil, and then looked up, and his face, usually so unreadable, was open with something like wonder. Kani walked the line, counting the saplings, and came back shaking his head. "Twenty, thirty, more," he said. "They go on as far as I can see, and they get thicker as they go."
Dzeni stood apart, looking at the line, and at Ethan, and at the saplings, and for a long moment he said nothing at all. Then he walked to the nearest sapling, touched a leaf, and let it go, and the leaf sprang back, green and alive, and he looked at Ethan with an expression that was not trust โ not yet โ but was no longer the flat wall of refusal it had been that first night.
It points northwest, Dzeni said. "Not south, to Murdock's well. Not east, to Webb's farms. Northwest, where no one has looked."
Northwest, Ethan agreed. "Two days on foot for the band, if the band moves together. One day on horseback. I don't know what's at the end of it yet. I know the signs point that way, and the signs have not lied to me yet."
They marked the place, and took a cutting from a sapling โ not to keep, but to show โ and turned back toward camp, riding faster now, because the news they carried would not wait, and because Sable, as if she sensed the change in them, walked with her head a little higher than she had that morning.
The camp was waiting when they returned, the whole of it, gathered near the basin, and the chief stood at its front, and Nakai beside him. Ethan told the council what they had found, plainly, without embroidery: the cottonwood line, the damp soil, the direction, the distance as he guessed it. Besh confirmed it. Kani confirmed it. Dzeni, after a pause, confirmed it too, and his confirmation, coming from him, carried more weight than any other man's would have.
The council voted. It was not unanimous โ a few of the oldest men feared the march, and feared leaving the stores and the known ground โ but it was clear, and the chief, when the votes were counted, stood and spoke the decision aloud so that everyone could hear it.
We march, he said. "At first light, we march northwest, following the signs. We march together, and no one is left behind. We carry what we can, and we leave what we must, and we trust the ground to tell us the truth, one day at a time."
The band prepared to move. Women packed dried meat and corn and blankets. Men checked the horses and the cattle, and mended harness, and filled every container from the seep, drop by drop. Ishtah gathered her medicine bundle and counted her herbs, and frowned at how few were left. Tahnee packed her gourd, and Yana helped her, small hands careful with the knots. Nakai packed his wooden cup, wrapping it in a cloth, and then, thinking better of it, unwrapped it and carried it in his hand, because a cup was for carrying, not for hiding.
Ethan stood apart for a moment, watching the camp prepare, and felt something he had not felt in a long time โ not the satisfaction of a man who has been proven right, but the heavier, stranger feeling of a man who has been trusted with something larger than himself, and who knows he must not drop it. The sun set behind Red Mesa, redder that night than it had been in days, or so it seemed to him, and the first stars came out, and the camp, for the first time in fifty-five days, went to sleep with something in it that had been gone for a long time, fragile and real and impossible to name without breaking it: hope.
The march began before the sun had finished climbing clear of Red Mesa, and it began in silence, because there was nothing left in any throat to waste on song. The women tied the last of the stores into bundles and slung them over the cattle's backs. The old people were helped onto the gentlest horses, or onto litters dragged between two poles, and they did not complain, though the poles jolted over every stone. The children walked in the middle of the column, where the warriors could shield them on either side, and the dogs trotted with their tongues hanging, stopping now and then to sniff at ground that gave them nothing.
Ethan Cole walked near the front, beside Chief Nan-tan-lupan, with Sable limping softly at his side. Her front-left foot was tender still, though Ishtah had bound it with care, and he kept his own pace slow to match her, shortening his stride whenever she faltered. Behind him the column stretched out like a wound across the dry earth: one hundred and eighteen people, twenty-six horses, eighteen cattle, nine dogs, all moving northwest, away from the camp beside the empty basin, away from the place they had called home through fifty-five days without rain.