Deya lived five years after Nate, on her own terms, in both worlds, without apology. She kept the house at Coldwater, though the ranch belonged to the council now, and the council would not have moved her for the world. She sang the old songs to the basin's children, ranchers' children and camp children alike, and they learned them the way Chidi had learned them: before the language, so the songs were the frame and everything else hung on them.
The winters got into her, those last years. She had always been lean and hard as a fence post, but after 1900 something in her began to bank its fires, the way a stove banks coals for the night. Chidi came out from Fort Verde as often as the clerk's work allowed, and he would find her by the well in the evenings, in Nate's place, watching the water. "You should come to town for the winter," he said, every autumn. "The house there has a real stove." Every autumn she said, "The well is here." It was not an argument. It was a fact, stated the way facts are stated in the basin.
The winter of 1905 was a hard one β snow in November, the arroyo frozen by Christmas, and a north wind that found every crack in the ranch house. Deya kept to her bed the last week, and the neighbor's wife from down the creek came up to sit with her, and Elder Kanoa's granddaughter came down from the camp, and between them she was never alone. On the last evening she asked to be carried out to the well. They told her it was too cold. She said, "The well is here," and they carried her out wrapped in blankets and set her down in Nate's place with her back to the stone, and she looked at the water and the ridge and the winter sky, and she smiled, and she died there, beside the well, in the cold clean air, the way she had lived: where she chose.
She was fifty-seven, near enough. Chidi buried her on the rise above the well, beside Nate. There was argument about the stone β a rancher's stone or an Apache stone β and Chidi refused the choice. Two stones mark them now: one cut in the rancher's style, with a name and dates; one laid in the Apache way, with the old signs. They stand side by side, and the wind moves over them, and the rain falls on them.
At the burial, the people came from both worlds, the way they had come for Nate. Elder Kanoa, white-haired now, spoke last. He said the basin had been given three things by the two people on the rise, and that the three things would outlast every fence and every claim filed in Fort Verde.
The first was kindness that asked nothing. The well had been Nate's, by every law the territory knew, and he had opened it in the hard winter to people his own kind were calling the enemy, and he had never once asked what it bought him. The water ran, and that was the whole of the account.
The second was honest records kept before anyone knew they mattered. The blue books had been only a rancher's habit, and then they had become the compact's memory, and then the law's. Chidi had filed four of them in the territorial archive in his own hand, and the clerks there had catalogued them under cold categories, not knowing they were holding the basin's heart in paper. Nobody keeps a true record for the future. The future finds it, the way a traveler finds a well.
The third was the hardest, and Kanoa said it looking at the young ones, the children of both peoples standing together on the rise. Never hate at the command of those who profit from panic. There had been men, in the hard years, who tried to make the basin afraid β of the camps, of the ranchers, of the water running out β because frightened people are easy to lead and easy to rob. The basin had refused. "Remember this," Kanoa said, "when the next ones come with their fear to sell. The well does not ask who you are. Be like the well."
After the burial, the children went down to the well β ranchers' children and camp children β and they drank from the tin ladle on the post, passing it hand to hand. The coyote's great-grandson watched from the ridge, lean in the winter light, and one of the children waved at it, and it did not run.
Chidi stayed on the rise a while after the others had gone down. He stood between the two stones, his father's and his mother's, and he thought about the books in the archive in Fort Verde, and the entry he had written as a boy about the coyote bringing her children to the water. So did we, he had written.
The wind moved over the stones. The water ran clear below. The basin went on, and the record held, and the kindness held, and the well stood open, as it always had, to whoever came thirsty.
The End