Chapter 5: The First Dig
They began when the wash still held a thin blue shade, with Silas's willow wand, his compass, and a line of stones.
Silas worked as his father had taught him, marking before he dug. He paced the wash, letting the forked willow ride loose in his hands, stopping where it dipped, driving a peg. Joseph watched with suspicion and said a stick would find whatever a hopeful man wished.
"It finds nothing by itself," Silas said. "It is a reminder to go slow. The earth does the rest. Here." He stood where the damp had lain deepest. "We dig on the inside of the bend, where the old creek slowed. If water ever loved this wash, it left its heart here."
The first spadefuls were easy and disheartening: sand, then gravel that rang against the shovel. Joseph dug like a man paying off an insult, and Silas matched him stroke for stroke. Saya came at the ration hour with measured water, Tomi at her side with his cup, asking whether they were nearly to the water yet, as if it lay in a jar underground.
By afternoon the pit stood waist deep, and the character of the digging changed.
"There," Silas said suddenly, and dropped to his knees. "Easy now. Easy with the shovel."
The gravel had given way to something darker. Joseph scraped with his hands, and his fingers came away soiled, neither dry nor wet, like the memory of a river. Then, deeper, true mud: cold, gray-brown, smelling faintly of iron and of deep places that never see the sun.
"Mud," Joseph said, and the word went up out of the pit like a bird startled into flight. In camp, heads lifted. Tomi came running with his cup held high, and Saya came after him at a pace she would afterward deny was running at all.
Silas pressed the mud between his fingers, grave and glad together. "Water has passed this way lately," he said. "It is moving under us, Joseph. Slow as a held breath, but moving."
"Then dig!" Tomi cried, dancing at the pit's edge. "Dig, dig!"
They dug with a hope so fierce it was almost a second ration, taking turns with two young men who came down unasked. The mud thickened. The pit deepened past a man's waist, past his chest. The smell of wet earth rose, and people who had not smiled in weeks were smiling, and Saya allowed Tomi an extra swallow from her own share.
And then, at a standing man's height, the shovel struck something that was not gravel.
It rang dully and stopped dead. Silas cleared the pit floor by hand, and a surface emerged beneath the mud: a broad, unbroken sheet of pale rock, smooth as a table, stretching beyond the pit's walls in every direction. The mud lay on it thin as paint.
They dug sideways until dark and found the same sheet, unbroken, sloping away under the wash. No crack, no seam their tools could enter. The mud was already stiffening, a film over stone shut like a door.
Tomi stood above with his cup, saying nothing, which was worse than crying.
That night Silas sat before the council fire unbidden, because a man who has spent a people's hope owes them the accounting in person, and he did not dress the failure in fine language.
"We found the footprint again," he said, "and this time the deer itself passed lately. But it passed over stone, not through sand. Water does not soak down through rock like rain through a blanket. It runs along the top of it, like rain along a roof, following the slope into the dark, sideways. The mud is where it paused. The water has gone on, toward wherever that stone leads it. I dug in the right creek, in the wrong place in it."
"Then three days will not be enough," Joseph said angrily, "and we have spent one of them learning that a hole is a hole."
"One day was spent learning where the water is not," Silas said. "Tomorrow I do not dig. Tomorrow I walk the stone. Where that rock nears the surface, where it cracks or dips, a man may meet the water travelling. And there is a place I have not yet walked, where bees were flying at evening in a line straight as a plumb string, toward the burned grove, where no flower has bloomed in seventy-one days."
Taklish studied him across the low fire. "You speak of the scorched ground, Silas Hart."
"I do, Grandfather."
"Men of this camp do not go there lightly." The chief's face was unreadable. "But thirst has never asked any man's permission. Walk your stone tomorrow. Joseph goes with you. And digger, hear me: the hope of a people is heavier than a shovel. Carry it more carefully than you carried it today."
Silas bowed his head under the rebuke, which was just, and beyond the fire Tomi slept at last, his empty cup beside him, where Saya covered both boy and cup with the corner of her blanket against the desert cold of the night.