"Much obliged," Wade said, and carried water back down the path with his arms trembling — not from the weight, but from the effort of the afternoon, which had been the hardest work of his three days: to stand in front of an insult built to gut a woman just out of earshot, and to keep his hands still, and to trust that the valley, watching, would know the difference between a man who couldn't and a man who wouldn't.
At the lodge door Weshka took one look at his face and snorted, quietly, like a woman confirming a private wager.
"You saw the water today," she said. "Good. Most men only ever see the trough."
Chapter 10 — The Upper Canyon
Tali rode out before the sun cleared the canyon wall, on the gray mare, with her knife at her belt and a strip of dried meat in her sash and the morning's excuse ready on her tongue if anyone had asked — the high pasture to check for strays, the upper spring to read. Nobody asked. That was the use of being the camp's eyes: her goings were weather, not news.
She rode the way she read everything. The flood had rewritten the upper canyon in a hand she was still learning. Here, the debris line ran two man-heights up the wall, a tidemark of brush and splintered cottonwood. There, the old trail had been taken out entire, and she picked the new way by the gravel's color, the way her grandmother's grandmother had taught down the line to her.
The first wrong thing was a smell: woodsmoke, old and thin, where no band fire had burned since the snows.
The second wrong thing was a track. She found it where the trail crossed a silt fan below the upper spring — mules, shod, four of them, overlaid on the flood's fresh silt and not washed, which meant days, not weeks, since the water fell. Shod mules did not belong to the valley. They belonged to the world of roads and invoices, and they had come down after the flood like a hand into a pocket.
She left the mare in a stand of juniper and went on foot, as her mother taught her before she was tall enough for a bow, and found the camp above the spring where a white man would put a camp: close to water he did not own, careless of the wind, loud in its leavings. Two tents, a canvas fly, stenciled crates, a cook-fire ringed with tin cans — and no one in it. The men were down at their work. She could hear it, faintly, around the bend: the ring of a pick, spaced, patient. A man's voice, another's, too far for words.
She should have gone down to the work and seen it with the camp's authority behind her. Instead — and she would think later about how knowledge chooses its hour — she followed the water, because the water had changed its mind about something.
The lower spring was the valley's heart: the basin at the camp was its mouth, but its source ran back under the wall and up, a chain of seeps and pools that fed everything. She climbed the side channel toward the upper seep, silent-footed on wet stone, and the wrongness grew under her hands like a fever coming up. The seep's little channel — which had run one way since before the oldest songs — had been met. A cut crossed it. Not flood-work: flood-work was wild and round and everywhere at once. This was a channel dug by tools, straight as intention, its sides still showing the pale bite of spade and pick, its spoil heaped in a neat, hated row. It turned the upper water aside, away from the chain that fed the lower spring, toward a raw new gully leading round the bend, toward the picks.
A sluice. They were unbuilding the spring at its source to run their gold dirt — or to say, when the valley's spring failed, that the land was dry and worthless and its people better gone.
She stood a long time with her hand flat on the cut earth. It was cool and damp and fresh, days old at most, and it had been dug while her people were carrying their goods out of the mud and counting their dead horses — while she herself had been cooling a stranger's fever with water from the spring these men were murdering at its root.
The stakes were below the cut, three of them, in a surveyor's line down the gully. She went to them already knowing what she would find, the way you know a rattlesnake before the second note. Fresh-driven: the wood at the ground line was still green-split and unweathered, the mallet bruises still pale. And the dates cut into each stake, in a careful clerkly hand — dates of before the flood. Before the water. Before the stranger washed up on the gravel bar, before the camp was even wet.
Liars had been here ahead of the storm, setting a claim like a snare for a season that hadn't come, and the flood — the flood that had nearly killed the valley — had washed the silt off their work and shown it to her clean.
She took nothing. She disturbed nothing — a tracker's discipline, and a deeper one: what the ground said now, it must still be saying when men with authority stood here and needed to hear it plain. But she read it all twice, the cut, the spoil row, the stake dates, the mule sign, the careless camp, and she noted the one thing more, drifting up from the diggings on the wind: a horse whinnied, somewhere around the bend — a horse's voice among white men's workings, and under it the jingle of a picket chain.
She rode home by the long way, over the high shoulder, where the whole valley lay out in the afternoon: the herd grazing the far pasture, the smoke of forty lodges, the lower spring catching the light like a held coin. Somewhere down there a Texas stranger sat inside his three days, weighing her name against his horses, and did not know that the ground under all of them had already been weighed by other men, and found worth stealing.