Your valley is interesting. The ridge to the north, there is a seep up there. Alkali, by the smell from the trail. Does it run year-round? Mat this frowned.
The north pasture seep runs all year. Why? Men camping in this country in autumn want water that won't freeze early. Alkali seeps stay warm well into winter. She looked at him steadily.
If the Quillin gang is still working this valley, they will water there. I would bet on it. He thought about that for a long time after she went to bed. The days found their own rhythm in ways that surprised him by how natural they felt. Sadie was up before him most mornings, which caught him off guard given that he'd been rising at first light for so many years that it had become purely involuntary.
But she moved through the pre-dawn darkness with the ease of someone for whom night held no particular threat. She was simply up first. The fire stoked, the coffee on, and she'd be outside in the gray early light standing still with her face turned east, watching the first color come into the sky. He never asked about that. Some things belong to a person in a private way that doesn't need explaining.
She learned the layout of his land with a quickness that felt almost like memory, as if her mind was built for terrain the way his was built for cattle numbers. By the third day, she could water the horses and check their feet without asking where anything was kept. On the third morning, he came in from the far pasture and found her crouched by the root of the big cottonwood at the yard's edge, examining something in the soil. She had a small branch in her hand and she held it up when he came over, a spray of narrow leaves, dusty green even in late October. "Yerba de la negrita," she said, holding the branch out to him.
"Good for inflammation. " It grew along fence lines in this part of Arizona, but most people walked past it without knowing what it was. She went on to name three other plants she'd noticed on her morning walk around the perimeter, where they grew, what they treated, how you prepared them. She had the habit of a teacher, laying information out in a clean line without expecting him to already know it. He listened. Then he gave something back, showed her how he read the cattle for sickness before symptoms showed, watching the way an animal held its head, the small delays in movement that meant a joint was swelling inside.
The medicine of cattle, learned from his father and from years of watching. She took that in with the same focused attention she'd given the plant. They were trading knowledge, each one finding the other's fluency interesting rather than foreign, and neither of them named it for what it was. By the fifth day, she had reorganized the tool shed in a way that made considerably more sense than the arrangement he'd been living with, and he noticed and said nothing because she was simply right. She found a crack in the east wall adobe that he'd been meaning to patch for two seasons and mixed mud and straw and packed it herself, working with a methodical patience that found the task itself satisfying in some fundamental way.