Wade Callaway was still proud of. He dug it with his own hands through two summers of cracked palms and busted knuckles 12 feet down through hard pawn that fought him the entire way. Some days he'd hit rock and think, "That's it. That's as far as this goes. There's no water under this god-forsaken ground, and there never was.
And a man's a fool for believing there might be." Then on a Tuesday, he never bothered to mark on any calendar. The shovel came up wet. He'd laughed out loud. First time in over a year now.
That well kept him alive, kept the horse alive. And in a country where the last real rain had fallen so long ago that folks argued over the actual date of it, water wasn't just water. Water was the only kind of wealth a man could still trust to keep its promises. Once a month, more or less, Wade rode into the trading post at the edge of the territory, traded pelts for flour. Coffee, the occasional bit of tobacco he didn't even much want, but bought anyway, just for something to do with his hands, while the storekeeper talked at him.
The storekeeper, a heavyset man named Dobs, liked to talk about the Apaches the way some men like to talk about weather. constant, certain, never once bothering to check if he was right. Savages, every last one, Dobs said once, sliding a sack of flour across the counter. You're a braver man than me, living out past the canyon like you do. I'd sleep with one eye open, was I? You had nodded along back then.
Hadn't argued. He wasn't sure this morning, riding out toward the eastern canyon country, why that particular memory had decided to surface now, except maybe some part of him already knew what he was about to find, he saddled the horse before the heat came up bad. Riding out toward the eastern canyon the way he did most mornings, checking the drywash for any sign the drought had finally broken. It hadn't. It wouldn't.
Everyone in the territory knew that by now, even the ones who wouldn't say it out loud, because saying it made it real. And nobody out here wanted anything more real than it already was. It was the bird that stopped him. An eagle circling low over the rock formations near the canyon mouth, dropping, rising, dropping again. Same spot over and over like it was tethered to that one patch of stone by some invisible line.
Wade had lived alone long enough to read that kind of thing like a language. An eagle doesn't circle that low for nothing. Doesn't come back to the same rock again and again unless something down there is dying or already dead. And either way, the bird knows something Wade doesn't yet. He pulled up on the res.
Sat there a long moment. Told himself it wasn't his business. Told himself the desert took what it took. And a man who'd learned to survive out here knew better than to go poking his nose at things that weren't his to poke at. Except Except he was already turning the horse.