On the 10th day, they walked the creek, all three of them. Amma with a walking stick Gideon had cut from a fallen pine, slower, but present, determined. He showed them where the ice held and where it didn't. The shallow crossings, the bank low enough for a horse, the timber stand that muffled sound from the north. So you heard movement from the south first.
Desa showed him things he hadn't seen in 7 years of living here. The ridge to the north had a natural break about a third of the way along. Not obvious unless you knew to look for it, but from the right angle, it gave a sight line all the way to the main road. She'd seen it from the timber line while running. Filed it away, because that was what she did.
Amma stopped at a place where the creek bank rose slightly. Here, she said he'd walked past this spot a thousand times. The ground is different, she said. Can you feel it? He stepped to where she stood, pressed his boot down.
The ground gave differently. A slight resonance underneath. There's a spring. Amma said frozen now. But come April, you'll have water this side of the cabin without going to the main creek.
Not more than 4 ft down. If you dig the right place, he looked at the ground. How do you know that? She looked at the grass poking through snow at the way the ice crystals had formed differently here than 10 ft in either direction. at things so small he had walked over them for seven years without registering.
"My grandmother showed me how to read ground like this, " she said. Her mother showed her. He thought about that about the generations of knowledge in the way she had pressed her foot into the snow. About what it meant to carry knowledge in your body rather than in books. About what had nearly been lost in the storm, "Amma, " he said.
She looked at him. I'm glad you're alive, he said plainly, without embellishment. Both of you. I want to say that and mean it to be heard. She looked at him for a long moment.
We know, she said. That's why we trust you. Desa, three steps away, was looking at the ridge. She didn't turn around, but he saw her shoulders move just slightly. The small involuntary adjustment of someone absorbing something they had not been prepared to feel.
The wind off the ridge was cold and clean. The three of them stood by the frozen creek in Wyoming territory, December 1883, and something, not yet nameable, not yet fully formed, but real and getting realer, settled over the homestead like the quiet after the last of a storm. Not peace exactly, but the first honest hour of something that might become it. That evening, after supper, after Amma had gone to lie down, after the lamp was turned low and the fire was banked, Desa sat at the table, Gideon sat across from her, which was new. He'd been sitting on the stool by the wall.
This was the table, the chair he never used. The one that had been pushed against the wall for 7 years, like a thing waiting to be needed. Neither of them commented on it. She was looking at her hands, then the window, then the folded leather with the papers. He was looking at his coffee.
"How long were you walking? " he said. "Before I found you, she was quiet a moment. Long enough that I had stopped being afraid of dying, " she said. "That's usually a bad sign.