Three days on the river road. They took turns at watch while the other slept, not because they arranged it, but because it was the obvious thing, and they were both people who did the obvious thing without needing to discuss it first. He learned that she had traveled this country since childhood and knew it with a specificity that made his seven years look superficial by comparison. Which creek crossings ran shallow in March, which cottonwood stands marked reliable water, what the cloud patterns off the southern peaks meant for tomorrow's weather. She could read a track in dry ground that he would have walked past without registering.
She named the birds as they moved through various territories. He told her things about the Davis Mountains that you only learn from working the same ground across many seasons. The particular details, which draws held water longest after a rain, which ridgeline caught the first light of a winter morning. That don't appear on any map and are not written down anywhere. The three days were not difficult.
By the end of them he had known her less than two weeks and he had the clear uncomplicated sense that he would go on knowing her for the rest of his life. They mailed the satchel from the Presidio post office by registered mail. The clerk weighed the envelope with professional indifference and issued a receipt and a tracking number, noting both in his own ledger with the unhurried efficiency of a man who has done this 10,000 times. Bitzi folded the receipt into her belt. The tracking number she memorized.
On the road south with the mountains holding the late afternoon light at their peaks the way they did best, Tobias asked where she would go when this was settled. A pause. North probably. Her brother was buried near the reservation. Natan's widow was there.
The children. She was not sure she would call it home in the way the word usually meant, but she did not know where else to call it either. He understood this. He had called the Davis Mountains home for three years after losing Marta because it was where his work and his mornings were. But home in the deeper sense of the word had been absent from it for a long time.
You could come back. He kept his eyes on the road ahead. If you want it, the spare room is there. She looked at him. The east fence line is never going to stop needing work.
And someone who can fix a hinge with a bent nail and a scrap of rawhide would be useful around a place like this. A silence that had nothing uncomfortable in it. A curve-billed thrasher called from a stand of scrub to the east. "Are you asking me to stay?" Bitsy said.