I expect I will, he managed, and meanted more fully than he'd meant almost anything in a good long while. Saying he came back within the month and then again before the next one had fully turned, and it wasn't long before the ride north to Chief Taji's canyon became less an occasional detour, and more simply a fixed part of the shape of Levi's life. He brought flour and coffee and a length of good rope the first time back. A small folding knife and a bolt of red trade cloth. The second and every time he rode in, Diani had something waiting in return.
A woven burden basket, deerhide tan soft as cloth, a jar of mesquite bean syrup that Levi's own late mother would have traded her best laying hands for had she lived to taste it. The Apache brought blankets and leather work and dried herbs down to the Cottonwood Bend mercantile now and again too. When the season allowed the trip, and slowly, almost without either side, quite deciding to let it happen, an easy commerce grew up between the camp and the town that had never once existed there before Levi rode down into that ravine. One visit fell during the hard rains of late summer, the wash running high and brown, and the whole canyon smelling of wet creosote and turned earth, and Levi arrived soaked through to the skin, only to find the camp had already strung a dry shelter for his horses before he'd so much as dismounted. Ward of a lone rider on the flooded trail, having reached them well ahead of him.
Another visit landed square in the middle of harvest. Mosquet pods gathered by the basket full and ground fine for flour, and Levi spent two full days with his sleeves rolled up, working the grinding stones alongside the camp's women, earning more laughter at his clumsiness than actual flour. Though by the second afternoon, his rhythm had steadied enough that Sihi allowed grudgingly that he might yet make a pass grinder of mesquite meal. A third visit caught the whole camp in the grip of an early frost that had no business arriving so soon in the season, and Levi rode back to his own ranch, and returned two days later, with every spare blanket and length of canvas his small operation could spare, arriving well ahead of any thanks he might have expected, and wanting none at all. The seasons themselves became a kind of shared calendar between the two of them, marked less by a settler's paper almanac than by what the land itself was doing at any given time.
Spring meant the agave stock shooting skyward almost overnight, sweet and ready for harvest before the summer heat turned them bitter and tough. Early summer meant the mesquite pods ripening heavy in gold along the wash and the whole camp turning out together to gather them before javelina and deer could strip the branches bare first. Monsoon season meant washes that ran bone dry 11 months of the year suddenly roaring brown and dangerous within an hour of a distant storm. And Levi learned early and the hard way never to make camp in a dry wash bed, no matter how flat and inviting the ground looked. A lesson Aiga had tried gently to teach him, and a flash flood eventually taught him properly.