Autumn meant the deer moving down out of the high country ahead of the first real cold. And winter meant long, slow evenings around the fire, mending tools and telling stories and waiting out weather that made the mountain trails too dangerous to risk. Levi found himself, without ever quite deciding to, marking his own ranch's year by that same rhythm rather than the calendar hanging in his kitchen, and found the change suited him better than he ever would have guessed it could. Winter that first year tested the friendship in a way neither of them had expected it to be tested. A hard sickness moved through the camp in the coldest months, the kind that settled into children's chests and would not let go.
And Levi rode north through freezing rain the moment word reached his ranch, bringing every blanket. Every ounce of willow bark and store-bought medicine he could gather on short notice from Cottonwood Ben's one reluctant druggist. He stayed four full days that visit, splitting firewood and hauling water and sitting up through two of the worst nights beside Sihi and Diani both doing whatever small unglamorous labor freed the camp's own healers to do the harder work only they knew how to do. He wanted no thanks and expected none. It was that visit, more than any single kind word exchanged before or after it, that finally settled whatever doubt Klo had been carrying about the settler who kept riding north for reasons that had nothing to do with profit.
The friendship between Levi and Diani deepened the same unhurried way. The seasons themselves changed. He taught her in exchange for everything she had shown him. How to read the brand marks scarred into a stray steer's hide, and how to gentle a spooked colt without ever once raising a hand to it. Patience traded plain for patience.
She taught him which plants along the wash could break a fever, and which could kill a careless man just as fast, which bird calls meant rain rolling down off the mountains within the hour, and which meant nothing worth minding at all. They argued more than once about small things that mattered a great deal in the moment, and nothing at all a week later, whose way of reading a coming storm was more reliable, whose people held the better claim to knowing this particular stretch of desert. And Levi came to understand, turning those small arguments over on the long rides home, that he had never once in his whole life enjoyed being wrong about something quite so much as he enjoyed being wrong in front of Diani. Somewhere in the second summer, without either of them quite marking the exact day it started, Diani began teaching him words rather than only lessons. the name for the mountain that guarded the canyon's mouth. The word for the particular gray gold light that fell across the desert in the hour before full dark.