She looked at the mountainside and then at him, then back at the flint-dry slope. Though she said nothing, it wasn’t hard to read doubt in her silence.
“I know it’s hard to believe,” he said, reaching back into his saddlebag without taking his eyes off the mountain, “but some kinds of rock layers are nothing but big stone sponges. Given time and the right conditions, those strata will soak up incredible amounts of water.”
“If you say so,” she muttered. Her tone was as full of doubt as her expression.
By touch alone, he pulled a worn map and a pencil out of his saddlebag. “Sandstone is an aquifer, a stone sponge. So is limestone. Buried alluvial fans make great sponges. Most of your wells are drawing on buried beds of sand and gravel washed down from the mountains millions of years ago.”
She looked at his hands. He was sketching as he talked.
“The water your wells brought up came from recent rains,” he continued, “this year’s water and the last, water soaking down into the land and renewing the wells with every rainy season.”
He tipped his hat back on his head and studied the map. A lock of hair, straight and black as night, fell over his forehead. He didn’t notice. His attention was on the tiny symbols he was adding to the worn map.
Hope ached to push the lock of hair back into place, to feel its texture and the heat of the man who wasn’t even looking at her.
“In most places on earth,” he said, squinting up at the mountain, “the groundwater would just ooze slowly downhill until it reached a river or a lake or the sea itself. But this isn’t most places. Here the water just sinks down and down until it reaches a layer of rock it can’t penetrate or until the heat of the basalt welling up from the mantle turns water into steam and sends it pushing back to the surface as hot springs and geysers.”
She remembered, and in remembering, wanted to weep. Turner’s land had such hot springs today. The Valley of the Sun had once had them, but they had dried up in her childhood, leaving behind a crust of colorful minerals and the memory of unearthly turquoise water that had pulsed with the earth’s own heartbeat.
“Most people think of this land as desolate, sterile, and uninteresting,” Rio said, his voice vibrant with his pleasure in the wild landscape. “It isn’t. In many ways it’s the richest, most exciting, and rarest of all the lands on earth.”
Hope heard the emotion in his voice and felt even more drawn to him. She, too, loved this lean and difficult land. She, too, had learned the subtle, sweet, extraordinary rewards that the land gave to those who understood it. Her mother had never found those rewards.
Her father had, and had given up his wife and family rather than leave the land.
A quick movement of Rio’s head caught Hope’s attention, but it was the mountain he looked toward, not her. She remembered his words, watched his confidence as he reduced his observations to mysterious symbols.
And she wondered who Rio really was, and how someone of his obvious education had become a man who drifted through the country like the wind, leaving little to mark his passage but enigmatic symbols made upon the softer surfaces of the land.
What set him to living with the wind? What would it take to hold him in one place?
Hope heard her silent questions and smiled a bittersweet smile. Nothing held the wind. Nothing.
Certainly not a woman’s dreams.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
If he heard the sadness in her voice, he didn’t show it. He wedged the notebook under his thigh and reached back into the saddlebag again.
“I’m looking for a layer of sandstone or limestone that’s sandwiched between strata of rock that won’t let water leak away. Sort of like a solid river flowing between waterproof banks.”
It wasn’t the answer Hope had asked for, but she knew it was the only one she would get. She shook off the sadness that clung to her like dust to the dry land. Her ranch needed water. Rio was a man who could find water. That was all that mattered.
It had to be.
“How does water get into the limestone if it’s sandwiched between waterproof layers of rock?” she asked after a moment.
Rio glanced aside and couldn’t help smiling with approval. She not only listened, she thought about what she heard. Other people he had helped had listened to him without understanding. They had been focused on only one thing. Water.
He knew that Hope needed water as much as the others had. Yet she was able to see the land as something more than a way to make a living. She sensed that in some indescribable way the land was alive, growing and changing with its own rhythms, its own inevitable movements, its own awesome beauty.
Hope saw that you could share the land’s life if you had enough room in your soul for the sound of coyotes calling to a moon they had always known and would never understand, and for the sheen of a rainbow stretching between drought and water, and for the tiny, fleeting perfection of a medicine flower blooming against rocks a billion years old.
With a feeling of inevitability as deep as time, Rio understood that Hope had room in her soul for all that and more, much more, things he had always hungered for and never touched.
Does she know my hunger as deeply as I know her beauty?
With an odd feeling of sadness he turned his mind to Hope’s question rather than his own. Her question was the only one that he would allow himself to answer.
“If the sandwich is lying flat,” he said, demonstrating with one palm on top of the other, “the rain will just roll off the top piece of bread, the waterproof layer. But if you break the sandwich in several places and tilt the pieces up toward the sky, the aquifer—that’s the softer center of the sandwich—will be open to the rain.”
“So the center, the sponge, just soaks up everything?” she asked.
“I wish,” he said wryly. “It would make my job a lot easier. Most of what falls still vanishes as runoff in mountain streams. But not all of it. Some of that water sinks into the aquifer itself. Pulled by gravity and pushed by the weight of new rain sinking in, the water seeps down through the aquifer.”
Rio dismounted, rummaged in his saddlebags, and pulled out a hinged black box no bigger than a pack of cigarettes. He handled it with the same ease that he handled reins or boots, silently telling Hope that the box was very familiar to him. When he opened it, she caught a glimpse of a mirror on one side and what appeared to be a complex compass on the other.
She watched with growing curiosity as he held the box up, tilted it until it roughly matched the line of the rock layer that interested him, fiddled with a small lever on the back of the box, and then wrote something on the map. He repeated the process several times, using different strata of rock.
“Is that a compass?” she asked.
“A special kind, yes. It’s called a Brunton compass.” He showed it to her. “The built-in clinometer measures the dip of a rock stratum. Of course, you’re supposed to lay it right on the stratum you’re working with.” He glanced toward the huge, nearly vertical chunk of land in front of him. “Since I left my mountain goat at the ranch, I’m doing it the easy way. For now, a guesstimate is good enough.”
“What did you learn from the compass?”
“That the dip of the rock layer is steep, but not steep enough to put an aquifer totally out of reach if you drilled down on the flats. That’s assuming there’s an aquifer in that broken mess,” he added, studying the rugged mountains. “And also assuming the aquifer runs beneath the mountain all the way down to your ranch without being interrupted by fault zones. Big assumptions.”
“What happens if it’s faulted?”
Rio mounted Storm Walker in an easy motion and settled into the saddle. “Sometimes the water leaks away at the fault zones. Sometimes the aquifer is offset so much by faults that you can’t find it again. Sometimes it just slips down so far that you can’t get to it.”
Hope gestured toward the steep mountain slope he had been measuring. “Is there an aquifer?”
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“No. The sandstone is dry, or there would be a seep right here, maybe even a spring.”
It was absurd to feel disappointed, but she felt it just the same. “Oh.”
He replaced the Brunton compass in his saddlebag. “Don’t worry. This is just one small piece of the mountain. Not even a representative part. It’s a transition between Turner land and your own.”
“What do you mean? We’re both bounded by the Perdidas on one side.”
“The mountains near his place are almost entirely made of Precambrian rock a billion and a half years old, stone so hard it makes a steel hammer ring. There’s no way for water to sink into that kind of dense rock. Everything runs off in streams or gathers on the surface in lakes. Even where little pieces of the mountain have washed down to the plains and built up rough soil, the groundwater stays close to the surface because of the impermeable roots of the mountain beneath.”
She squinted, imagining a relatively thin layer of sand and gravel covering the much more solid rock layer beneath. “That’s why Turner has so much water, isn’t it? The water can’t sink down and get away from his wells. It’s all there, waiting to be tapped.”
“For a while, yes. If he doubles his cropland as he talks about doing, he’ll be living off the future. Sooner or later he’ll suck it all dry.”
At least he has a future.
Though Hope didn’t say it aloud, she might as well have. Rio knew how desperate the Valley of the Sun was for water. It was there in the empty sky, in the dry land, and in Hope watching him, eyes filled with fears and dreams.
Fourteen
WHEN HOPE COULDN’T bear the silence any longer, she looked away from the land’s innocent betrayal and asked Rio, “What’s different about my mountains?”
“The rocks are much younger, more porous. They erode much more quickly. That’s why your mountains are lower than Turner’s, even though they’re part of the same block fault. Your outwash plains are thick, deep. Water soaks down into them almost as soon as it falls.”
“Then the land should hold more water, not less.”
“But it’s out of reach,” he said simply. “There are many places on your ranch where you could go down a thousand feet and then keep on going for thousands more and get nothing for your time and money but dry gravel.”
Hope took a ragged breath at the thought of drilling that far down and finding no water, a dry hole draining away her slender reserves of money, turning her dreams to dust.
When Rio saw the fear darkening her eyes, he cursed his thoughtless words. With gentle, relentless fingertips he turned her face toward his. For the first time since he had seen his visions reflected in her eyes, he allowed emotion back into his voice, the deep certainty that came from a knowledge that had nothing to do with diplomas and schools.
“That’s why you hired me,” he said simply. “I won’t waste your money drilling where there isn’t any chance of water. Do you believe me?”
His words and his touch took away the fear that had chilled Hope. She put her hand over his fingers and pressed, not speaking for fear that her voice would break.
Her eyes spoke for her. They said that she trusted him with her dreams, and that she was quickly, inevitably, coming to the point where she would trust him with herself. That was something she had never done with any man. She had held herself aloof, knowing from the example of her parents’ lives and her sister’s life that loving someone wasn’t enough to ensure peace, much less a dream of love returned.
So Hope had loved only the land.
Now Rio was sliding through the hard layers that had protected the life-giving core of her. Each day with him, each conversation, each touch, he sank more deeply into her, coming closer to the instant when he would break through the last layer of her reserve and touch the flowing wealth of love concealed deeply inside her.
The thought terrified her.
And the thought that he might not break through, might not touch her, might not release her love, also terrified her.
“Hope?”
“Yes,” she said in a husky voice, “I believe you.”
With an effort of will, Rio forced himself to release the silky warmth of her. Even after he removed his hand, his fingertips tingled with shared warmth, the energy of two lives touching.
Without a word he turned Storm Walker toward the edge of Piñon Camp and forced himself to think only of finding water in a dry land.
“Are there other benches like this farther south toward the ranch house?” he asked.
Caught in her own thoughts, she didn’t answer. His fingers no longer touched her skin.
She was shocked by the loss she felt at such a simple thing as the absence of his touch. Shaken, she reined Aces to follow the stallion.
“Piñon Camp,” she said finally. “It’s a landmark around here simply because it’s different.”
“How about cliffs? Old mining or timber roads? Deep canyons or ravines? I’m looking for places where I can see layers of rock that are buried out of sight in other areas.”
Frowning, Hope recalled details of the land she had ridden over since she was old enough to sit upright in a saddle. “Just on the ranchland, or on the lease lands, too?”
“If the lease is above your watershed, I’ll be glad to look at it, although I’ve already seen most of the government land. Whatever you have on your own property should come first.”
She urged Aces to the edge of the bench until she could see the country falling steeply away below. Storm Walker came up alongside the mare, standing so close that Hope’s stirrup rubbed against Rio’s.
“Over there,” she said. Pointing, she touched his sleeve. Even that light brush of her fingertips against cloth reminded her of his vitality. The heat of him demanded a deeper touch, a longer sharing. “See that bald spot just beyond the ranch house?”
“Yes.”
“Straight up from there, hidden behind the shoulder of the mountain, there’s an old road. A hundred years ago there was some kind of mining operation up there. Silver or gold, I forget which. It didn’t amount to a hill of beans, but they cut a wagon road up above Wind Canyon, into the high country where there was another mine.”
“Any luck?”
“Just the bad kind. The mine caved in long ago, but some of the road is still there. It’s a scary piece of real estate. It hangs by its toenails to the edge of Wind Canyon. The canyon itself is thousands of feet deep. The land is different there. Crumbly rather than solid. Even sagebrush has a hard time clinging to the mountainside.”
“Perfect,” Rio said, satisfaction obvious in his tone.
“If you say so,” she muttered. “I remember that road scaring the hell out of me.”
“You don’t have to go.”
She gave him a level look.
He knew she wouldn’t be staying behind.
“There are a few other places between here and there that have bare rock,” she said.
“We’ll see them on the way.”
She shook her head. “Not unless we plan to be gone for a few days. Each one of the sites is up a long, blind canyon.”
His eyes narrowed as he considered the possibilities. “Any signs of water?”
“Do you mean springs?” she asked in disbelief. “If there were springs, I’d be laying pipe instead of hauling water by truck.”
“Nothing as obvious as a spring. I’m looking for unusually big brush, grass that stays greener longer than in other places at the same elevation and exposure, that sort of thing.”
“Oh. Well, maybe in Stirrup Canyon. Dead Man’s Boot might be a possibility. Then there’s always Silver Rock Basin,” she added, gesturing toward the lower part of the ranch. “Jackass Leap, too. That’s up above the head of Wind Canyon.”
“Hold it.” Rio began unfolding more of his map.
The basic map was the result of a USGS survey. It showed each contour of the thirty sections of land that made up the Valley of the Sun. The paper was nearly four feet b
y four feet, more suited to a kitchen table than to a saddle. The map showed deep creases and frayed edges from being handled a lot.
Hope wondered how many times Rio had studied the map. And why. Surely the time since she had hired him hadn’t been enough to make that much wear on a map. Yet what she could see of the map covered her ranch and little else.
“Silver Rock Basin is no problem,” Rio said, “but where is Dead Man’s Boot?”
She laughed. “That’s a family name, not an official one. So are the other ones.”
Smiling, he refolded the map. “Where do you think most of the names on maps came from? Place names are one of the richest oral traditions in the West.” He handed her the pencil and the map. “Mark them in.”
She took the pencil, unfolded a panel of the awkward map, and was promptly lost.
The amount of detail already on the paper was both staggering and absolutely unlike any map she had ever used. In addition to contour lines showing the changing elevations of the land, there were many other lines whose purpose was a mystery to her. Most of those lines had been drawn in after the fact. Indecipherable symbols—both printed and handwritten—appeared in odd places on the map. Even more enigmatic notes appeared in the margin. Formulas, Greek letters, cryptic comments; all had been added by hand.
Hope had only to glance at the map to know that Rio already had put in a lot of time studying her land, much more than he could have in the less than two weeks since she had hired him. She looked up, puzzled.
“Lost?” he asked, expecting it.
“Yes, but it’s not just the map.”
“What else, then?”
“You,” she said quietly.
He stared at her.
“Nothing adds up,” she said. “You’re a drifting horsebreaker who knows more about this land than the highly educated, highly recommended hydrologist who was out here six weeks ago. You’ve worked for me for less than two weeks, but this map is worn thin in the creases and has enough notes on it for some kind of textbook.”
She wanted to go on, to say, You have only one name, and it’s neither Scandinavian nor Zuni nor Scots. Nobody knows where you came from or where you’re going, but Mason trusts you more than he trusts anybody except me. You have a reputation as a bad man to cross, but you’ve been so gentle with me that it’s all I can do not to crawl into your arms and never let go.