Beautiful Dreamer with Bonus Material (13 page)

He closed his eyes for a moment, seeing it happen, vast lakes becoming a desert. “All that immensity of water. Gone.”

Hope saw, too, and mourned.

When Rio’s eyes opened, he looked out on today’s land, a dry land layered with fossil life forms from long-dead lakes.

“Today almost no water flows out of the Basin and Range country to any sea,” he said simply. “Think of it, Hope. Thousands upon thousands of square miles of land drained by rivers that run into the desert and vanish. Mountain runoff goes down to the playas, the sinks, the basins between the ranges. And there the water stays. There are no networks of ponds and lakes, no rills and creeks and rivers running down to a waiting sea. There is only a blazing sun and an empty sky. And the wind, always the wind, blowing over the changing face of the land, touching all of its secrets.”

Hope heard both Rio’s words and the hissing whisper of a dry wind blowing over the Valley of the Sun. She had a thousand questions to ask him, a lifetime of questions aching for answers. Yet she didn’t speak because she wanted him to keep talking, wanted to see the world as he saw it, an endless process of change and renewal, seas and mountains rising and falling, continents shifting.

And through it all there were rivers and clouds pregnant with rain, the recurring miracle of water.

As though Rio sensed her silent plea, he began talking again. “In the rare cases where there’s still enough runoff to keep a low spot covered with water year-round, the lakes evaporate at a fantastic rate, up to one hundred fifty inches a year.”

Hope winced. “God. It barely rains a tenth of that most years.”

“That’s how fresh becomes salt, over time. All water, even so-called fresh water, contains tiny amounts of dissolved salts. When the water evaporates, what goes into the air is truly fresh, no salts allowed. The salts stay behind. Each year the fresh water goes and the salts remain.”

Her saddle creaked as she moved slightly, as though she would hold back the flight of water from the dry land.

“Without enough new, fresh water, evaporation slowly turns a freshwater lake into a saltwater lake, useless to animals or plants,” Rio said simply. “The Great Salt Lake is what’s left of one of the huge Pleistocene lakes. Mono Lake is the remainder of another. Salt and little water.” He shrugged. “That’s how it went from the Sierra Nevada to western Utah and even beyond. All that land. All that water stolen by the sun and the thirsty sky.”

Hope waited, watching him with an intensity that made her eyes almost dark. “Then the hydrologist was right? There’s no hope for my ranch?”

Rio shifted in the saddle, wanting to promise and knowing he couldn’t. All he could do was offer a fighting chance.

And that was all she had asked for. A fighting chance.

“Not all of the water evaporates,” he said. “Some of it slides down into the land itself. It gathers between fist-sized rocks and pebbles no bigger than my thumb. It hides between grains of sand and oozes between particles of silt so fine you have to use a microscope to see them. It sinks down into some of the rock layers of the mountains themselves, limestone and sandstone and shale.”

Suddenly Rio turned and pinned Hope with a vivid, midnight-blue glance. “And the water stays there. There’s water all through this country. Some of it is old water, fossil water, rains that fell when men hunted mammoths by the shores of ancient lakes.”

Wind like a long exhalation from the past moved over Hope’s skin, stirring her in a primal response. She looked at her ranch with new eyes, seeing beyond the drought of today to the water of a million yesterdays. When she turned back to Rio, her eyes were radiant with the vision he had shared.

He saw the beauty of her eyes, green and gold and brown, a mixture of colors that changed with each shift of light. He saw his own vision of time and the country reflected in her eyes and in the primal shiver of awareness that rippled through her.

And then he knew that she had understood his words as few people would have, or could. She had
listened
with her soul as well as her mind. She had seen time and the great land as he saw them, sharing his vision in an intimacy that he had never known with anyone.

At that moment he wanted nothing more than to lift Hope from the saddle and let her flow over his skin and he over hers like a rain-sweetened wind, touching all the secret places, bringing a passionate storm, sharing his flesh with her as deeply as he had shared his mind.

Silently cursing his unruly body, Rio reined Storm Walker around the landslide. After a moment he heard the long-legged gray mare follow. A shod hoof made a distinctive sound as steel rang on a stone buried just beneath the surface of the landslide.

When Aces moved alongside the stallion, Rio didn’t look at Hope. He couldn’t. He was afraid that she would read the hunger in his eyes, afraid that her eyes would be hungry, too. Then he would reach for her, lift her into his arms, know her as deeply as he knew the land.

And in time the wind would blow and he would leave her as surely as water had left the land.

Rio rode on, wondering if the Great Basin’s long-vanished rains hated themselves for leaving a hungry, hurting land behind.

Thirteen

H
OPE AND
R
IO
rode in silence until he could look at the bleak mountains without seeing a far more gentle flesh, could focus his thoughts on the slabs of differing rock strata broken and canted up to the sky instead of on the hunger that clawed through both his body and his mind.

He could deal with the passionate needs of his body. But the passionate hunger of his mind for Hope was new to him, as deeply disturbing to him as the upwelling of molten basalt was to the thick crust of the earth. He knew that their shared silence, like the shared vision before it, held an intimacy that he could neither describe nor deny.

Rio didn’t speak until he was in control of himself again. It took a long time. Much too long.

“Most of the boundaries marked on my map of the ranch go something like ‘one hundred and twenty paces on a Montana horse’ or ‘twelve degrees northwest of Black Rock Wash,’ ” Rio said. His voice was practical, empty of visions, offering no more than the dictionary meaning of his words.

“Homesteaders’ measurements,” Hope said. “Dad called them horseback estimates.”

“They’re not a hell of a lot of use when you’re trying to figure out how to avoid drilling a well on someone else’s land. When was the most recent survey of your ranch done?”

“Oh, about 1865, shortly after Nevada became a state. That was when one of Mom’s great-greats decided to file on land that we’d been squatting on for twenty years,” Hope added with a small curve of a smile.

Rio sighed and tugged his hat into place. “That explains it,” he drawled. “Some rawhide ancestor of yours took a notion and filed on about thirty square miles of sagebrush and foothills. Damn shame he didn’t take a cut of the high-country watershed while he was at it.”

“Oh, he tried, but we could only show improvements in the foothills—spreader dams we’d built to slow the flow of the runoff streams, water holes deepened and cleaned out, wells dug, that sort of thing. Because we didn’t need anything like that for stock in the high country, where there is water year-round, we didn’t make any improvements.”

“So the government kept the high country and you kept as much of the foothills as you could,” Rio summarized. It was an old, familiar story around the Basin and Range.

“Plus all the government land we could sneak cows onto,” she added wryly. “We’ve never been real big on fences here in Nevada.”

He smiled. That, too, was an old, familiar story. “How deep were the wells in those days?”

“It’s hard to say. You know how it is. The ‘good old days’ were always better. The truth is they had droughts then, too.” She hesitated, fighting to keep her voice neutral. “It’s also true that the water table is dropping gradually, and has been for years. Some of the drop comes from too much pumping for local irrigation. Some of it comes from pumping water out and selling it to cities like Las Vegas. And some of it,” she said bleakly, “comes from the simple fact that less rain is falling. This is a dry land and it seems to be getting drier every year.”

Rio heard the hollowness in Hope’s voice that she couldn’t hide. He didn’t ask any more questions.

Side by side they rode in silence until the dirt track dwindled to a trail winding up toward a ridgeline covered with piñon and juniper. Higher up, far beyond the point where foothills blended into the mountains themselves, stands of aspens touched by frost blazed like golden embers burning against a green and gray backdrop of pine and sage.

Saddles creaked and the horses began to breathe deeply as they leaned into the steep climb that led to Piñon Camp. Finally the trail took them to a gently sloping piece of land where piñon and pine grew thickly. A sun-cured meadow made a tawny contrast with the black rocks of the mountainside and the dense green of the piñon.

To one side of the trail there was a fire-blackened ring of stones, a rack for hanging game, and faint old footpaths leading from the camp to the meadow. Overhead a hawk soared in transparent circles, watching for movement below. Ravens and scrub jays called from nearby perches, warning other animals of the intruders that had appeared from the dry lands below.

Rio took in everything with the quick, comprehensive glance of a man who has spent most of his life in wild country. Then he looked again, seeing beyond the superficial clothing of plants and animals to the geological history beneath.

The meadow and the camp were part of a bench, a small block of land that a minor fault zone had caused to break away from the larger mountain block. The mountain had continued to rise on the far side of the local fault, while on this side the bench had continued to rise, too, but more slowly. The result was a sloping land surface that was higher than the surrounding foothills but lower than the mountain it had sheared away from.

Rio reined Storm Walker across the open land. Ahead of him the mountain rose suddenly, its side bare of all but the most determined sagebrush. The various steeply tilted layers of rock that made up part of the mountain showed in the changing colors and textures of the cliff, looking like thick stone ribbons that had been pushed and pulled by unimaginable forces.

Though worn by time and weather, twisted and broken by the movements of the earth, the stone layers had a story to tell to anyone who could read them. Some ribbons of stone were relatively young sedimentary rocks. But the majority of the stone layers were old, dense, so darkened and changed by time and the movements of the earth that they were all but impervious to the elements now. Storm, wind, water, sun, nothing changed them. They were the spent, blackened bones of a younger time, a different world.

Somewhere, tilted at a steep angle and buried from sight, Rio believed there would be at least one thick layer of limestone, legacy of the great sea that had covered the land long, long before man arrived forty million years ago, when the Basin and Range country lay beneath a wealth of water that could hardly be imagined now. Since then, continental plates had oozed over the earth’s surface, their passage lubricated by molten rock. The movement of the plates changed everything, making mountains rise and dragging other lands down beneath the surface of the earth until it became so hot that rock melted and ran like water.

“What are you looking for?” Hope asked.

“Potential aquifers.” Rio’s eyes were intent on the mountainside as he visually traced various twists and turns of stone. “An aquifer is a layer of rock that can absorb water.”

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.