Epilogue
Dale took them north through Nevada and into Oregon, across high desert that gradually gave way to the Blue Mountains.
Ponderosa pines closed over the pavement, the temperature dropping degree by degree until Yuji stopped sweating for the first time since Death Valley.
Green undergrowth thickened beneath the trees, and the passes felt cool and loud after all those months in the desert.
Bracken fern carpeted the damper roadside cuts, its fronds browned to rust and bowed under the wet.
Yuji watched them pass with his arm out the window, letting the sixty-degree air push between his fingers.
The Bronco’s engine labored on the grades, the familiar knock softening in the dense wet air.
Three days out of Death Valley. Three days of roadside motels and truck-stop coffee, Dale talking more than Yuji had heard him talk in the four months since the flood—about the green country they were heading into, about the Blue Mountain canyons he’d run as a teenager, about a pack trip when he was twelve that ended with him lost for six hours in a fir maze before his uncle found him sitting on a fallen log, not panicked, just waiting.
“Earl didn’t say anything,” Dale had told him that second night, the two of them eating burgers in a diner outside La Grande. “Threw me up behind him on the horse and rode us back to camp. Didn’t lecture, didn’t yell. Just handed me a bowl of stew and went back to tending the fire.”
Now the road bent west toward Pendleton and the timber thinned onto rolling wheat country.
Green winter wheat rippled under a wind carrying petrichor and turned earth.
Fence posts ran beside the highway in neat rows, wire strung tight between them.
A red-tailed hawk circled a fallow field, riding a thermal that made its shadow pulse and contract on the wet stubble below.
Dale stopped talking when they crossed into Umatilla County. His jaw was set, working through something.
“I called him three weeks ago.” Dale kept his eyes on the road. “Told him I was coming up. Told him I was bringing someone.”
“What did he say?”
“Asked if the someone was a woman.”
The Bronco’s tires hummed on a stretch of new asphalt. Yuji waited.
“I said no. He went quiet long enough I thought the call dropped.” Dale’s grip shifted on the wheel. “Then he asked what time we’d be getting in and whether you eat beef.”
A meadowlark burst from the roadside bitterbrush, its yellow breast catching the sun before it dropped back into cover. Yuji let the silence stretch.
“Earl and I don’t talk much. Never did.” Dale’s thumb found the seam in the steering wheel.
“My folks died when I was nine—car went off a bridge in the Christmas ice. Earl took me in because there wasn’t anyone else.
Taught me to work. But he wasn’t the talking type, and I learned not to be either. ”
“You’re talking now.”
“Yeah.” Dale glanced over. “You make it easy.”
The road climbed through a cut in the basalt, columns rising on both sides like organ pipes. Yuji rolled his window down farther. The air tasted of wet fir and woodsmoke.
“Haven’t been home in four years,” Dale said. “Aunt Carol’s funeral. Stood in the back of the church, shook hands at the reception, drove back to Death Valley the same night. Earl and I didn’t exchange more than twenty words.”
“What changed?”
“I nearly died in a cave with a hydrologist I couldn’t stop thinking about.” Dale squeezed Yuji’s thigh. “Clarifies things.”
The ranch road came up on the right—a gravel track between two leaning gateposts, the crossbeam weathered silver-gray and bare of any sign.
Dale slowed, turned; the Bronco’s suspension found every rut in the road as they climbed toward the ridge.
Wheat fields gave way to Douglas fir, the trees dense and dripping from a recent rain, their bark dark with moisture.
The smell of wet needles and loam rose off the forest floor.
A quarter mile up, the road bent and the ranch spread out below them. White clapboard house, green metal roof. A barn weathered to the same gray as the gateposts, corrals extending from its south side. Pickups in the dirt yard—Dale’s uncle’s operation, small but working.
Dale stopped at the top of the rise and killed the engine. The Bronco ticked in the silence.
“That’s it.”
Yuji looked at the house, the barn, the ridge rising behind them. “It’s beautiful.”
“It’s wet half the year and brutal in winter.
Nearest town’s twenty miles. I couldn’t wait to get out.
” Dale stared through the windshield, hands still on the wheel.
“But I dream about it sometimes. The way fog sits in the valley at dawn. The sound the creek makes in spring when the snowmelt comes down.”
A dog appeared on the porch—big brown mutt, cattle dog mix by the look of it. It lifted its head, ears pricked toward the Bronco.
“That’s not Earl’s old dog.” Dale leaned forward. “Murphy died two years ago.” He opened his door. “This must be the new one.”
The dog came off the porch at a trot, tail swinging. It reached Dale before he’d taken three steps from the Bronco, circling his legs with a low whine, pressing its head against his knee. Dale dropped to one knee and let the dog push its face into his palm.
“Hey there.” He scratched behind its ears. “Hey. Yeah. Good dog.”
Yuji came around the front of the Bronco. The dog turned to him—a long sniff at his boots, his cargo pants, his hands. Its tail kept swinging.
“He likes you.” Dale stood. “Dogs know.”
The screen door swung open. Earl came down the porch steps—tall and lean, white hair cut close to his skull under a pushed-back hat, the same hard cheekbones as Dale. Pearl-snap shirt tucked into worn Wranglers, boots caked with mud.
“Dale.” Earl stopped three feet away. Rain had darkened his hat brim. “Filled out some.”
“Been a while.”
“Has been.” Earl’s eyes moved to Yuji. “You must be the scientist.”
“Yuji Takeda.” He held out his hand. “Thank you for having me.”
Earl’s grip was dry and hard, palm rough from sixty years of rope and leather. “Dale said you study water.”
“Desert springs. How they’re responding to climate change.”
“We’ve seen it here. Creek’s been running lower every summer. Springs up on the ridge that used to flow year-round are dry by August now.” Earl released his hand. “You got any answers?”
“Working on it.”
“Fair enough.”
The dog had settled at Dale’s feet, chin on his boots. Dale reached down and scratched its head.
“What’s his name?”
“Scout.” Earl started toward the porch. “Come on in. Got steaks thawing.”
Hardwood floors worn pale along the traffic paths. A woodstove stacked with kindling for the winter. On the mantel, a faded snapshot of a boy Yuji recognized as Dale standing beside a creek with a fishing rod.
“Bathroom’s down the hall if you need to wash up.” Earl was already in the kitchen, pulling plates from the cupboard. “Spare room’s the last door on the left. Made up the bed this morning.”
The spare room. One room. Yuji caught Dale’s eye. Dale nodded once.
The room was small, a double bed taking up most of the floor. A window looked out on the grove, the trunk of the nearest tree close enough to touch if you leaned out. The bed was made tight—military corners, thin wool blanket folded at the foot. A glass of water sat on the nightstand.
“This was my room.” Dale stood in the doorway. “When I was a kid.”
Yuji set his pack on the floor. No posters, no evidence of a childhood.
“Earl cleared it out after I left for good. Said there was no point keeping a museum to someone who wasn’t coming back.
” Dale crossed to the window. “I used to climb that tree at night. Sit in the fork where the main trunk splits and watch the stars. Earl never said anything about it. I don’t think he minded. ”
Yuji came up behind him and put a hand on the small of Dale’s back. Dale’s shoulders dropped.
“I want to show you something.” Dale turned. “After dinner. Before it gets dark.”
“Where?”
“Up the ridge. There’s a place.” Dale’s eyes held his. “Somewhere I used to go when I needed to be alone. Never showed anyone.”
They ate on the porch as the sun dropped—steaks charred on the outside and pink in the middle, baked potatoes swimming in butter, green beans Earl had put up in August. Scout lay at Earl’s feet, eyes half-closed, occasionally lifting his head when the conversation paused.
Earl asked about Yuji’s work—the methodology, the equipment, the political complications of federal science.
He asked whether Yuji had ever ridden a horse and seemed satisfied when Yuji admitted he hadn’t.
He asked where Yuji’s people were from and listened without comment when Yuji said Cupertino by way of Hiroshima, three generations back.
Dale watched his uncle more than he talked. The tension left his shoulders as the meal went on.
“You boys want anything else?” Earl stood and gathered the plates. “Got pie in the icebox. From Safeway in Pendleton, but it’s not bad.”
“Maybe later.” Dale pushed back from the table. “I want to show Yuji the ridge before we lose the light.”
Earl nodded. “Trail’s overgrown past the spring. Watch for the ravine where it used to wash out.”
“I remember.”
They walked up through the timber, Scout trotting ahead with his nose to the ground. The trail was just visible under a season’s growth of fern—a thread of packed earth winding up the slope. Golden light came slanted through the canopy, throwing long shadows as they climbed.
Dale’s hand found Yuji’s hip, guiding him over a root, steadying him on wet stone.
“I used to come up here when the quiet got too heavy.” Dale’s voice dropped. “Earl was never mean. Just not much for talking. I’d slip out after dinner and climb until I couldn’t see the house anymore.”
The trail crested a false summit and dropped into a saddle thick with wild rose and ocean spray. Yuji’s boots crushed the damp leaves and the smell of wet earth rose sharp, cutting through the fir resin that had followed them from below.
“Almost there.” Dale took his hand.
The spot was a shelf of basalt jutting from the ridge, big enough for two people to sit side by side.
Below, the ranch spread in a patchwork of green pasture and dark timber, the white house pale and distinct in the dying light.
To the east, the Blue Mountains rolled toward peaks already under snow.
The wheat fields caught the last sun and threw it back like scattered coins.
Dale sat on the rock and pulled Yuji down beside him. Scout flopped at their feet with a contented grunt.
“I never brought anyone here.” Dale’s hand tightened on Yuji’s. “Not Ray. Not anyone. This was the one thing I kept.”
Yuji looked out at the land, at the gold running through the valley, at the sky deepening above the eastern peaks.
“Why now?”
“Because I’m done keeping things to myself.” Dale turned to face him. “You know why.”
“Yeah.” Yuji leaned into his shoulder. “I do.”
Dale put his arm around him. They watched the color drain from the sky over the ranch.
A light came on in the house—a yellow square in the gathering dark. The horses shifted in the corral, their shapes going indistinct. Somewhere in the firs, a quail called its covey together.
Dale’s fingers threaded into the hair at Yuji’s nape, settling there. Yuji closed his eyes—the rain-washed air, the trees, the man beside him.
“Dale.”
“Yeah.”
“I’m glad you showed me.”
Dale kissed him on the cooling rock while the first stars came out. Scout sighed at their feet.
When they walked back down through the timber, Scout trotted ahead. Earl had pie waiting on the porch—three plates, a pot of coffee. They sat and ate while an owl called from somewhere in the firs.
“You staying through the week?” Earl asked.
Dale looked at Yuji. “If that’s all right.”
Earl poured more coffee. “I’ll put you to work.”