32. Nash
NASH
The birds come back in the second week of July. By summer, the valley has started learning how to be ordinary again.
I'm on the shore with a coffee when she comes in at seven, and she doesn't tie up properly, just throws the painter at the cleat and vaults out with her notebook held over her head like a trophy.
"Eleven," she says. "Eleven on the west shoal, and there were six last Thursday, and that's not birds moving around — the shoal's holding them, which means there's something on it to eat. Nash, the whitefish are back on the spawning ground."
"You're sure?"
"I've got egg counts. I've got fry." She smacks the notebook against my chest. "Six weeks ago that shoal was a desert. I'd have told anybody who asked that recovery on a system like this takes fifteen years and I'd have been able to cite four papers at them."
"And now?"
"And now I've got to write a paper explaining why a lake got better in eight weeks, and I can't put the actual reason in it, and I'll be extremely annoyed about that until the end of my professional life."
She's happier than I've ever seen her. The rest comes back through the summer, one thing at a time.
The herons come to the drowned timber in late July, nine nests where there were none in April.
The otters are on the outlet side by August and Wyatt has photographs of a pair with three pups.
There's a bear on the east ridge that I haven't seen the like of in three years, and the water farther than the drop-off has gone from that flat dead gray back to the green-black it's supposed to be.
The families move back into the bay in stages. Their numbers had fallen from fourteen to nine before we got underground. There are eleven now, with the two we brought up from site two, and in August there's a birth, and Erin is invited to it and comes home at dawn unable to speak.
Grace says the pack's healing runs quicker again. Nobody has a way to measure that except my mother's forty years of judgment, and I'll take my mother's judgment over an instrument.
The coalition meets for the first time in September, at Marrow Creek, and it goes better than it has any right to.
Bracken's grandmother has been made their Alpha outright, which anybody could have predicted after the first week in our valley.
Loon River comes with four people instead of one.
Two of the drowned-timber elders are carried in on stretchers and put in a stock tank, and nobody thinks it's strange, which is the whole point.
Erin presents for forty minutes on the state of the source. She's been running a field-strength proxy off water chemistry all summer — her own method, built from nothing, because Helix's instruments went into the flood with everything else.
"Recovery's real but it isn't complete," she tells them. "The gradient's back to roughly ninety-one percent of what I can reconstruct for the pre-drilling baseline, and it's still climbing. I'd guess three to five years to full."
"Guess," Loon River repeats.
"Guess. I've been measuring this thing for four months and it's four hundred miles across and nobody in the history of the world has ever had a baseline for it.
" She grins at him. "You're going to have to learn to live with a scientist who says I don't know, because the last people who measured it never did and look what they built. "
Afterward, Loon River finds me by the fire.
"That's the second time I've watched her tell a room full of Alphas she doesn't know something," he says. "In my community that would end a person."
"In your community somebody should try it."
He laughs. "We're doing the second meeting at Bracken in the spring. You're still chair. Don't sulk about it."
We hold the gathering toward the end of September, on the point, when the maples have gone.
Every community sends people. By the time the sun's down, there's an overflow of people, plus every Stillwater family, plus a stock tank hauled to the water's edge on a trailer by four of the Kettering boys with a great deal of shouting.
My father has been cooking for two days.
Hazel has her tenth notebook and won't be moved from the good chair.
Caleb walks. He's slow and he's got a cane he pretends is decorative, and Isla is around thirty weeks and glowing about it, and the pair of them have spent the entire month being unbearable.
Bo, who is fifteen now and insufferable as predicted, has a table set up with Erin's summer data pinned to boards. He explains egg counts to anybody who slows down within reach. Erin stands behind him with her arms folded and lets him do all the talking, and I watch her not correct a single thing.
At full dark, Hazel gets up and taps her cane twice on the boards, and two hundred and sixty people go quiet.
She reads the pack history for the year. It's the oldest thing we do. This year it takes eleven minutes and there are names in it that never had a hope of being in a Stillwater record, and the last entry is Erin's.
Then Hazel closes the notebook and says, "Well. Get on with it."
Erin comes and stands facing me, and I take both her hands, and I say the words my father said and his father before him.
"I'd have you as my mate. Not because it was decided for us. Because I've chosen you every day since April, and I'll keep doing it."
"That's the traditional version?"
"That's the traditional version with an addition, and Hazel's already told me off about it."
"I liked the addition," Hazel says loudly.
Erin's crying, and she's not remotely embarrassed about it, which is new for her and has taken five months.
"Then here's mine, and I've written it down and then thrown it away four times.
" She takes a breath. "I came here in April to fix my reputation.
I thought that was the whole problem with my life.
I was wrong about the problem, I was wrong about the lake, and I've been wrong about almost everything I thought I was certain of.
This is the one thing I'm not wrong about.
" Her hands tighten on mine. "I accept the bond.
Freely, with the whole story, in front of everyone here.
Not because fate picked us out. Because I looked at every option I had and I want this one. "
I kiss her, and two hundred and sixty people make a noise you can probably hear across the lake, and Wyatt starts a chant that Isla shuts down inside four seconds.
Much later, when the fire's low and most of it has gone to bed, we walk down to the water on our own.
The lake is moving the way it should. Out past the drop-off there's fish rising somewhere, and a loon calls, and gets an answer this time.
"I've been thinking about the next fifty years," Erin says.
"That's very like you."
"There's a five-year renewal on my post and I've got fifteen years of data to build before it means anything.
Then there's the coalition, and Bo's going to want a real degree eventually, and somebody has to teach the kids that time is part of the number.
" She leans into me. "And that house has forty years of wiring in it and I've made a schedule. "
"Of course you have."
"I'm serious about one part, though." She turns to look up at me.
"What we've got isn't a happy ending. It's a job.
There's a well under four hundred miles of country and somebody worked out it was there, which means somebody else can.
Fifty years from now there'll be another Roy Harlow with better instruments. "
"There will."
"Good." Her chin comes up. "Then let's be the ones who saw him coming."
I put my arm around her and we stand there at the edge of Stillwater Lake, two people with a monitoring program and a pack and a bad roof, watching the water hold everything it holds.