The forest did not respond. It was six days into the survey, and she had established that this forest was somewhat reserved until you got to know it.
Her phone buzzed in her breast pocket. Paloma.
“Catch me up,” she chirped, before Nellie had even finished saying hello. It was a morning ritual they’d fallen into by day three: the eight a.m. call, Paloma commuting to her office job in the center of Phoenix Ridge and Nellie already somewhere in the survey grid, the audio quality of which Paloma had described as “a nature documentary crossed with a laundry room.”
“Nine confirmed indicator species. Possibly ten. I’ve just foundLobariaon a boulder in the eastern zone that the survey report says categorically isn’t there.”
“That’s good?”
“That’s very good. It’s an old-growth obligate. It needs decades of stable, humid, and undisturbed forest to colonize. It cannot be planted or faked. It is, for our purposes, a witness.”
“I love a witness.” A bus announcement sounded faintly in the background. “What else?”
“The mycorrhizal density around Eleanor is connecting to a network that extends further east than I expected. I’ve been mapping thread-points in the duff and they’re consistent all the way to the drainage.” Nellie started walking, notebook tucked under her arm, following the slope down through stands of sword fern. “There’s also something going on with the riparian zone that I can’t fully explain yet.”
“Explain it un-fully.”
“The watercourse on the county maps has this stream at”—she checked her notes— “approximately forty years old. Seasonal, probably glacier-fed, first documented in a 1987 land survey. But the riparian zone around it is behaving like it’s been there much longer. The soil structure, the species composition on the banks, the root architecture of the red alders—all of it is reading as a hundred-plus years, maybe significantly more.” She paused at the top of a small ridge and looked down toward the glint of water through the salal. “Which means either the county maps are wrong or the stream itself went somewhere else for a while and came back. Either way, it matters.”
“Right… uh, how much does it matter?”
“In terms of building a case? Significantly. Riparian corridors that predate mapped data suggest ecological continuity that’s really hard to argue against in a statutory protection framework.” She started down the ridge. “It would matter even more if I find what I’m looking for on the eastern slope this week.”
“And what are you looking for?”
“I’ll know it when I see it,” Nellie said with complete conviction. The eastern slope had been bothering her since day one in a way she trusted more than data—a persistent, low-grade itch at the back of her scientific mind that saidthere is more here. “How’s life?”
“Don’t ‘how’s life’ me. You’re deflecting.” Paloma’s bus honked loudly. “Have you seen her again?”
“Who?”
“Nellie.”
“What? I asked a simple?—”
“Sawyer Alburn. Have you seen her?”
The salal parted at Nellie’s knees and she emerged onto the stream bank then stopped. The water moved over the gravel bed in a long, steady sheet, clear enough that she could count theindividual stones two feet down. On the near bank, a red alder had grown horizontally over the water, its exposed root system draped across the bank in a skirt of deep moss. She crouched down and pressed two fingers into the root matrix. Her fingers disappeared to the second knuckle.
“Pal,” she said, slowly. “The alder roots on this stream bank must be three feet deep.”
“That is incredible if you know what that means, and I’m going to need you to stay on topic.”
“It means the bank has been building for a very long time. It means—hold on.” Nellie photographed the root system, the bank profile, and the water clarity. Her fingers were still buried to the knuckle in soil that felt like the accumulated memory of a century of flooding and recovery and flooding again. She wrote four lines of rapid notes. “It means the hydrology here is ancient.”
“Wonderful. Back to Sawyer Alburn. Have you seen her?”
Nellie stood and brushed her hands on her field pants, which were, at this juncture, a lost cause anyway. “Once. Earlier in the week. She came to check on the drainage issue on the southern track.”
“The drainage issue that you said was extremely minor?”
“It was minor. It was genuinely a real drainage issue, though, so, yes.”
“She drove forty-five minutes each way to look at a puddle.”
“It wasn’t a puddle. It was—” Nellie began walking upstream, trying to sound casual. “Erosion. There was real erosion. I looked at it myself afterward, and it was a legitimate?—”
“Nellie.”
