“She also looked at the lichen with me. Briefly. She didn’t know what it was, obviously, but she didn’t not look, which Ithought was—” She stopped, then started again. “The point is it was a professional interaction, and there’s been nothing since.”
Which was true. There had been nothing since. Four days of survey work, two clarification emails to Alburn’s legal office about permit boundary markers, one follow-up on the northern sector access protocol—all answered, efficiently, by people who were not Sawyer Alburn. Nellie had expected this. The CEO had a company to run. She was not going to materialize personally at every request for documentation.
Nellie had nonetheless found herself glancing up at the access track rather more often than it had warranted.
“Uh-huh,” Paloma said.
“I’m not doing whatever you think I’m doing.”
“You asked her to look at the lichen with you, didn’t you?”
“She was right there. What was she going to do, stare at the sky?”
“I’m just noting,” Paloma said serenely, “that when I asked whether you’d seen her, your first response was to tell me about an alder root system.”
“Because the alder root system is the most important thing I’ve found this week!”
“Is it?”
Nellie opened her mouth then closed it.
“I’ll call you tonight,” she said.
“You always say that and then you call me at eleven from the porch.”
“I do my best thinking on the porch.”
“Bye, Nellie.” Paloma chuckled. Nellie could picture the smirk from twenty miles away.
The stream curved west near the top of the survey zone, where the gradient steepened and the bank narrowed, and it was here—standing at the point where the water came fast and coldthrough a gap in the rock—that Nellie found the margin she’d been circling toward all week without knowing it.
On the left bank, a dense, undisturbed stand of native riparian vegetation, the kind of assemblage that the initial survey had dismissed in a single line. Sedges, yes. Skunk cabbage—which she’d mentally noted on day three—rooted deep in the seep zone. And below the skunk cabbage, half-hidden under the overhang of the bank: a small colony of something she almost walked past.
That would have been a grave error.
She crouched so fast her knees hit the mud simultaneously with a painful thud, but she didn’t care in the slightest because she was looking atBotrychium multifidum—leathery grape fern—tucked into the seep zone beneath the bank overhang. Four distinct rosettes that had absolutely no business being at this elevation and were there nonetheless.
She took twelve photographs. She wrote seven lines of notes and then crossed two of them out and wrote better ones. Then she sat back on her heels and breathed.
Botrychium multifidumwas not, on its own, a slam dunk. It was uncommon. It preferred stable, ancient soils. It was sensitive to disturbance in ways that made it a reliable indicator species for an undisturbed riparian corridor, but to anchor a statutory protection argument on it alone would require either a very sympathetic county board or considerably more evidence than four rosettes and Nellie’s word.
What it was, though, was a beginning.
Nellie had been doing this long enough to understand what beginnings felt like. They felt like something tilting very slightly toward you—not certainty, not yet, but permission to keep going. She pressed her hand flat against the bank beside the colony, felt the cold seep through her palm, and thought,I see you.
She sent a formal survey data update to Alburn’s legal office at two in the afternoon, as required by the access agreement. She included her coordinates for the day, her species list, and, because the terms required disclosure of any findings of potential ecological significance, a single line noting the presence ofBotrychium multifidumin the eastern riparian zone. She kept the entry precise and dry and revealed nothing of the fact that she’d had to sit very still for ten minutes after finding it before she could write accurate field notes.
At seven-thirty that evening, she called Paloma again from the porch, long before eleven and therefore a personal record.
“You’re calling way earlier than usual, which means you found something,” Paloma answered without bothering withhello. “Or did you run into a certain couture-clad CEO?”
“I foundBotrychium multifidumin the eastern riparian seep zone.”
Paloma sighed deeply. “I don’t know what that is.”
“Leathery grapefern. It’s not listed at the federal level, but it qualifies under the state’s Priority Habitats list if I can document associated species meeting the co-occurrence threshold.”
“Which means?”
