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Long Odds, Episode 4: Foundation Seed · Long Odds

0:13
SPEAKER_00: Long Odds.
0:14
SPEAKER_00: Episode 4.
0:16
SPEAKER_00: Foundation Seed.
0:19
SPEAKER_00: On the first morning of the first quarantine in the history of the survey that anybody had ever served on the way out, Owen Tate woke up with Luis Ortega's sock about four inches from his face.
0:31
SPEAKER_00: The trailer behind the steel shed on the hill above the Humboldt River had three bunks, a sink, a propane heater, and a speaker phone.
0:41
SPEAKER_00: And it had been built for a team of three.
0:44
SPEAKER_00: Team one was four.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Inez Carvalho had taken the top bunk because she was in charge.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: Hanna Whitlock had taken the other lower bunk because she had gotten there first, and Luis had blown up an air mattress on the floor and declared it the best bed in Nevada.
1:03
SPEAKER_00: Sometime in the night, the mattress had lost about half its conviction, and Luis had slid down it like a man on a water slide.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: And now his left foot was resting on the edge of Owen's pillow in a grey wool sock.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Luis Owen said.
1:28
SPEAKER_09: I'm a biologist.
1:30
SPEAKER_09: Then it's simple biology.
1:31
SPEAKER_00: The window over the sink was white with frost on the inside.
1:35
SPEAKER_00: It had dropped to twenty three degrees in the night, the first hard freeze of the fall, and the heater had ticked and muttered until dawn like an old man doing arithmetic.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: Outside the sun was coming up clean and gold, and the sky over the valley was already crossed by two white contrails heading for Salt Lake.
1:57
SPEAKER_00: Owen lay on his back and looked at the bottom of the bunk above him.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: He had not slept much since Monday morning.
2:04
SPEAKER_00: Clara Benning had told him in her office at the annex, with the door shut, before the four of them caught the plane west.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: Femi's departure swab our ordinary flu, a railroad engineer about seventy years old and a young fireman, two hours in a cab smaller than her office, in a world that had gone its own way a hundred years ago, and had never once met this particular germ.
2:31
SPEAKER_00: She did not know whether anybody over there had gotten sick.
2:35
SPEAKER_00: She said she would probably never know.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: Owen had listened to all of it with his hands between his knees, and when she was done he had said Oh which was not one of his better contributions to science.
2:48
SPEAKER_00: For six years he had been saying the same thing to anybody who would listen.
2:54
SPEAKER_00: One of these days, we're going to bring home something nobody can cure.
2:58
SPEAKER_00: Bring home something out there, getting in here.
3:03
SPEAKER_00: It had never once occurred to him to turn the picture around, and that bothered him almost more than the thing itself.
3:11
SPEAKER_00: He was supposed to be the careful one.
3:14
SPEAKER_00: Now he had a name to go with it.
3:16
SPEAKER_00: Joe Echeveri.
3:18
SPEAKER_00: Owen had never met him.
3:20
SPEAKER_00: He had been thinking about him for a day and a night.
3:24
SPEAKER_00: The way you think about a neighbor whose lights haven't come on.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: Cleveland came back last night.
3:30
SPEAKER_00: Louis said to the ceiling.
3:32
SPEAKER_00: He had a little transistor radio on his chest.
3:36
SPEAKER_00: Turn down low.
3:37
SPEAKER_09: Down two runs, and they come back and beat Tampa seven to three.
3:41
SPEAKER_09: They're going to win the whole thing, just despite me.
3:44
SPEAKER_09: My father's eighty one years old, Inez.
3:48
SPEAKER_09: A man that age should be protected from this kind of thing.
3:51
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, said Inez from the top bunk without opening her eyes.
3:56
SPEAKER_00: Don't be sorry.
3:57
SPEAKER_00: Be angry.
3:58
SPEAKER_00: Every six hours the speaker phone on the wall rang, and Clara asked for four temperatures, and four people read them off like children taking attendance.
4:08
SPEAKER_00: This morning's call was going to be different.
4:11
SPEAKER_00: The night before, Clara had warned them about it in the tone she usually saved for needles.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: Neil Ashby was coming out to the annex.
4:20
SPEAKER_00: He'd like to say hello.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: He had never met a team in quarantine before, and he thought it would be interesting.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: At nine o'clock the phone rang, and Inez reached down from the top bunk and pushed the button.
4:34
SPEAKER_00: Good morning, Nevada.
4:36
SPEAKER_00: Walt Sabieski's voice, dry and patient.
4:40
SPEAKER_01: I have Clara here and I have Neil.
4:42
SPEAKER_01: Neil, this is Team One.
4:44
SPEAKER_01: They've been in a trailer since yesterday, so be kind.
4:47
SPEAKER_00: Good morning, everybody.
4:48
SPEAKER_00: The voice that followed was warm and easy.
4:51
SPEAKER_00: The voice of a man who had spent his whole career making people feel he had come a long way to see them in particular.
4:59
SPEAKER_05: Neil Ashby, I won't keep you.
5:01
SPEAKER_05: I only wanted to say thank you.
5:03
SPEAKER_05: I'm told you're the first team in the history of this program to be quarantined on the way out.
5:08
SPEAKER_05: Somebody had a scare, and the program learned from it, and you four are the ones paying the price in.
5:14
SPEAKER_05: What is it, Walt?
5:15
SPEAKER_05: Three bunks?
5:16
SPEAKER_01: Three bunks, Walt said.
5:18
SPEAKER_01: And a sink.
5:20
SPEAKER_05: I want you to know it's noticed.
5:22
SPEAKER_05: Now, Dr.
5:22
SPEAKER_05: Benning tells me the cause of all this is that one of our people may have given a nice old railroad man a cold.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: Owen sat up so fast he hit his head on the bunk above him.
5:32
SPEAKER_07: It's not a cold, he he said.
5:34
SPEAKER_07: There was a small pause on the line.
5:36
SPEAKER_07: I'm sorry, Ashby said.
5:39
SPEAKER_07: Who's this?
5:40
SPEAKER_07: Owen Tate, I'm the biologist.
5:42
SPEAKER_06: Owen rubbed his head.
5:44
SPEAKER_06: I don't mean to correct you.
5:46
SPEAKER_06: I just mean the word matters.
5:48
SPEAKER_06: It's the flu.
5:50
SPEAKER_06: Over here, nearly everybody alive has met it, or had a shot for it, or had a mother who had it.
5:55
SPEAKER_06: Over there, nobody has.
5:57
SPEAKER_06: Not one person.
5:59
SPEAKER_06: It's not a cold in a world that's never had it.
6:01
SPEAKER_06: It's a stranger.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: Dr.
6:03
SPEAKER_00: Tate.
6:04
SPEAKER_00: Ashby said, and he did not sound offended.
6:08
SPEAKER_00: He sounded delighted.
6:09
SPEAKER_05: You're absolutely right, and I'll stop calling it a cold.
6:13
SPEAKER_05: You know, you're exactly the person I hope to talk to.
6:16
SPEAKER_05: May I ask you something?
6:18
SPEAKER_05: Purely hypothetical.
6:19
SPEAKER_00: Across the trailer, Hanna caught Owen's eye and shook her head very slightly.
6:24
SPEAKER_00: Owen didn't see it in time.
6:27
SPEAKER_00: Sure, he said.
6:29
SPEAKER_05: Say you had 300 people.
6:31
SPEAKER_05: Ordinary people, very few farmers among them.
6:34
SPEAKER_05: And say you had to put them somewhere with good ground and fair weather and leave them there for 20 years.
6:39
SPEAKER_05: No deliveries.
6:40
SPEAKER_05: No fuel.
6:41
SPEAKER_05: No help.
6:42
SPEAKER_05: Not once.
6:43
SPEAKER_05: What would you have them plant?
6:45
SPEAKER_05: Is this a hypothetical?
6:48
SPEAKER_05: Everything I say is hypothetical, Dr.
6:50
SPEAKER_05: Tate.
6:50
SPEAKER_05: It's the only way anything gets done in Washington.
6:53
SPEAKER_00: Owen should have said he didn't know.
6:56
SPEAKER_00: He knew that afterward.
6:58
SPEAKER_00: But somebody had asked him a real question about plants, and he had never in his life been able to leave one of those alone.
7:06
SPEAKER_00: Potatoes.
7:07
SPEAKER_00: He said.
7:08
SPEAKER_06: Beans, squash, corn if it's warm enough, all three in the same hill, the old way.
7:15
SPEAKER_06: Some kind of grain.
7:16
SPEAKER_06: And you'd still lose them the first bad year.
7:19
SPEAKER_06: A late frost, a blight, a dry summer.
7:22
SPEAKER_06: That's the thing nobody understands about farming.
7:25
SPEAKER_06: Nothing we eat comes back on its own.
7:28
SPEAKER_06: Every field of wheat in the world dies every year, and somebody has to plant it again in the spring.
7:33
SPEAKER_06: Miss one spring and you starve.
7:39
SPEAKER_05: Then I suppose Ashby said thoughtfully, you'd want something that comes back on its own.
7:50
SPEAKER_05: Thank you, Dr.
7:51
SPEAKER_05: Tate.
7:55
SPEAKER_00: He's always only asking said Clara's voice, from somewhere in the room.
8:05
SPEAKER_00: When the temperatures were red and the line was quiet, Hannah sat up in her blanket and put on a pleasant, easy, reasonable voice that was so exactly Neil Ashby that Luis laughed out loud.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: So Owen took it alone.
9:22
SPEAKER_00: The pause was long enough that he thought the line had dropped.
9:29
SPEAKER_11: I said not this year.
9:31
SPEAKER_00: Not this year, what?
9:33
SPEAKER_11: Not this year.
9:34
SPEAKER_11: I'm not going to tell him to shut it down.
9:37
SPEAKER_00: Her voice was even and tired.
9:39
SPEAKER_11: You should have seen him, Owen.
9:41
SPEAKER_11: Walt showed him the pill, our little pill, the one that takes away the matches.
9:46
SPEAKER_11: Neil held that bag up to the window and turned it in the light like a jeweler, and the first thing he asked was how many people knew about it, not what it does.
9:55
SPEAKER_11: How many people know she stopped.
10:41
SPEAKER_00: That night a little after ten, Luis's phone buzzed on the floor beside the air mattress.
10:46
SPEAKER_00: He looked at it, and his face changed, and he took it outside without his jacket.
10:52
SPEAKER_00: They could hear him through the thin wall, his voice low and warm, talking to the dark.
10:59
SPEAKER_00: I meant it.
11:01
SPEAKER_09: I know what it says, Mari.
11:03
SPEAKER_09: I wrote it.
11:05
SPEAKER_09: Someday.
11:07
SPEAKER_09: No, not on the phone.
11:09
SPEAKER_09: Because it's not a phone kind of thing.
11:12
SPEAKER_09: I love you too.
11:14
SPEAKER_00: He came back in shivering and lay down on his half-flat mattress and pulled the blanket up to his chin.
11:21
SPEAKER_07: Was that the postcard?
11:23
SPEAKER_00: Owen said after a while.
11:25
SPEAKER_09: It came today.
11:26
SPEAKER_09: She put it on the refrigerator.
11:29
SPEAKER_09: Under the magnet from Myrtle Beach with the pelican.
11:32
SPEAKER_09: A long pause.
11:33
SPEAKER_09: She read it to me.
11:35
SPEAKER_09: Out loud.
11:36
SPEAKER_09: My own words.
11:37
SPEAKER_09: You ever hear your own words read back to you by somebody who loves you, Bambi?
11:41
SPEAKER_09: It's the worst thing in the world.
11:53
SPEAKER_00: They crossed on Thursday at first light, after three nights in the trailer, and four clean swabs apiece.
12:01
SPEAKER_00: Femi's chart recorder was clipped to the posts on case one, a gray box the size of a toaster with a fresh roll of paper in it.
12:10
SPEAKER_00: Femi himself was in bed at home with a fever and a great deal of guilt, and he had sent the recorder west with a note taped to its lid in tidy capital letters.
12:22
SPEAKER_00: Same sight.
12:24
SPEAKER_00: Same dial.
12:25
SPEAKER_00: Different world.
12:27
SPEAKER_00: If it's thin again, it wasn't luck.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: F Luis set the dial to four.
12:34
SPEAKER_00: Inez turned the key.
12:36
SPEAKER_00: The hum came up into Owen's back teeth.
12:39
SPEAKER_00: The lamp went from amber to green, and the pen on the recorder began to twitch.
12:49
SPEAKER_00: Pressure.
12:50
SPEAKER_00: Cold.
12:52
SPEAKER_00: Gone.
12:54
SPEAKER_00: The first thing Owen heard in World 296 was cranes.
12:59
SPEAKER_00: He knew the sound before his ears had finished popping.
13:03
SPEAKER_00: A rolling, wooden, rattling call, like somebody running a stick along a picket fence at the bottom of a well, and not one of them, but thousands, coming up out of the valley in waves.
13:16
SPEAKER_00: So many voices that they blurred into one sound, rising and falling, the way the ocean sounds from a long way off.
13:26
SPEAKER_00: He opened his eyes.
13:27
SPEAKER_00: The hill was the same hill.
13:30
SPEAKER_00: The sky was the same October blue.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: But the valley below them was gold.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: There was no interstate.
13:38
SPEAKER_00: There was almost no sagebrush, only a fringe of it along the rocky tops of the hills.
13:44
SPEAKER_00: From the foot of their hill to the far mountains, the whole floor of the Humboldt Valley was a sea of pale standing stubble, gold and gray in the low sun, cut by straight gravel roads and the dark winding line of the river.
14:00
SPEAKER_00: And all over it, like smoke lying on the fields, were birds.
14:05
SPEAKER_00: Tall gray birds in their thousands, lifting off in long, ragged ribbons as the sun hit them, wheeling over the river with their necks stretched out and their long legs trailing.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: Calling, calling.
14:19
SPEAKER_00: Sandhill cranes are Owen said.
14:22
SPEAKER_06: He found that he was on his knees.
14:24
SPEAKER_06: And that's fifty thousand birds.
14:27
SPEAKER_06: That's more.
14:28
SPEAKER_06: At home you'd drive two days to Nebraska to see a quarter of that, and people do.
14:32
SPEAKER_06: I've seen grown men cry on a bridge over the Platte River.
14:35
SPEAKER_00: I can see you're about to, Inez said kindly.
14:39
SPEAKER_00: I'm already doing it.
14:41
SPEAKER_00: Give me a minute.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: Hannah had torn the strip off the recorder.
14:45
SPEAKER_00: Owed at it over her shoulder.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: He had seen Femi's charts a dozen times.
14:50
SPEAKER_00: The fat, fuzzy humps from dial one and two crowded on both sides like a busy street.
14:57
SPEAKER_00: This was a single line, straight up and straight down.
15:01
SPEAKER_00: That's a needle, Hannah said softly.
15:04
SPEAKER_02: That's two.
15:05
SPEAKER_00: Owen looked at it and thought, for no reason he could have explained, of a pleasant voice on a speaker phone.
15:12
SPEAKER_00: He made himself stop.
15:14
SPEAKER_00: They hid case two on the back slope, under a lip of rim rock where a badger had dug a den long ago, and Luis stacked flat stones across the mouth of it, until Owen, six feet away, could not have said which rock it was behind.
15:31
SPEAKER_00: Then they walked down into the valley in their canvas work clothes and wool jackets, Luis carrying case one, and the cranes lifted off the fields in front of them, and settled again behind them, like a gray tide going out and coming back.
15:47
SPEAKER_00: At the edge of the first field, Owen on his knees again.
15:52
SPEAKER_00: The stubble was waist high, standing in thick bunches with bare ground between them.
15:58
SPEAKER_00: A grain field at home after harvest was a dead thing, rows of brown stalks waiting for the plough.
18:20
SPEAKER_00: It worked here, Hannah said.
18:22
SPEAKER_00: At the top of the wash, Inez had her binoculars up, looking toward town.
18:28
SPEAKER_00: The town was where Winnemaka ought to be, and it was much bigger.
18:32
SPEAKER_00: A real small city along the river with church steeples and brick blocks, and above it, like the towers of a cathedral, a row of white concrete grain elevators beside the railroad.
18:45
SPEAKER_00: Painted across the tallest, in letters Owen could read from three miles away, were the words Humboldt, perennial, cooperative.
18:55
SPEAKER_00: Closer, on a bend of the river a mile off, stood a cluster of buildings by itself, a long stone barn, a house with a porch, a tall iron bell on a post in the yard, small square test plots along the river like a quilt, each with a white stake at its corner.
19:15
SPEAKER_00: And in front of the barn, on a granite block, the bronze statue of a woman in a long coat with a sheaf of grain in her arms.
19:26
SPEAKER_07: Owen said.
19:29
SPEAKER_07: Make it Luis said.
19:33
SPEAKER_00: Owen didn't answer.
19:37
SPEAKER_00: They spent the rest of the day in the dry wash below the station, out of sight.
19:42
SPEAKER_00: Inez and Hanna went into town at noon.
19:46
SPEAKER_00: Hanna had picked their one planned contact from the hill.
19:50
SPEAKER_00: A brick hotel near the depot, with a Basque name painted on the side, and a sign in the window that said Family Style Supper at six.
20:01
SPEAKER_00: Ada's report from two hundred ninety five had described a hotel just like it.
20:06
SPEAKER_00: Some things in this valley seemed to happen in every world.
20:10
SPEAKER_00: Inez would walk the town and the river road and come back by dark.
20:16
SPEAKER_00: Hannah would eat at the long table and listen.
20:19
SPEAKER_00: Owen and Luis watched the station.
20:22
SPEAKER_00: An old woman lived there in her seventies, tall and stooped, in a man's barn coat and rubber boots, who walked the test plots twice with a notebook.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: She kept an old sorrel mare in a corral beside the barn, and a black and white border collie that was, as far as Owen could tell, the friendliest animal in Nevada.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: He pointed.
21:32
SPEAKER_06: Those two big plots on the river say L fourteen.
21:35
SPEAKER_06: Seed parent and W nine pollen parent.
21:38
SPEAKER_06: The ones behind say Humboldt Cross.
21:41
SPEAKER_06: They make it the way you make a mule.
21:43
SPEAKER_06: The fields out there live twenty years, but the grain they make won't grow true.
21:46
SPEAKER_06: Plant it and you get cousins of cousins.
21:49
SPEAKER_06: Half won't come up and the rest won't come back.
21:52
SPEAKER_06: So we can't just grab a handful off the ground.
21:54
SPEAKER_06: We could dig up one plant and take one mule home and split it every year like a hosta.
21:58
SPEAKER_06: And in twenty Years we'd have a field the size of a tennis court.
22:02
SPEAKER_06: Owen looked at the stone barn.
22:04
SPEAKER_06: Or we could have the horse and the donkey, and then we could have Kansas.
22:09
SPEAKER_06: And the horse and the donkey live in there.
22:11
SPEAKER_06: In jars or sacks or tins.
22:13
SPEAKER_06: In one building on one bend of one river.
22:16
SPEAKER_06: He rubbed his face.
22:17
SPEAKER_06: In this whole world, Luis, that's probably the only place.
22:21
SPEAKER_00: Inez came back at sundown with a loaf of bread under her arm.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: She listened to Owen without interrupting, sitting on the case with her elbows on her knees.
22:30
SPEAKER_04: Then we take the parents, she said.
22:33
SPEAKER_06: Inez, it's her building, that old woman's.
22:36
SPEAKER_06: The statue out front is probably her mother.
22:38
SPEAKER_06: It's not a newsstand.
22:40
SPEAKER_06: We'd have to go into somebody's house in the dark.
22:42
SPEAKER_00: He heard his voice getting faster and couldn't stop it.
22:46
SPEAKER_06: And every door we open we breathe on.
22:49
SPEAKER_06: Every handle, every tin.
22:51
SPEAKER_06: Femi breathed on one old man for two hours, and we don't know if he's alive.
22:55
SPEAKER_04: We were screened.
22:57
SPEAKER_04: Three days, four swabs.
22:59
SPEAKER_06: We're clean of what Clara can test for.
23:01
SPEAKER_06: That's not the same thing as clean.
23:04
SPEAKER_00: Inez nodded slowly, as though he had made a fair point, which he had.
23:10
SPEAKER_00: She looked out across the fields gone violet in the dusk, where the cranes were settling for the night, their voices dropping to a low murmur like a church before the service.
23:22
SPEAKER_04: A crop you plant once and cut for twenty years, she said.
23:26
SPEAKER_04: No plowing, no tractor, no fuel.
23:30
SPEAKER_04: Roots that go down to the water.
23:33
SPEAKER_04: Owen, think who that feeds.
23:35
SPEAKER_04: Half the West is voting on water this fall.
23:38
SPEAKER_04: And the other places, the empty ones, if it ever came to that?
23:43
SPEAKER_06: I know exactly who Neil Ashby thinks it feeds.
23:46
SPEAKER_04: I'm not talking about Neil Ashby.
23:48
SPEAKER_06: You are though.
23:49
SPEAKER_06: Owen said.
23:51
SPEAKER_06: Even if you don't mean to.
23:52
SPEAKER_06: That's the trouble with this place.
23:55
SPEAKER_06: Whoever you think you're talking about, by the time it gets to Washington, you're talking about him.
24:00
SPEAKER_00: Inez didn't get angry.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: It was one of the things that made her hard to argue with.
24:05
SPEAKER_04: We are not going home with a loaf of bread, she said.
24:09
SPEAKER_04: Walt's paying for six days of cleared people on every trip now, because of$2.95.
24:16
SPEAKER_04: That money comes from us bringing home things that matter.
24:19
SPEAKER_04: This matters.
24:20
SPEAKER_04: You knelt down in it twice.
24:22
SPEAKER_00: Luis cleared his throat.
24:24
SPEAKER_09: Bambi.
24:25
SPEAKER_09: You're the only one of us who can read the labels.
24:28
SPEAKER_09: If you don't go in, I go in by myself and grab whatever's closest to the door, and we bring home a sack of oats and a jar of buttons.
24:37
SPEAKER_00: Owen looked at the stone barn.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: A light had come on in the upstairs window of the house.
24:43
SPEAKER_00: In the yard, the iron bell stood black against the last green of the sky.
24:48
SPEAKER_06: Gloves, he said finally.
24:51
SPEAKER_06: And masks, and we touch nothing we don't need.
24:54
SPEAKER_06: Not the doorknob, not the dog, not one thing.
24:57
SPEAKER_06: I already touched the dog, Louise said.
25:00
SPEAKER_00: I know you did.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: Inez stood and brushed off her trousers.
25:04
SPEAKER_00: Low over the western hills, a thin new moon was going down, bright as a pairing of fingernail.
25:11
SPEAKER_00: She looked at it a moment longer than she needed to.
25:14
SPEAKER_04: I made somebody a promise about a moon once, she said, to nobody in particular.
25:20
SPEAKER_04: I keep seeing it in the wrong places.
25:22
SPEAKER_00: Owen didn't ask.
25:24
SPEAKER_00: He had learned on the first trip that you didn't ask Inez about that.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: The radio on Luis's belt clicked at a quarter past nine.
25:32
SPEAKER_00: Hanna's voice came through low and quick, with a Nevada drawl in it that hadn't been there in the morning.
25:40
SPEAKER_02: Supper's done, 40 people at one long table, lamb stew, and a lady who told me her whole life story, which was mostly her gumbladder.
25:48
SPEAKER_02: The old woman is Nora Larrabee.
25:50
SPEAKER_02: The statue is her mother, Edith, dead since the 70s.
25:53
SPEAKER_02: They talk about her like a saint.
25:55
SPEAKER_02: Nora lives up there alone with a dog that likes everybody and a shotgun for the birds.
25:59
SPEAKER_02: The cranes take their time at everything, the lady said.
26:02
SPEAKER_02: And Nora's the only one who still shoots at them.
26:05
SPEAKER_02: Bird shooting to scare them.
26:06
SPEAKER_02: There's a man named Brody who rides for the cooperative at night in season.
26:10
SPEAKER_02: And there were seed thieves last week from Oregon.
26:13
SPEAKER_02: 15 years in Carson City.
26:15
SPEAKER_02: The lady said in her grandfather's day it was a hanging matter.
26:18
SPEAKER_02: Brody's at the bar downstairs right now playing cards, and he's winning.
26:22
SPEAKER_02: And I've been invited to sit in.
26:24
SPEAKER_07: Hannah, Owen said into the radio.
26:27
SPEAKER_07: Forty people at one table.
26:29
SPEAKER_07: A short pause.
26:31
SPEAKER_02: I know.
26:32
SPEAKER_00: Hanna said in her own voice.
26:34
SPEAKER_02: I counted everyone, Owen.
26:36
SPEAKER_02: I sat at the end and I didn't shake any hands.
26:39
SPEAKER_00: Another pause.
26:40
SPEAKER_02: Be careful in there.
26:43
SPEAKER_00: They went in at eleven, when the light in the upstairs window had been out for an hour.
26:48
SPEAKER_00: Ines stayed in the wash with Case One and the radio.
26:52
SPEAKER_00: Ow and Luis crossed the last field in the dark, through stubble that whispered against their trousers, past the cranes roosting on the sandbars of the river, a long, pale, murmuring mass of them in the starlight.
27:07
SPEAKER_00: The dog met them at the corral fence with its tail going.
27:12
SPEAKER_00: Luis said something to it in Spanish, softly, and it walked beside them to the back of the stone barn like an usher.
27:20
SPEAKER_00: The back door had an old lock.
27:23
SPEAKER_00: Luis knelt in front of it with two thin strips of steel from his kit, and in less than a minute it turned over with a small, clean click.
27:35
SPEAKER_09: Where did you learn that?
27:36
SPEAKER_09: Owen whispered.
27:37
SPEAKER_09: Fort Bragg.
27:39
SPEAKER_09: Also my cousin Eddie.
27:41
SPEAKER_09: Mostly Eddie.
27:42
SPEAKER_00: Inside it smelled of grain dust and stone and old paper.
27:46
SPEAKER_00: Owen switched on his flashlight with the red lens over it.
27:50
SPEAKER_00: The front of the barn was one long room with a glass wall on the roadside, and in the middle of it, alone on a wooden pedestal under a glass case, was a single canning jar half full of seed.
28:03
SPEAKER_00: A card beside it, in faded ink, in a tall, slanting hand.
28:09
SPEAKER_00: 1931.
28:10
SPEAKER_00: The first that came back.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: E.
28:13
SPEAKER_00: L.
28:14
SPEAKER_00: On the floor around the pedestal, where people had left them were little bunches of yellow rabbit brush and purple asters, some fresh, some brown.
28:24
SPEAKER_00: Owen looked at the jar for a moment and did not touch it.
28:28
SPEAKER_00: The working part of the station was through a heavy door at the back, a cold room lined with wooden shelves, and on the shelves, row after row, square tin canisters with numbers stenciled on their lids.
28:42
SPEAKER_00: On a desk by the door was a ledger as thick as a family Bible.
28:47
SPEAKER_00: Owen went through it by red light, page by page, in Edith Larrabee's tall, slanting hand, and then from about 1970 on, in a smaller, squarer one.
29:00
SPEAKER_00: It took him eleven minutes to find it, and every one of the eleven was an hour long.
29:07
SPEAKER_00: Foundation L14.
29:10
SPEAKER_00: Shelf C Foundation W nine Shelf F.
29:17
SPEAKER_00: He filled two cloth sample bags, a cup full from each tin, the seed whispering in like sand, and tied them and labeled them in grease pencil with shaking hands, and buttoned them inside his jacket against his chest.
29:32
SPEAKER_00: Got it.
29:33
SPEAKER_00: He breathed.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: Let's go.
29:35
SPEAKER_00: That was when the front door opened.
29:39
SPEAKER_00: Not the back door.
29:41
SPEAKER_00: The big front door at the far end of the long room, the one that opened on the yard.
29:47
SPEAKER_00: Then a big white flashlight came on and caught Owen full in the face through the open door, so that he couldn't see anything but the light.
30:30
SPEAKER_00: Luis said, in the kindest voice Owen had ever heard come out of him.
30:35
SPEAKER_00: Easy now.
30:36
SPEAKER_00: Nobody's gonna The shotgun went off.
30:43
SPEAKER_00: In a stone room it was not a bang.
30:46
SPEAKER_00: It was a blow, a slap of pressure against his whole body, and his ears went to a high, thin whine.
30:53
SPEAKER_00: And through the whine he heard something heavy hit the floor.
32:01
SPEAKER_09: As high as it goes.
32:02
SPEAKER_09: Pull it tight.
32:04
SPEAKER_09: Now the stick.
32:05
SPEAKER_09: Turn it, Bambi.
32:06
SPEAKER_09: Keep turning.
32:07
SPEAKER_00: Owen turned it.
32:08
SPEAKER_00: Luis made a sound Owen had never heard a human being make, and Owen stopped.
32:14
SPEAKER_09: Don't stop.
32:15
SPEAKER_09: If it doesn't hurt, you didn't do it right.
32:17
SPEAKER_09: Turn it.
32:17
SPEAKER_00: Owen turned it until the pumping between Luis's fingers slowed, and stopped.
32:22
SPEAKER_00: And he locked the stick in its clip, the way Luis had shown them once, laughing, on a picnic table at Hancock in the spring.
32:30
SPEAKER_00: Good, Luis said, breathing fast and shallow.
32:34
SPEAKER_09: Now write a T on my forehead, and the time.
32:37
SPEAKER_09: So the doctor knows how long it's been on.
32:40
SPEAKER_09: Grease pencil, do it.
32:42
SPEAKER_00: Owen looked at his watch.
32:44
SPEAKER_00: He wrote a T on Luis Ortega's forehead.
32:47
SPEAKER_00: And after it, 1140.
32:50
SPEAKER_00: You spelled it wrong, Luis said, and laughed.
32:53
SPEAKER_00: And stopped laughing.
32:55
SPEAKER_00: The old woman had come closer, the shotgun hanging forgotten from one hand.
33:00
SPEAKER_10: Let me help.
33:01
SPEAKER_10: I've got clean sheets in the house.
33:04
SPEAKER_10: I can call the doctor in town.
33:07
SPEAKER_07: Don't come closer, Owen said.
33:09
SPEAKER_07: Please don't touch him.
33:11
SPEAKER_00: She stopped.
33:12
SPEAKER_00: She thought he was afraid of her.
33:15
SPEAKER_00: He could see it in her face.
33:17
SPEAKER_00: And he couldn't tell her what he was really afraid of.
33:20
SPEAKER_00: That she would kneel down over a man from a world she would never see, and breathe what he breathed.
33:28
SPEAKER_00: That she was in her seventies, like an engineer on a helper engine.
33:33
SPEAKER_00: He just knelt there with his gloved hands on Luis's leg and shook his head.
33:39
SPEAKER_00: Ma'am Luis said from the floor, thin but his own.
33:43
SPEAKER_09: It's all right.
33:44
SPEAKER_09: I'd have shot me too.
33:45
SPEAKER_00: Nora Larraby looked down at him for a long moment.
33:49
SPEAKER_00: Then she looked at the open door of the cold room, and at the lid of a tin that Owen had not, after all, put back quite straight.
34:01
SPEAKER_10: Who are you?
34:02
SPEAKER_00: He couldn't answer.
34:04
SPEAKER_00: She saw that he couldn't, and something in her face closed like a door.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: She went.
34:43
SPEAKER_06: Insults.
35:03
SPEAKER_00: Again and again, and the whole valley answered it.
35:07
SPEAKER_00: Out on the river, the cranes went up.
35:10
SPEAKER_00: All of them.
35:12
SPEAKER_00: Fifty thousand birds came off the sandbars and the stubble at once in the dark.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: A roar of wings like a waterfall turned upside down.
35:21
SPEAKER_00: And over it, from the whole black sky, that wild rattling bugling so loud, Owen could not hear the bell anymore.
35:30
SPEAKER_00: Or Luis or himself.
35:33
SPEAKER_00: He got Luis to the corral.
35:35
SPEAKER_00: The sorrel mare stood with her head up and her eyes white.
35:39
SPEAKER_00: But she stood.
35:41
SPEAKER_00: There was a halter on a nail.
35:43
SPEAKER_00: Owen had grown up in Kansas a long time ago, and his hands remembered things the rest of him had forgotten.
35:50
SPEAKER_00: He got the halter on her and got Luis's good foot on the bottom rail.
35:56
SPEAKER_00: And heaved.
35:57
SPEAKER_00: And somehow Luis was astride her, bareback, white-faced, gripping her mane.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: Bambi, Luis said.
36:05
SPEAKER_06: Are we stealing a horse?
36:07
SPEAKER_06: We're borrowing a horse.
36:08
SPEAKER_06: They hang you for that out here.
36:10
SPEAKER_00: Fifteen years in Carson City, Owen said, and opened the back gate.
36:14
SPEAKER_00: There were lights on the river road now, three sets of headlights, and a spotlight on the first pickup sweeping the fields.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: And behind the trucks, men on horseback with lanterns.
36:26
SPEAKER_00: The spotlight caught the sky as it swung, and for a moment the beam was full of cranes, a blizzard of white wings and long necks lit from below.
36:36
SPEAKER_00: And the horses on the road shied and reared, and somebody was shouting, and the beam swung wild across the river.
36:44
SPEAKER_00: Owen led the mare up the draw into the hills, under the roaring sky, with the seed against his chest.
36:52
SPEAKER_00: The radio on his belt crackled.
36:55
SPEAKER_04: Owen.
36:56
SPEAKER_00: Inez, low and very calm, which meant it was bad.
37:00
SPEAKER_04: Talk to me.
37:02
SPEAKER_06: Luis's hit.
37:03
SPEAKER_06: Shotgun.
37:04
SPEAKER_06: His leg high up, tourniquets on.
37:06
SPEAKER_06: 1140.
37:07
SPEAKER_06: I've got him on a horse.
37:08
SPEAKER_06: I'm taking him up to two.
37:10
SPEAKER_06: The smallest pause.
37:11
SPEAKER_04: Hana's still in town.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: Inez said.
37:14
SPEAKER_04: They're all coming out of the hotel.
37:17
SPEAKER_04: She's in the middle of them.
37:19
SPEAKER_04: I'm going in for her.
37:20
SPEAKER_04: We'll go home on one.
37:22
SPEAKER_00: Another pause.
37:23
SPEAKER_04: Owen, did you get it?
37:25
SPEAKER_00: He nearly didn't answer.
37:27
SPEAKER_00: Later he would remember that too.
37:29
SPEAKER_00: Yes, he said.
37:31
SPEAKER_04: Then go home.
37:32
SPEAKER_04: Don't wait for us.
37:34
SPEAKER_00: The climb took forty minutes.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: It felt like a year.
37:38
SPEAKER_00: The mare picked her way up the dark slope like a goat, and every few minutes Owen reached up and touched Luis's knee to make sure he was still there.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: Tell me a joke, Luis said.
37:49
SPEAKER_07: His voice was getting farther away.
37:52
SPEAKER_07: One of your terrible ones.
37:53
SPEAKER_07: What do you call a sleeping bull?
37:55
SPEAKER_07: Oh no.
37:56
SPEAKER_07: A bulldozer.
37:58
SPEAKER_00: A pause.
37:59
SPEAKER_07: That's the worst one yet.
38:00
SPEAKER_09: I've got worse.
38:01
SPEAKER_09: Don't you dare.
38:02
SPEAKER_09: A long breath.
38:04
SPEAKER_09: Hey, they're going to give Mary some story.
38:07
SPEAKER_09: Hunting.
38:07
SPEAKER_09: Car wreck.
38:08
SPEAKER_09: Something.
38:09
SPEAKER_09: Don't talk.
38:10
SPEAKER_09: Save it.
38:12
SPEAKER_09: I'm a medic, I know what to save.
38:14
SPEAKER_00: A few more steps.
38:15
SPEAKER_09: She put it on the refrigerator.
38:17
SPEAKER_09: Under the pelican.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: At the rim rock, Owen pulled the stones away by feel and dragged case two out into the starlight.
38:26
SPEAKER_00: He had seen it done a hundred times.
38:29
SPEAKER_00: He had never once done it himself.
38:31
SPEAKER_00: The lamp came up amber, and the dial was already set, where it always was when a case woke up.
38:38
SPEAKER_00: On the one place the cases could always find home.
38:43
SPEAKER_00: He got Luis down off the mare, which was the hardest thing he had ever done, and laid him in the dirt beside the case, inside the circle.
38:53
SPEAKER_00: Then he slipped off the mare's halter, and she looked at him in the dark, with the whites of her eyes showing.
38:59
SPEAKER_00: Go on, he said.
39:01
SPEAKER_00: Go home.
39:02
SPEAKER_00: He slapped her shoulder, and she went back down the slope toward the lantern moving in the corral below, and he listened to her hooves on the stones until he couldn't hear them.
39:13
SPEAKER_00: He thought about an old woman at her corral fence, seeing her mare come home alone in the dark, with blood on her back.
39:24
SPEAKER_00: He knelt inside the circle and turned the key.
39:31
SPEAKER_00: Cold up through his knees.
39:34
SPEAKER_00: Then the sound changed.
39:37
SPEAKER_00: The cranes were gone.
39:39
SPEAKER_00: In their place, from down in the valley, came the long, steady hiss of the interstate, trucks running through the night toward Reno, and a freight horn, and that was all.
39:51
SPEAKER_00: The steel shed.
39:53
SPEAKER_00: The weather mast.
39:55
SPEAKER_00: The lights of Winnemucca.
39:57
SPEAKER_00: Small and orange and ordinary, three miles off.
40:01
SPEAKER_00: Owen ran for the shed.
40:04
SPEAKER_00: Getting Luis into the passenger seat of the sight truck took five minutes, and most of what both of them had left.
40:11
SPEAKER_00: Owen drove down the dirt road with the headlights bouncing and his phone on the dashboard, and Clara answered on the first ring, at a quarter to four in the morning in Virginia, sounding as if she had been sitting up waiting for exactly this.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: He told her.
40:45
SPEAKER_06: Claire, I'm walking into an emergency room.
40:48
SPEAKER_11: From dial four, I know exactly where you're walking in from.
40:52
SPEAKER_06: There are people in there, nurses, kids.
40:55
SPEAKER_11: Owen.
40:56
SPEAKER_07: Her voice did not rise.
40:58
SPEAKER_11: You can leave a tourniquet on about two hours before he starts to lose the leg.
41:03
SPEAKER_11: You've used up most of one.
41:05
SPEAKER_11: I can quarantine a sick man.
41:07
SPEAKER_11: I can't quarantine a dead one.
41:10
SPEAKER_11: Go.
41:11
SPEAKER_00: A breath.
41:12
SPEAKER_11: You were hunting Chukar.
41:15
SPEAKER_11: The season opened last Saturday.
41:17
SPEAKER_11: You were walking a ridge in the dark to be in position at first light.
41:22
SPEAKER_11: You tripped on a rock and your gun went off.
41:25
SPEAKER_06: I don't own a gun.
41:27
SPEAKER_11: You do now.
41:28
SPEAKER_11: Walt will see to it.
41:31
SPEAKER_11: Say as little as you can.
41:33
SPEAKER_11: Touch nothing, you don't have to.
41:37
SPEAKER_00: The emergency room at Humboldt General was very bright and nearly empty, and for the next 40 minutes it belonged to Luis.
41:45
SPEAKER_00: A nurse saw the tourniquet and the tea on his forehead and started shouting before the doors had finished opening.
41:53
SPEAKER_00: A young doctor came running with a small black badge on her collar with a light on it, and said This listens and writes my notes, do you mind?
42:02
SPEAKER_00: And didn't wait to hear whether Owen minded.
42:06
SPEAKER_00: Owen answered her questions through a mask, in canvas clothes stiff with blood, with two bags of seed buttoned inside his jacket, and he did not know afterward half of what he had said.
42:19
SPEAKER_00: There was a trauma center in Reno, and a surgeon who fixed arteries and a helicopter.
42:26
SPEAKER_00: Owen could not go.
42:28
SPEAKER_00: They wheeled Lewis past him to the pad, masked and grey, with his eyes open.
42:34
SPEAKER_00: He caught Owen's sleeve going by.
42:37
SPEAKER_00: Not your fault, Bambi, he said through the mask.
42:40
SPEAKER_00: Tell Murray that.
42:43
SPEAKER_00: Then the cold air and the rising roar of the rotors, and the light going up into the dark and away west.
42:51
SPEAKER_00: Owen sat in the waiting room for two more hours, because a deputy was coming, and because running would look worse than staying.
43:00
SPEAKER_00: He did not touch the arms of the chair.
43:03
SPEAKER_00: He sat with his hands in his lap and looked at the people who came in.
43:08
SPEAKER_00: An old rancher with a hand wrapped in a dish towel, a young mother walking a little boy whose cough barked like a seal.
43:17
SPEAKER_00: A night nurse who brought Owen a paper cup of coffee, and smiled and went back to her desk.
43:24
SPEAKER_00: Every germ in their world was one their grandmothers had met.
43:28
SPEAKER_00: Every germ but whatever might be riding on him.
43:31
SPEAKER_00: He didn't drink the coffee.
43:33
SPEAKER_00: The deputy was a big, tired, polite man named Garza, who had seen a great many hunting accidents in October.
43:41
SPEAKER_00: He wrote everything down.
43:44
SPEAKER_00: The ridge, the dark, the rock.
43:48
SPEAKER_08: Then he flipped back a page.
43:51
SPEAKER_08: One thing.
43:52
SPEAKER_08: That machine the doc wears writes down what's said in the room.
43:55
SPEAKER_08: Says here, you told her, quote, she shot him.
43:58
SPEAKER_06: Who's she?
44:01
SPEAKER_06: Owen heard himself say.
44:02
SPEAKER_06: I don't know what I said, I was saying a lot of things.
44:06
SPEAKER_00: Deputy Garza studied him for a moment.
44:08
SPEAKER_08: Then he shrugged.
44:10
SPEAKER_08: These things hear everything and understand about half.
44:13
SPEAKER_08: He said.
44:14
SPEAKER_08: Last month one of them had my sergeant's dog down as a witness.
44:18
SPEAKER_08: Game warden will call you.
44:20
SPEAKER_08: They look at every one of these.
44:22
SPEAKER_08: Have the shotgun handy.
44:25
SPEAKER_00: At four in the morning, Owen drove back up the dirt road and stopped at the gate, and turned off the engine, and sat in the dark truck, while the heater ticked itself cold.
44:35
SPEAKER_00: The seed lay against his chest, warm from his body.
44:39
SPEAKER_00: He sat there until the sky behind the hills turned gray.
44:56
SPEAKER_00: Inez and Hannah came home at sunrise.
45:00
SPEAKER_00: Owen was standing at the edge of the white circle, because he had known they would come at first light, and then they were in it.
45:08
SPEAKER_00: Inez on one knee with her hand on case one, and Hannah beside her with straw in her hair.
45:16
SPEAKER_00: They had spent the night in a hay barn on the edge of town, while half of Brody's posse rode past the door, and had carried the case back up the hill in the gray before dawn.
45:27
SPEAKER_00: Inez looked at the blood on his clothes and at his face, and said only Luis Reno, surgery, that's all I know.
45:38
SPEAKER_00: Inez put her hand on his shoulder for a second, hard, and went to the shed for the phone.
45:44
SPEAKER_00: Ada Brennan's truck came up the road twenty minutes later.
45:48
SPEAKER_00: Clara had cleared her on Wednesday after three days of clean tests, and called her at four in the morning, and Ada had driven from Reno in the dark.
45:58
SPEAKER_00: She took one look at the three of them and went into the trailer and started making coffee, and did not ask a single question, which Owen thought was the kindest thing anybody had done for him in a year.
46:12
SPEAKER_00: Hannah didn't ask anything either.
46:14
SPEAKER_00: She filled the little sink with warm water and took his hands, one and then the other, and washed them.
46:22
SPEAKER_00: Luis's blood had dried in the creases of his knuckles and under his nails.
46:27
SPEAKER_00: She washed it out without a word, the way you'd wash a child's hands, and dried them on a dish towel, and held them a moment longer than she needed to.
46:41
SPEAKER_12: Not now.
46:42
SPEAKER_00: He didn't know what she meant by it.
46:44
SPEAKER_00: He had a feeling she didn't either.
46:46
SPEAKER_00: The seed went into a canning jar from Ada's truck, both bags taped shut and labeled, and the jar went on the little table under the window, where it would sit for seventy-two hours before anybody carried it east.
47:01
SPEAKER_00: Two cloth bags in a jar.
47:03
SPEAKER_00: It didn't look like much.
47:08
SPEAKER_00: Walt called at two in the afternoon with Clara.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: He sounded older than he had on Tuesday.
47:15
SPEAKER_01: He's out of surgery, the arteries repaired.
47:18
SPEAKER_01: He keeps the leg.
47:19
SPEAKER_01: I want you to hear that first because it's the main thing.
47:23
SPEAKER_01: There's damage to the nerve, and nobody will know how much for months.
47:27
SPEAKER_01: He may walk with a cane.
47:30
SPEAKER_01: He won't carry a pack up a ridge again for a long while, maybe not ever.
47:35
SPEAKER_00: Pause.
47:36
SPEAKER_01: Parisol's with him.
47:38
SPEAKER_01: I called her at five this morning.
47:40
SPEAKER_01: Her time.
47:42
SPEAKER_01: She's been told it was a hunting accident during a training rotation in Nevada.
47:47
SPEAKER_01: And she's been told it in a way I would not want to repeat to a judge.
47:51
SPEAKER_00: What else?
47:52
SPEAKER_00: Enough said.
47:53
SPEAKER_01: What else?
47:54
SPEAKER_01: Three charge cells for a trip that was meant to cost two.
47:58
SPEAKER_01: A helicopter, which I'll be paying for out of a budget line that does not exist.
48:03
SPEAKER_01: A deputy's report.
48:05
SPEAKER_01: A game warden on Monday, so Walker is driving over from Elco tonight with a shotgun.
48:10
SPEAKER_01: He's very fond of.
48:12
SPEAKER_01: Clara has asked the county to tell her about any unusual favors and win a muck-up for the next three weeks.
48:18
SPEAKER_01: They think she's writing a paper.
48:22
SPEAKER_11: I am writing a paper, Clara said.
48:25
SPEAKER_11: Nobody's ever going to read it.
48:27
SPEAKER_01: And that listening badge in the emergency room wrote down a pronoun.
48:31
SPEAKER_01: Owen.
48:32
SPEAKER_01: She.
48:34
SPEAKER_01: It's in a medical record now in a building I don't control.
48:38
SPEAKER_01: Right next to a story about a man who tripped on a rock.
48:42
SPEAKER_01: I can make a lot of things go away.
48:45
SPEAKER_01: I've never once had to make a sentence go away that nobody wrote.
48:49
SPEAKER_00: I'm sorry, Owen said.
48:51
SPEAKER_01: I'm not finished.
48:53
SPEAKER_01: I read Femi the strip over the phone this morning.
48:56
SPEAKER_01: He said one word, and the word was twice.
48:59
SPEAKER_01: Then he wouldn't say anything else, and I could hear him blowing his nose.
49:03
SPEAKER_00: Walt was quiet a moment.
49:05
SPEAKER_01: And I told Neil this morning, 48 hours.
49:08
SPEAKER_01: That's the deal, and I keep it.
49:10
SPEAKER_01: He was very kind about Luis.
49:12
SPEAKER_01: I think he meant it.
49:14
SPEAKER_01: And then he asked me one question.
49:16
SPEAKER_00: Owen looked at the jar on the table.
49:19
SPEAKER_01: He wanted to know whether it would grow over there, Walt said.
49:23
SPEAKER_01: In the empty ones.
49:25
SPEAKER_01: The far ones, the thin ones with nobody in them.
49:28
SPEAKER_01: Whether a few hundred people with hand tools and nobody coming to help could live on it year after year without plowing or planning.
49:37
SPEAKER_01: And he said, and I'm quoting him exactly, Owen, because he made a point of it.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: Dr.
49:43
SPEAKER_01: Tay told me we'd need something that comes back on its own.
49:47
SPEAKER_00: The heater ticked.
49:49
SPEAKER_00: Out the window the valley was brown and empty, and the interstate hissed.
49:54
SPEAKER_00: I told him I'd ask the biologist Walt said.
49:57
SPEAKER_01: So I'm asking.
49:59
SPEAKER_01: Would it?
50:00
SPEAKER_00: Owen didn't answer for a long time.
50:02
SPEAKER_00: Probably he said.
50:07
SPEAKER_00: Marisol Ortega called at a quarter past eight that night.
50:11
SPEAKER_00: Owen didn't know the number.
50:13
SPEAKER_00: He almost didn't answer.
50:14
SPEAKER_03: Is this Owen?
50:15
SPEAKER_03: This is Marisol.
50:17
SPEAKER_03: Luisa's wife.
50:18
SPEAKER_00: A tired, warm, very clear voice.
50:22
SPEAKER_00: The voice of somebody who had cried earlier in the day and was finished with it.
50:27
SPEAKER_03: He said your number to me three times in the recovery room, from memory, so I'd write it on my hand.
50:33
SPEAKER_03: He said you'd be beating yourself up.
50:35
SPEAKER_06: How is he?
50:37
SPEAKER_03: Sleeping.
50:38
SPEAKER_03: He's going to be okay.
50:39
SPEAKER_03: He's mad about the leg and the hospital food, and he keeps asking the nurses for the score, so he's himself.
50:46
SPEAKER_00: A pause.
50:47
SPEAKER_03: He said to tell you it wasn't your fault, and that you're carrying his groceries for a year.
50:52
SPEAKER_00: Owen closed his eyes.
50:53
SPEAKER_03: They told me you tripped, Marisol said.
50:56
SPEAKER_03: On a ridge in the dark, and your gun went off.
50:59
SPEAKER_03: Owen, Luis doesn't hunt.
51:02
SPEAKER_03: In twenty years I've never known him to shoot a bird.
51:05
SPEAKER_03: He has three feeders in the backyard, and he names the cardinals.
51:08
SPEAKER_03: And you don't sound to me like a man who owns a shotgun.
51:12
SPEAKER_00: Across the trailer, Inez was lying on the top bunk with her face to the wall.
51:17
SPEAKER_00: Hanna was at the table, very still.
51:21
SPEAKER_03: I got a postcard from him on Tuesday, Marisol said.
51:24
SPEAKER_03: It says, A man was alive there who is dead here.
51:29
SPEAKER_03: It says, Someday I'm going to tell you all of it.
51:32
SPEAKER_03: It's on my refrigerator.
51:34
SPEAKER_03: I'm not stupid, Owen.
51:36
SPEAKER_03: I've never once been stupid.
51:38
SPEAKER_03: I'm going to ask you one time, and then I won't ask again.
51:41
SPEAKER_03: Did you shoot my husband?
51:43
SPEAKER_00: The jar sat on the table under the window.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: No.
51:46
SPEAKER_00: Owen said.
51:48
SPEAKER_00: He heard her breathe.
51:49
SPEAKER_06: I can't tell you who did he said or where.
51:53
SPEAKER_06: If I did, I think they'd take everything away from him and from you.
51:57
SPEAKER_06: And I don't think he'd forgive me, but I didn't shoot him.
52:00
SPEAKER_06: And I'll tell you one more thing.
52:03
SPEAKER_06: And then I can't tell you anything else.
52:06
SPEAKER_06: That postcard is true.
52:08
SPEAKER_06: Every word of it.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: The line was quiet so long he thought she'd hung up.
52:13
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
52:14
SPEAKER_00: Marisol said.
52:15
SPEAKER_00: Okay.
52:16
SPEAKER_03: That's more than I've gotten in five years.
52:18
SPEAKER_00: Her voice wobbled and steadied.
52:20
SPEAKER_03: Thank you, Owen.
52:21
SPEAKER_03: Carry his groceries.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: She hung up.
52:24
SPEAKER_00: On the top bunk, Inez didn't turn around.
52:27
SPEAKER_04: I didn't hear any of that, she said to the wall.
52:31
SPEAKER_04: Inez, I I mean it.
52:33
SPEAKER_04: I was asleep.
52:34
SPEAKER_04: I didn't hear one word.
52:38
SPEAKER_00: Later, when the others were asleep or pretending, Owen went out and sat on the metal step of the trailer with a blanket around his shoulders.
52:47
SPEAKER_00: It was cold again and very clear, and the interstate went on hissing toward Reno.
52:55
SPEAKER_00: He heard them before he saw them.
52:57
SPEAKER_00: High up, faint, a rattling wooden call, then another, then a ragged line of them going over in the starlight, heading south.
53:06
SPEAKER_00: Sandhill cranes, real ones, ours.
53:11
SPEAKER_00: Forty, maybe, maybe fifty.
53:14
SPEAKER_00: Calling to each other in the dark as they went, the same voices he had heard by the thousands the morning before, over a valley full of gold.
53:23
SPEAKER_00: He listened until they were gone.
53:26
SPEAKER_00: Then he went back inside.
53:28
SPEAKER_00: The jar sat on the table in a little square of starlight.
53:32
SPEAKER_00: He looked at it for a long time and he did not touch it.
53:37
SPEAKER_00: World 296.
53:39
SPEAKER_00: Dial setting four.
53:42
SPEAKER_00: One day on the ground.
53:44
SPEAKER_00: Brought home two cloth bags of foundation seed, one from each parent of a wheat that comes back on its own, sealed in a jar, and a strip of chart paper with a second thin line.
53:56
SPEAKER_00: Charge cells spent.
53:58
SPEAKER_00: Three for a trip that was meant to cost two.
54:01
SPEAKER_00: Return test, none attempted.
54:04
SPEAKER_00: Return odds at dial two, one hit in eleven.
54:08
SPEAKER_00: At dial four, two readings, both thin, both from the same hill above the Humboldt.
54:14
SPEAKER_00: And Femi has said one word about them.
54:19
SPEAKER_00: You have been listening to Long Odds, Episode Four, Foundation Seed.