The drive over Kebler was clear at 7am, the aspens just starting on the south-facing slopes, and Esteban Cordero made it to RMBL365 with twenty minutes to spare and a coffee from the place on Elk Avenue that had finally, after fifteen years, learned to make it the way he liked it. He parked behind the building. The lot had been gravel when they bought the place; now it was permeable pavers, and there was a charging bank along the south wall where two of the tribal council's vehicles were plugged in from yesterday's session.
Inside, the partnership room smelled like new carpet and old coffee. The wall map was already up. Sofia had been in since six, he could tell — her tablet was on the table next to a stack of marked-up printouts, and the eleven polygons glowed soft on the map, color-coded the way he had asked: red for shrink, blue for expand, yellow for shift, gray for hold. He had asked for gray to be gray and not green because he didn't want anyone, including himself, reading the holds as good news.
"Morning," Sofia said. She was the cumulative-stressors lead at RMBL's translation team, fourteen years younger than he was and a better systems thinker than anyone he'd worked with in the agency. "Donny's already on. He had a thing at six their time."
The screen at the end of the table showed Donny Tom in his office in Towaoc, holding a mug that said RMBL CENTENNIAL 2028 on it, which Esteban suspected was a joke between Donny and Sofia he wasn't going to ask about. Behind Donny the light was different — drier, southern, the cottonwoods outside his window not yet turning.
"Esteban," Donny said. "You drove."
"I drove."
"You could've called in."
"I wanted to walk the map."
Donny nodded. He understood that. Anna Yazzie from Upper Gunnison came in then with her own coffee and a binder, and behind her, walking slowly, Mr. Cisneros, who was eighty-three and had been on a lek above what was now the Roaring Judy hatchery in 1962 with his uncle, counting birds, before the agency had counted them. Esteban stood up to greet him. He always stood up.
"Sit, sit," Mr. Cisneros said, and didn't sit himself for another minute, looking at the map. "You moved seven."
"We moved seven."
"Good."
They walked the map.
Sofia had pulled the cumulative-stressors layer underneath the polygons, and you could see, if you knew how to look, the parcelization creep along the western edge of polygon four — the thirty-five-acre subdivisions that had gone in across the late 2020s when the county was still issuing final plats faster than anyone could track them. The geodatabase Sofia's team had been building for three years stitched the plat records to the well-pad footprints to the road network to the recreation infrastructure, and what came out the other end was a map that told you, polygon by polygon, where the birds had been losing function and where they had been holding. The county hadn't given them the plat records willingly. Sofia had spent eight months in 2038 sitting in the assessor's office, scanning, until the county clerk had finally just given her a login.
"Four shrinks on the west," Esteban said. "We've talked about that. Polygon five expands north into the McCabe parcel because the easement closed in March. Six holds. Seven —"
"Seven is the one I want to talk about," Donny said.
Esteban had known he would. Polygon seven covered the western edge of the basin where the Ute Mountain Ute had documented lek occupancy that the agency's records didn't have, because the agency's records started in 1979 and Mr. Cisneros's uncle had been counting in 1962, and the bird had been on three sites in the western part of the polygon then that the BLM transect grid had never crossed.
"I have the historic occupancy from your office," Esteban said. "I want to expand seven west to capture all three of the historic sites. The cumulative-stressors layer says the western two are still viable habitat under the climate projections. The third one is gone — the road came too close in '08."
"Two of three," Mr. Cisneros said.
"Two of three. I'm sorry about the third."
Mr. Cisneros made a small motion with his hand that meant go on, or I heard you, or don't apologize to me for what your agency did in 2008 — Esteban could never quite tell with him, and had stopped trying to read it precisely. He just took it as permission to keep going.
Anna pulled up her hydrology overlay on the second screen. The reservoir operations had shifted under the 2036 compact revision, and there were spring flows now in the lower drainage that hadn't been there in fifteen years, which had brought the wet meadows back on the western edge of polygon eight in a way nobody had predicted. The birds had found them in 2039. The lek had moved four hundred meters east.
"Eight shifts," Esteban said. "Not expands. Shifts. I want to draw the new line tight to where they actually are and let the old western edge release."
"You'll get pushback on releasing," Sofia said.
"I'll get pushback on everything. I'd rather defend a polygon that matches the birds."
She nodded. She had her tablet open to the draft language for the public comment document, and Esteban could see she was already marking it up — she had a way of working alongside him in real time that he had found uncomfortable for about six months and indispensable after that. There had been an afternoon last March when she had pulled up four different framings for the same boundary change and laid them out side by side and asked him which one his agency could actually use, and he had realized, sitting there, that nobody in twenty-eight years of Bureau work had ever asked him that question in that order.
Donny was looking at something on his end. "Sofia. The synthesis you sent over Sunday — the season-specific layers for the western populations. Can you pull up the winter layer for seven?"
She pulled it up. The winter habitat extended further west than the breeding habitat by almost two kilometers, into a parcel cluster that the agency had been treating as outside the priority area for fifteen years.
"That's a problem," Esteban said quietly.
"That's a problem," Donny agreed.
"That's not in the November draft. I can't get that in by November."
"No."
"But it goes in the 2043 cycle."
"It goes in the 2043 cycle," Donny said. "We'll have three more years of telemetry by then. I'll send you what we have so far this week."
Esteban wrote it down. He wrote it in the small leather notebook he had been using since 2019, on a fresh page, with the date and the polygon number and a single line: winter habitat west of seven — 2043. Three years was nothing. Three years was a cycle. He had spent six years on the 2010 listing decision and another five on the not-warranted finding and the whole of the 2020s watching the litigation eat his calendars, and now he was writing 2043 in a notebook in September 2040 and meaning it.
They broke at eleven. Mr. Cisneros wanted to walk down to the coffee place and Esteban walked with him, slowly, because Mr. Cisneros set the pace and Esteban had learned not to rush. The aspens on Snodgrass were turning. Esteban's daughter was driving up from Denver on Friday with her partner and the baby, and he had to be back in Gunnison by Thursday night to clean the guest room, which his wife had been reminding him about with increasing specificity.
"You drive over a lot now," Mr. Cisneros said.
"Twice a week, this fall."
"Better than the airplane to Denver."
"Better than the airplane to Denver."
Mr. Cisneros laughed at that, a short laugh, and then they walked the rest of the block without talking. The light at eleven in September at this elevation came in low and slanted off the metal roofs along Elk Avenue, and Esteban thought about the eight weeks he had until the draft went out, and the third site they had lost in 2008, and the winter layer west of polygon seven, and his daughter's baby, who was six months old and had not yet seen the basin in fall.
After lunch he would go back and start on polygon nine.