The thing Priya Venkataraman wanted to say first, and didn't, was that the willows on the right bank were three weeks ahead of where they'd been when she'd first walked this reach in 2037. The leaves were already turning the color of weak tea. The Salix geyeriana she had used as a reference stand was browning at the tips. She kept the observation in her tablet's margin for later and walked.
"Piezometer three is still drifting," Dale said. He was the district hydrologist, sixty-something, in the kind of canvas pants that had outlived two presidential administrations. "Self-correcting since June, but the correction's getting bigger every month. I want it pulled before snow."
"Noted," Priya said.
The five of them were spread loose along the channel: Dale upstream, kicking at a cobble bar that had grown in the last two years; Annabeth Six-Crows from the Ute Mountain Ute NRO walking the willow margin with her hands clasped behind her back, the way Priya had learned meant she was thinking and did not yet want to be asked what about; Marcus, the basin's riparian PI, crouched at the cutbank with a soil knife; and Tomás, the RMBL365 partnership coordinator, holding the tablet that held the agenda but mostly watching the rest of them work.
Priya pulled up the site-selection matrix on her own tablet. Twelve rows, eight columns. She'd built the first version of this thing in her kitchen in Corvallis four winters ago and had revised it across the table from Dale at least six times since. It looked, now, less like a decision tool than like a shared notebook they had argued into existence.
"Okay," she said. "Sun's getting higher. Let's actually walk it."
The reach above the Ohio–East confluence climbed a quarter mile through a valley that opened then narrowed then opened again. Aspen on the south-facing slope had gone yellow early; the cottonwoods at the bottom were still green. A red-naped sapsucker drilled somewhere above them, irritable about something. The morning smelled like cured grass and cold stone.
"Valley width here is what I want to look at," she said. "Geometry says we should be installing at the second pinch point. The forage proxy says first."
"Beaver don't read your proxy," Dale said.
"Beaver don't read anything, Dale."
"Beaver read everything," Annabeth said, drifting closer. "They're better at it than we are." She had not raised her voice but Dale laughed, and Priya did too, and the laugh was the kind that had a six-year history under it.
Marcus stood up from the cutbank with a fistful of dark sediment. "This is the floodplain you want. Look at this. Smells like a wetland already and we haven't done anything to it."
"What's the willow density up the second pinch?" Priya asked.
Marcus tipped his head at Tomás's tablet. Tomás had already pulled the Walton-Six Mountains co-located inventory open; the layer for willow cover loaded slowly, then resolved. He turned the screen so Priya could see. Twenty years of crown-cover estimates from RMBL plot work, aerial surveys the district had paid for, and the bird-survey plots Annabeth's office had been running since 2031 — all of it stitched onto the same map. The willow stand at the second pinch was a tidy 0.4 hectare patch that had been there since at least 2014, dense, mature, with a regeneration cohort the inventory tagged as 2032.
"Forage's fine there," Priya said. "Better than the matrix gave it credit for. The matrix is reading my 2036 plot data and the 2036 plot data was a bad water year."
"That whole row needs to be reweighted," Dale said.
"I know."
She amended the row in front of them and the weighted score for the second pinch ticked up two points. The matrix now agreed with Dale's instinct. This was not, Priya knew, how decision matrices were supposed to work, but it was how this one had always worked, and she had stopped pretending it was different.
Annabeth was quiet for a moment, looking up at the willow stand. "There's a song about beaver in this drainage," she said. "My grandmother's cousin's husband knew it. I have been trying to get someone to remember it for twelve years."
"Any luck?" Tomás asked.
"Not really. But the looking is the point of part of it." She glanced at Priya. "I want this installation. The plant work my office is doing with the schools, the kids have been mapping willow along here. They've named some of the stands. If you put a BDA at the second pinch, they will know what it is and they will watch it."
"Then we're putting it at the second pinch," Priya said.
"That's not how this is supposed to work," Dale said, mock-offended. "We're supposed to deliberate."
"We have been deliberating since 2036."
They walked up. The second pinch was a hundred meters of tight valley where the channel braided around a small in-stream wetland — exactly the geometry the colony-persistence models liked. Priya's tablet, which had been listening to the conversation with the matrix open, suggested in a soft line of text at the bottom of the screen that she might want to compare this reach against the persistence outcomes at the McClure analogues from 2034 to present. She tapped it. The comparison resolved while they walked: McClure's three persistent colonies all sat in valley segments within fifteen percent of the geometry they were standing in now. She showed it to Marcus, who grunted, which from Marcus was strong endorsement.
"What I want to know," Dale said, settling on a boulder, "is whether the East River basin keeps its July flows long enough to support a colony here in a 2031-type year. I don't trust the runoff projections. I don't trust anyone's runoff projections."
"The 2031 type year is now the median year," Marcus said.
"Don't tell me that before lunch."
The wind shifted; the smell of curing willow leaves came down the valley. Priya thought about her younger student, who was supposed to be installing invertebrate samplers in the existing four BDAs this week and who had texted her at 6 a.m. that one of the samplers had been carried off by something, possibly a pine marten, possibly an undergraduate. She would deal with that tonight. She thought about her partner's brother flying in next Tuesday and the dinner she had promised to be home for. She thought about the manuscript she was supposed to send to her co-author by Friday and had not opened in nine days.
"Let's call it," she said. "Second pinch. Installation five goes here."
"Agreed," Annabeth said.
"Agreed, with a note that I want piezometer three replaced before the install, not after," Dale said.
"Agreed," Marcus said.
Tomás was already typing the decision into the shared record. The record would go to the district's quarterly meeting, to the tribe's NRO docket, to Priya's grant report, to the RMBL365 partnerships log, to the school district's program lead — all from one entry. Priya remembered, briefly and without affection, the three months she had spent in 2034 trying to get a paired-basin agreement signed with a county in eastern Oregon, where every one of those bodies had needed a separate cover letter and two of them had never replied. Her colleague at the Sangre de Cristo basin was, she knew, still trying to convene a meeting like this one. The neighboring district there had no partnership office. The tribal NRO there had no relationship with the field station. The site selection was being done by email, badly, and the riparian PI was furious about it in a way Priya had stopped offering advice on.
"Lunch at 365?" Tomás said. "I have soup."
"You always have soup."
"It is September. It is soup season."
They walked back down. Annabeth fell into step with Priya and said, without preamble, "I want the kids to be here when you install."
"October?"
"Late September. Before the bus runs short."
"I'll move the crew."
"Good."
Back at the trucks, Priya stood for a moment with her hand on the tailgate and watched the willows on the right bank, three weeks early, browning toward winter. She opened the tablet again and started a new note. Second pinch, installation 5, she typed. Reweight forage row before sites 6–8. Ask Annabeth about the song. She stopped, then added: Invert samplers — find out what kind of marten.
She got in the truck. They had a site to get back to before dark.