Maren took the long way over Kebler because she wanted the drive. The aspens above Lake Irwin were leafing out late again — the second week of June, and only the south-facing slopes had filled in. She had stopped trying to remember which years were the early ones. The crew at Gothic had started saying "the old June" the way her mother used to say "the old winter," meaning nothing specific, only a structure of expectation that had quietly relocated itself.
The letter was on the passenger seat in a manila folder. She had printed it that morning at RMBL365 instead of in Gunnison, because she liked the printer there better and because she wanted to walk past the front room where the development team had their coffee. Three years of bridge funding from stewardship reserves, contingent on a resubmission in the next cycle. Forty-two thousand the first year, thirty-eight and thirty-five after. Enough for the field tech, the database hours, the truck. Not enough for the postdoc. Cara would know that at a glance.
Cara's house was on the east side of town, up against the lower flank of Gibson Ridge, with a porch that faced the wrong direction for sunset but the right direction for the feeder. Maren parked behind the old Subaru — Cara had been talking about replacing it with one of the electric four-wheel-drives for six years now, and hadn't — and walked around to the back. The gate stuck the way it always had. Cara was already on the porch with two mugs.
"You drove the pass."
"I drove the pass."
"You wanted the drive."
"I wanted the drive."
Cara handed her the coffee. It was the good kind, from the place on Elk that had survived three ownership changes. The hummingbirds were at the feeder — a pair of broad-tails, the male's gorget catching afternoon light, the wing-trill loud enough that Maren felt it before she heard it. Cara watched them with the half-attention of someone who had watched these birds, or birds very like them, from this porch for thirty-one summers.
"They're early," Maren said.
"They're on time. We're late." Cara sipped. "I had the first male on the twenty-eighth of May. Which used to be early. Now it's the middle of the distribution." She glanced sideways. "Give me the letter."
Maren handed her the folder.
Cara read it the way she read everything: once fast, once slow, and then a third time with her finger on the line that mattered. The third pass took longer than the first two combined. The hummingbirds came and went. A neighbor's dog barked twice and then stopped. Somewhere down the block a kid was learning the trumpet, badly, in the way Maren remembered her own daughter learning the clarinet, badly, and she felt a small involuntary affection for the kid and the parents both.
"Three years," Cara said finally.
"Three years."
"Contingent on resubmission."
"Contingent on resubmission. The program officer thinks the cycle clears by twenty-six months. Maybe twenty. She's not promising anything, but she's not closing the door."
"She wouldn't close the door on this study." Cara said it flatly, without vanity. It was a fact about the study. "She might lose her job and the door closes itself, but she wouldn't close it."
"That's roughly my read."
Cara set the letter down on the small table between them. She picked up her coffee. She didn't drink it. "Where does this come from. Specifically."
"Stewardship reserves."
"I know that. I mean which line."
"The bridge category Petra set up in thirty-four. It hasn't been touched since the Sage Creek thing in thirty-six." Maren shifted in the chair. "We have capacity for two more commitments at this scale before we'd need board approval to go deeper. The board would approve it. But we'd need to ask."
Cara nodded slowly. She was doing arithmetic that Maren could not entirely follow — not financial arithmetic; some other kind, having to do with which of her people she could keep and which she would have to release and what that would do to the structure of what she had built. The genetics arm of the marmot study had grown around three field techs and a rotating postdoc and an enormous, idiosyncratic database that Cara had been refusing to standardize for fifteen years because she was the only one who fully understood why the eccentricities were load-bearing. Without the postdoc, the sequencing pipeline would slow. With it, even at reduced scale, the time series held.
"The postdoc doesn't fit," Cara said.
"No."
"I figured."
"I'm sorry."
"Don't be. The postdoc has options. She's been talking to the Sierra group anyway." Cara picked the letter up again. "What about Joaquín."
"Joaquín fits. The truck fits. The database hours fit. The field season fits at the scale you ran it last year, not the year before."
"Last year was the reduced year."
"I know."
Cara made a small sound that was not quite a laugh. "So we lock in the reduced year for three more."
"Yes."
"And the seventy-fifth-year milestone passes at the reduced scale. Last summer. We marked it small."
"Yes."
The hummingbirds came back. The male did the dive display — the J-shape, the wing-trill at the bottom — and Maren watched Cara watch him with the particular stillness Cara had when something was happening she did not want to interrupt by reacting to. After a moment Cara said, almost to herself, "I had the model run the demographic projection on the reduced sampling last week. It loses resolution on the dispersal estimates around year ninety. Everything else holds. The centennial is twenty-four years out — I'd like to be alive for it, but I can hand the question off if I'm not."
"It told you that unprompted?"
"I asked it what would break if I had to cut. It came back with the dispersal thing and a list of seven other small things and a suggestion about how to weight the trap-nights to recover some of the resolution. I argued with it about the weighting for an hour. It was mostly right. I was right about one thing." She smiled faintly. "Which is better than I usually do."
Maren had her own arguments with her own model, most mornings, about the development calendar and the donor-cultivation sequencing. She had stopped being surprised by what it noticed. She had not stopped being surprised by what it missed — which tended to be the things that mattered, in the way that mattering itself was a thing the model could not quite locate.
"Will you sign it," she said.
"Of course I'll sign it." Cara folded the letter carefully along the existing crease. "I was going to sign it before you got here. I just wanted to read it with you in the room." She looked up. "Thank you for driving over."
"I wanted to drive over."
"I know you did. Thank you anyway."
They sat for a while. Maren thought about her daughter's graduation, which was Saturday in Boulder, and whether she could make the drive back tonight or whether it made more sense to stay over in Crested Butte and leave at four. Four was bad. Five was worse because of the light. She would leave at four. She would call Tomás from the road and tell him she was coming down the canyon at seven and would he please not start the eggs until he heard the car.
"The colony at Avery," Cara said. "I want to walk it tomorrow morning if you're around."
"I'm not. Graduation."
"Right. You said. Sunday?"
"Sunday I can do."
"Sunday then. Seven. We can take the upper trail; the willows along the lower one are a mess this year."
"Seven."
Cara nodded. She picked up a pen from the little table and signed the letter without looking at it again, in the practiced and slightly illegible hand of someone who had signed a great many things over a long career. She handed the folder back.
"Tell Petra thank you. Tell her specifically. Not a general thank-you."
"I will."
"And tell the board, when you tell them, that the study is going to be here in twenty-two months regardless. The grant comes through or it doesn't. The marmots come out of hibernation either way. Joaquín and I will be at the upper colony on the third of May. I'd just rather do it with the database intact."
"I know."
"I know you know." Cara stood, stretched, picked up the empty mugs. "Stay for dinner. I have trout."
Maren thought about the drive, and the graduation, and Tomás, and the eggs, and the way the light came down the canyon at seven.
"Yes," she said. "Thank you. I'd like that."
She picked up the folder and followed Cara inside.