Marisol got to the office early to print the candidate's materials on actual paper, because she still read better that way and because Devon had asked, once, whether they could meet without screens. It was a small request. She liked him more for it.
The district office sat at the south end of Gunnison in a low brick building that had been a feed store before the seventies. The maple by the parking lot had turned already — early again, like last year, like the year before that. She'd stopped being surprised. She watched a magpie work a wrapper across the asphalt and drank her coffee standing up.
Devon arrived at one-fifty, ten minutes early, in the same Tacoma she remembered from the transect summers. He'd cut his hair. He brought her a jar of rosehip syrup his partner had put up. "From the bushes behind our place," he said. "There's a lot this year."
"There's a lot of everything this year that isn't water," she said, and he laughed, because it was true and because they had the kind of acquaintance where you could say something like that without it sitting heavy.
They went to the small conference room. The window looked west toward the Palisades. She had spread the materials on the table: his field record, the position description, the protocol binders she'd printed from the RMBL archive for the bee work and the Ipomopsis counts and the late-season Boechera checks. Three binders. Eight years of patches.
"I want to start with the hard one," she said. "I want to know what you'd do in the third week of July if the truck's in the shop and the aggregata peak is happening and you have one person available."
He didn't answer right away. That was one of the things she had noticed about him over the seasons — he treated her questions like they were actually questions. He looked out the window for a second.
"Triage by site," he said. "Avery Picnic and Kettle Ponds first because they're closest and because the dataset there is the longest continuous. The upper transect I'd let slip a week if I had to. The protocol says don't, but I'd document the gap and call it. I'd rather have an honest gap than a panicked count."
"The protocol says don't," she repeated. "But you'd call it."
"Yes."
"Good answer."
He smiled a little. "Was it a test of whether I'd follow the protocol?"
"It was a test of whether you understood it." She slid the bee binder toward him. "These were written in the late twenties. They're good. They're also from a period when there was someone in Gothic with budget to fix the truck the same afternoon. You're being hired into a different period."
He nodded. He had worked the transect for three summers as a seasonal, two of those under her and one under the postdoc from Logan who had finished her degree and gone to the state of Washington and not come back. He knew the period.
She walked him through the position the way she had walked herself through it for the last two months: forty percent district, sixty percent RMBL, but the percentages were a fiction and they both knew it. The work was the work. The district cared about the pollination data because the alfalfa growers cared, and the alfalfa growers cared because the bee picture in the upper basin was the bee picture in the lower basin two years later. RMBL cared because the transect was one of the last continuous pollinator records in the southern Rockies, and because the two researchers who had carried it were both past seventy now, and because Gothic had not been able to fund a staff position to hold it.
"They tried, right?" Devon said. "During the campaign."
"They protected the protocols and the plots," Marisol said. "Not the people. That part has been us. It's still going to be us. The district is the employer of record. RMBL gives you bench space and housing in summer and access to the archive. Lila in the Knowledge Commons will be your closest collaborator on the data side. You've met her."
"Twice."
"She's good. She'll have opinions about your file structure within the first week. Let her have them."
He laughed.
She let a silence sit. She had thought she would want to ask him about the molecular side, about whether he'd consider running the DNA barcoding on the bowl-trap catches if a grant came through, but she found she didn't. Those were questions for later. The question now was simpler.
"Why do you want it," she said.
He took a breath. "I was going to say something about the long record."
"Don't."
"Okay." He looked at her, then at the window. "My grandmother had a place in Almont. We came up summers when I was a kid. The river was different then. I know everybody says that. But it was. There were caddis hatches in June you could read a book by. I learned the bees because of an undergrad class but I stayed because of — this." He gestured vaguely west. "I don't want to leave. The seasonal work has been one foot out the door every September. I'm tired of it. I want to be somebody who lives here and does this work and gets to be married and have a dog."
"Do you have a dog?"
"Not yet. Sam is allergic to the idea of one until we have a yard."
"Get the yard," she said. "There are houses in Almont still, if you're willing to drive."
"That's what we're thinking."
She liked him. She had liked him for three years. The question was not whether to hire him; the question was what she was hiring him into, and whether she could be honest about it.
Erin came in at two-forty with her laptop under her arm and a tea in a steel cup. She was the district director and she had been since 2034 and she had the specific tiredness of a person who spent her weeks talking to ranchers about water and her evenings talking to a board about money. She sat down and pulled up Devon's file on her screen and then closed the laptop again, which Marisol took as a kindness.
"Marisol speaks well of you," Erin said. "I'm going to ask you the thing I ask everybody. We can fund this position for three years out of the reserve and the ag-extension match. After that it's grants and prayer. Are you comfortable with that?"
Devon thought about it. "Is it more or less stable than seasonal?"
"More."
"Then yes."
"Good." Erin half-smiled. "I had a longer version of that question prepared."
They talked logistics for ten minutes — start date, the federal background check that had gotten faster lately, the shared vehicle, the question of whether the district truck or the RMBL truck would be primary in summer (the RMBL truck, they agreed, because it had the rack already). Erin asked about his references and he gave them. She wrote two names down on the legal pad she still carried into every meeting.
Then Erin said, "I want to say one thing before I leave you two. The board approved this position in July because the alfalfa report this spring scared them. It was not because they finally understood the science. I want you to know that. The reason you have a job is that the bees are visibly in trouble in a way that hits a balance sheet. The reason the job is worth having is different. I'm not going to pretend those are the same reason."
Devon nodded slowly. "Understood."
"All right." Erin stood. "I'll be in my office. Marisol, swing by before you go."
When she left, the room felt larger.
"You're going to offer me the job," Devon said.
"I'm going to recommend you to Erin and she's going to offer you the job on Monday, probably late morning. Is there anything you need to think about over the weekend?"
"Salary," he said. "I'd like a thousand more than the posting. Sam and I ran the numbers."
"I'll ask. I think she'll say yes."
He stood up and gathered the binders into a stack and then set them back down because they weren't his yet. They walked out into the parking lot together. The maple had dropped more leaves in the last two hours. The light was the long west light of late September, the kind that made the Palisades look closer than they were.
"Tell Sam thanks for the syrup," Marisol said.
"I will." He opened the truck door. "Hey — the upper transect. The protocol binder. Whose handwriting is that, in the margins of the 2029 section?"
"Billie's."
"I thought so. I wanted to be sure."
He drove away. Marisol stood in the lot a moment longer, then went back inside to find Erin, because she wanted to argue for the thousand dollars before the weekend started and she had a draft of the argument already half-written in her head.