With its old bed no longer intact, the creek seemed to feel its way at first, running in spurts down mud paths and tractor tracks. And then like a horse that smelled home, the water began moving faster into the bottom of the basin. It spread out there, slowed by the mud, but eventually a stream made its way to the far end, where it was stopped by our dam.

We watched and watched, till glistening pools of water pocked the whole basin bottom and crept up the concrete of the spillway.

Our reservoir was filling.

I didn’t know who started yelling. Somebody. And then we all picked it up.

Maggie said later her mother flew out the house, scared that something was wrong.

But it was just us. The 597th crowing to the world what we’d done.

Everything was moving right fast that last part of April. A yellow green haze had settled over the land almost overnight, and now the earth was taking on all the shades of early leaves and new grass.

The Montanans called it green up, as if it was a season of its own. They said green up in throwaway tones like they were hoping to hide how they felt, but their eyes gave away how they welcomed it.

We pitched ourselves into helping it along. We planted the rest of the willows, along with all kinds of baby trees a CCC nursery sent us. On the prairie land marked for restoring, we seeded native grasses. We rechanneled gullies to direct runoff into the reservoir instead of onto the county road.

There were setbacks, sure: A batch of poplar saplings died without ever leafing out. One of the stake trucks went out of control going down a hill and crashed hard enough to cause damage, though luckily nobody got hurt. A flash thunderstorm washed out a bunch of shrubs, reminding us all how vulnerable soil was when it didn’t have a good network of roots holding it.

And as April ended, off and on wet, rainy weather kept things off and on muddy.

But the setbacks were far outweighed by the progress we could see all around us. At the rate the reservoir was filling, water would soon be going over the spillway, running down the old creek bed and on through the Lundgren place again. Over there, the first of the seeded fields was coming up, the curving strips of tiny wheat sprouts a darker color than the younger barley next to them.

And each day brought surprises. A mate for that red-winged blackbird Apple had spotted, along with a passel of their relatives.

A killdeer putting on a show of having a broken wing, to divert the attention of anyone about to discover her ground nest.

A mule deer atop the berm one morning.

A red fox running off.

Wildflowers.

Chapter 32