In Dark River, the boats, skiffs, and other water travelers dry-docked back along the marina look dark and skeletal. Nevertheless there is a quiet power in it all.

With everything in silent repose, the situation calls for action, but no one knows what. Prayer hasn’t worked. Old songs haven’t worked. Everyone has dressed up and gone to the church and some have even fallen into spells and spoken in other languages, and so one day Ruth, who stands in good relations with the old ones, walks out where the water had been, eyeing things, the barren distances that were ocean, and, up close, she spots a shining brooch that had come from a woman who must have been leaning over the side of her husband’s old whaling ship. It might have been diamonds, but she thought it would curse her to touch it. She is watched from windows when she walks, as if she might never return, or the wave would come rushing in and drown her. What a shame that would be, with her long dark hair hanging down her back, her lovely form.

But then, her home is out there, between the black promontories. It is remote, but the boat never looks abandoned like the others, or uninhabited. Her clothes hang in the still air, airing out, if you could call it that, because she doesn’t want to waste any of her spare water on washing them. The boat, on land now, is silent as if awaiting her return.

But Ruth, walking, does not go to the Marco Polo. She is thinking, as Thomas had done, thinking of the old stories and how so many are still alive and true. She’d heard there was once a man called the Rain Priest who could take away curses or change the waters and call down the rains. He could call water to come. It was his gift. He was called when the signing of the treaty caused the old drought.

This was, according to the old stories of Thinking Woman, A’atsika ancient law before god had arrived with the missionaries, before they’d ever heard of Moses parting the waters. The Rain Priest was their Moses. He had saved them once and Ruth thinks this may be their only help. She is uncertain, but she thinks time is an element, like air and water and stone. It could be sailed on or dropped into or broken open. Sometimes it is entered like a dark cave and no one returns from it. They pass on to other places. So why shouldn’t time still be this way? Why should stories and truth have existed only in the past? Why shouldn’t the Rain Priest of “long ago” not be able to climb out of that crack of time from the past and crawl into today? Perhaps he could call the water back to them. Or maybe he had sons or grandsons and he taught them how to break a drought.

The past is its own territory, after its broken laws, its walked-over truths. Ruth knows this. And once people forget that territory of “the way it used to be,” the doorway back is hard to find. But it is still there, she knows it. Maybe it can be found.