“What if they aren’t?” someone else says, sitting on a pallet in a corner.

This, too, is considered, because then it may not work.

The man looks at Ruth. “Because it is you who ask, we’ll see what can be done.” This man is called Feather, a name his wife called him because he seemed to float everywhere. She even noticed that he floated above the water when he was out fishing and didn’t know he was being watched.

He goes outside to look at the dried-up place and at the sky, and he walks about. Returning a long time later, he tells Ruth, “I think it’s possible. But it will take some work. What do you have to offer?”

“What do you mean?”

“A sacrifice.”

“Haven’t I already made one?”

“Bitterness won’t work in that world.”

Ruth is embarrassed. She is turning bitter, is becoming like Thomas, which is what she fears.

Money or gemstones are not good enough, even though an octopus might have taken them, being a lover of coins and shining things. A healer, too, if it would pay for gasoline to a ceremony. This Rain Priest, once they could find him up north, if they found him, would want something more. Rain is almost too much to ask for. Asking for the water to come back to the river is even more. It means changes not just here, but also inland. And to ask to be given an ocean is like asking to change the earth’s tilt on its axis or to ask for the moon to move away from its course.

“It will require a great deal. Yes, it will take a large sacrifice.”

Since it is Ruth who asks, the sacrifice will be hers. She thinks about the Zodiac she has bought to replace the old dinghy. She bought it with some of her salmon money. She offers that. “That would be good,” says old Feather, following her thinking. He knows about the new Zodiac. He’d seen it a few times out there before the drought, orange and moving quickly, better than the cheap and beaten-up dinghy of her father’s, and it was light so it lifted easily onto her fishing boat with ropes so she could haul it. He is thinking, rubbing his chin whiskers. “But it’s not enough. For all that, he might want more. I think he’d want your fishing boat.”

She doesn’t act surprised, even though something in her stomach lurches. She considers it. Maybe drought isn’t so bad. This crosses Ruth’s mind. Maybe there will be a tidal wave, as some have said. Maybe it is just part of the natural rhythms of the earth and sea, part of the weather cycle, as the newsmen say. She’s already lost so much. Her son. Isn’t that enough? She even feels angry. She’s worked so hard for what she has. Harder than the others. Alone, too. And then the men, angry at her protest, stole beloved items from her boat. But then she exhales and seems to crumple a bit. “Yes. Okay, if that is what it’s going to take.”