“I want to thank you, Ben,” Miriam said. “I’m quite proud that I climbed the ladder, and I never could have done it without you. I’d have stood down here, ached to climb up, and wouldn’t have had the nerve. You gave me courage.”

“Me too,” Sadie said.

They left Bandelier and drove up the steep, twisting road through the canyon, and out onto the mesa. After a time Ben asked, “Are you guys hungry? I am. The hotel packed us a picnic lunch.”

“I could eat a monster,” Sadie said, and rubbed her stomach.

“I could eat a monster, too,” Amelia said.

“How about let’s park and have us a picnic in that grove of trees, in the shade, over there?” Ben suggested.

“Now that sounds like a wonderful idea,” Miriam said.

Moments later, Ben parked in the shade near an old streambed. They removed the picnic basket from the rear, and Amelia spread the plaid tablecloth while Sadie set out paper plates. Miriam and Ben unpacked ham-and-cheese and turkey sandwiches, sealed containers of macaroni salad, sliced ginger pears, iced tea, plastic glasses, and utensils.

Amelia waved them to sit. “Very nice.”

They ate in silence. Then Ben pointed to the dry streambed. “Water flowed here recently.” Leaning forward, with his fingers he traced a bootprint that was firmly fixed and clearly visible in the hardened silt.

“How do you know that?” Sadie bent to look. “It’s just dried-up dirt.”

“Look closely. That’s the print of a modern-day sneaker. This footprint was made after a rain, when the streambed was still muddy, not quite dry.”

Miriam joined her daughter and examined the stiff crust. “Yes, I see it.” She sat cross-legged on the hard earth and looked about her. “The dryness of this whole place mystifies me, and yet there seems to be so much life below the surface of what appears dead in this heat.”

“Heat drought is what they believe drove the inhabitants from this area, from their pueblos and the land,” Ben said. “Imagine what that must be like. You’ve been growing food for years and suddenly no rain and no food, and you have to pack up everything you own and move. I wonder how often that happened to those people?”

“We’ve moved a lot with just our clothes,” Sadie said as if relating the most ordinary of things.

She rarely spoke of her father, a drunk, or of being awakened at night by her mother, being bundled into a car, and going off into the night, until they finally arrived in Covington. Her father had died when he drove his car headfirst into a river. To Sadie that meant she and her mother would never have to move again.