“You guys probably have work to do,” Larry told them. “I just thought I’d stop over. It’s ages since I’ve been out here.”

“Come by again sometime,” Nate said.

“Hey, you ever dig up that old time capsule you and your dad buried that time?” Larry asked him. “I always thought about how cool it was, you two burying all that stuff.”

Nate hadn’t thought about the time capsule for a while. It had been years since he’d even been out to the animal graveyard, where he and his dad had buried it. That spot by the poplar trees had been his dad’s favorite place on the whole farm.

Thinking about how much his father loved it, how seldom anybody thought to go there, a thought came to Nate: The animal burial ground was one place he hadn’t gone looking for the gun.

“We should go out there sometime,” Larry said.

“How about now?” Nate said.

In five minutes they had their jackets on, and the three of them were making their way across the field. Though the snow had melted, the ground was still damp. The air was clear enough that they could see all the way to the Crazy Mountains along the horizon. Closer by, Nate studied the outline of the Landrys’ barn, a stand of cattle grazing on the nearby quarter, and the silhouette of the old green metal windmill his mom was always telling him to stay away from rising into the sky like a lone sentry.

“I’ve read about people burying time capsules,” Naomi said. “I just never actually knew someone who did it.”

“You had to know Nate’s dad,” Larry explained. “He’s just so crazy.” Unlike most people who’d been making that observation lately, he didn’t say it in a mean way. There was admiration in his voice.

Nate knew every inch of their farm, but walking the land now, aware that his family would be leaving soon, made everything seem newly precious—the song of the meadowlarks, the angle of the sun against the barn, the sweet smell of cow manure. He hated the sight of the rich soil lying fallow this way, with no new seed planted for the coming summer. Before, he’d always marked time by the growing season: cleaning and oiling the tractor, then bringing it out of the barn for the first spring plowing; putting in the seed and watching as the field slowly greened up; running the combine over their tall, golden fields and watching the grain shower down from the auger into the hopper at harvesttime; then making the runs to the elevator and the anxious moments of waiting for the final tally—how many bushels, how many dollars.