“I heard my parents talking a couple nights back,” Larry said. “My dad was saying how he ran into Bud Scruggs, down at Legion Hall. Even though my dad was the one who said I shouldn’t hang out with you anymore, he said it made him feel bad listening to the guy talk about your family the way he was.”

“When I grow up,” Naomi said, “I’m never living in a place like this. I’m moving someplace where people don’t get all huffy just because you’re a little different.”

“You’d better move to Mars, then,” said Larry.

They had come to the windbreak of Russian olive and poplar, the place where the tractor marks stopped. The three of them stepped more gingerly now, past the rusting remains of an old tractor body and a circle of stones that had served, long ago, as the spot where Nate and his father built their campfires. Off to one side, partly concealed in scrub, lay the skeleton of a cow, so perfectly in place, it could have served as the illustration in some animal husbandry anatomy textbook.

“I saw a painting in a library book one time by this famous artist named Georgia O’Keeffe,” Naomi said, studying a piece of bone bleached by the sun. “She paints things like cow skulls all the time, in a way that makes you see how beautiful they are. I wish I could bring one of these bones home, so I could draw it, but my mom would kill me.”

Nate looked around, hoping to see the rifle. He remembered his dad telling him how this was really the prettiest spot on their whole four hundred acres, and for the first time he could see what he’d meant. Where the rest of their land stretched almost perfectly flat all the way to the horizon, here was this one little rise, marked by the poplar trees. Just next to one of them was the stone they’d set down to remind them of the place they’d buried their time capsule seven years ago. He knelt down and brushed his hand through last summer’s dry grass. He touched something hard and cold.

“I found the marker,” Nate told his friends.

“You should be the one to dig it up,” Larry said, handing Nate the shovel they’d brought.

He plunged the blade into the muddy ground and began to dig. The hole was almost a foot deep when he finally hit metal.

“It’s like a real treasure hunt,” Naomi said. “Like finding the Dead Sea Scrolls or something.”

“Not quite,” Nate told her, lifting out the gray metal box and placing it on the muddy ground. “Still, a lot has happened since we buried this thing.” Naomi handed him her bandana to wipe the dirt off. He unfastened the clasp on the box.