Deerflies sank into Mara’s skin like needle pricks as she tramped toward Loren’s place. The air felt monsoon muggy. It was hot and swampy between the tall grasses behind Trudy’s cabin. Mara peered around. Something felt off. No cows grazed in the fields. The past several months, she’d noticed the deer hadn’t bedded down here as often. Maybe from drought? Deer were smart. They knew not to breed when conditions changed. They knew not to make babies when the earth could not sustain them.

Trudy should have been out taking pictures or tending her garden—picking tomatoes, broccoli, cauliflower, all blooming wild as weeds. Why had she left? An empty bird feeder swung from a splintered fencepost. A low vibrating hum twitched in her ears, a crick in the neck, sallow, like the machinery of crickets, beetles, burnt-orange dragonflies. Except these weren’t bug sounds. She couldn’t tell what made the noise, but it wasn’t the bugs she’d grown accustomed to on the ranch.

A rustling in the sagebrush caught her attention. She turned.

“Trudy? That you, darling?”

A low growl rooted her to the ground. Her heart rapped, her mouth sandpapered. A mountain lion skulked in the brush. What was it doing here? They didn’t wander this far downhill. Never onto the ranch. A hiker had been attacked in the hills last year. What had she done to survive? Fought back? Mara couldn’t remember, and spry as she felt, she wasn’t strong enough to fend off an attack. As she considered her odds of staying still and hoping the lion moved on without noticing her versus defying her age and sprinting back toward Trudy’s cabin, she heard a loud grunting sound. The mountain lion was hunting a javelina, the skunk pig defeated before Mara had time to react. The lion gripped its prey as Mara circled back around to Trudy’s cabin and toward her own trailer. She needed a truck.

Something inside her siren-wailed. She should leave, hitch up her trailer and drive, that familiar tugging away. Her father had swept her to Europe, and she’d grown up, away. She hadn’t stopped running since. Until Trudy.

She’d almost made it to her truck when she noticed the moths, sheer-winged and flutterless on the hard-packed dirt. She stepped on them, but they were newly, softly dead. Nothing crunched beneath her boots. It was like stepping on wet leaves. Hundreds of them, moths dropped from the sky. She couldn’t leave. She had to check on Loren and find Trudy.

Seat pushed all the way forward so she could reach the pedal, Mara plowed the landscape. Still wearing her yellow coveralls and indigo bandanna, her hiking boots covered in mud, she splashed through the creek at its shallowest point, cut through the field behind Trudy’s house, smashing grass and weeds, across the gravel toward Loren’s cabin.