Mara’s mother had tried to warn her about returning to New Mexico, the Land of Enchantment (as transplants like Mara’s family called it), but Mara had been too young to take the warning seriously. Had it been just after Los Alamos? Just after Chaiwa and Lizard’s Tail? Mara couldn’t remember. But Chaiwa’s words haunted her: The earth will find a way to reclaim itself. Though seventy-five years had passed, Mara Rothstein still heard her nanny’s voice echoing from the grave, or what she imagined must have been a grave, a warning siren she mistook for a beckoning call.

Late that morning, nearly lunchtime, Chaiwa’s voice shivered louder than usual through the cottonwoods. The corrugated metal of Mara’s workshop contrasted sharply against the postcard-blue New Mexico sky. Barn doors wide open, she had an unobstructed view of the creek, watercress lining its slippery bed, evergreens and piñon foresting in the distance, the red-orange ocotillo and Mexican poppy, the muted jade and mauve rabbitbrush. The wildlife nearest the horses and grazing cattle were small and benign. In the distance, beyond the rolling sage hills, coyotes and mountain lions skulked after sunset, though they rarely bothered anything inside the fences.

Wearing her usual attire of sunflower-yellow coveralls that Trudy said made her happy and an indigo bandanna covering her faded-amber curls now streaked silver, Mara perched on the swivel stool at her metalwork bench, which had lately monopolized much of the studio. She hammered the delicate cactus wrens she was constructing from scrap copper to alight the spines of the barbed cane-cholla sculpture she’d been constructing in cast iron for weeks. Above each tap of her hammer, creek sounds and the warbling of sandhill cranes echoed through the chamber of her workshop, one of the reasons she’d chosen this location on the ranch. Working metal beside the water, she seemed to meld with the landscape.

A few minutes later, the distinct sound of children’s laughter called her from her copper bird on the anvil block. The three boys who lived down the dirt road on the neighboring ranch were splashing in the creek again. They never paid attention to the no-trespassing sign, but she didn’t mind them swimming. She just didn’t want the responsibility if they drowned themselves.