Chapter 19: The Creek

"Fluids," I said. "Two lines. Wide open."

Lucille was already tearing the kits.

The pharmacy tech came running from the tack room in her pajamas with the bag I'd been saving for the worst night.

It was the drug that binds metal in the blood and carries it out through the kidneys.

We had six doses.

I gave the girl one.

Then I sat with her the rest of the night and watched her pressure, while her mother sat on a hay bale and held her foot.

"What do you drink at home?" I asked her mother around four.

"Water. From the tap."

"Town water."

"From the creek. Like everybody." She looked up. "Why?"

I didn't answer.

At six the girl opened her eyes and asked for toast.

Her mother put her face in the blanket and cried.

Stellan stood in the barn door with the sunrise behind him.

He'd been there all night.

"The windmill," he said.

I looked at him.

"We've been drinking well water since we got here," he said. "Every stray on this ranch. Nobody's sick."

"And everybody in the valley drinks the creek."

"Everybody in the valley drinks the creek."

We drove down to the county road bridge at seven, where Hollin Creek came out of the valley and ran under the asphalt.

He went down the bank on his heels and crouched at the water's edge.

He cupped some in his hand and smelled it.

His eyes closed.

"It's faint," he said. "But it's there."

I filled six specimen jars from six places along the bank.

The surgeon in the city, the one who'd taken the rancher's leg, owed me a favor.

I drove the jars to him myself.

He called me back the next afternoon.

"What did you dip these out of?" he said. "Silver's nearly forty times what it should be."

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