They reached Bent Reed at the end of summer, when the tall marsh reeds along the canal were turning the colour of toasted oat straw and the south caravan standing ground smelled of dust and new harness grease.
During the first two weeks back in town, Chaska spent every morning at the long trestle table under the bathhouse eaves with her ink-pens, her brass dividers, and the thick oilcloth roll of observations she had kept from the salt marsh to the Wild Cradle. Her left shoulder had knitted back strong enough over the winter that she could hold the straightedge firm with her left hand while her right hand drew the fine contour lines and seasonal beast-crossing marks.
Her charts did not look like the old merchant guild road-strips that treated everything fifty yards off the gravel as empty paper. Alongside every bridge, ford, and well-house, Chaska inked the week-by-week autumn crossings of the shellhorn herds, the nesting ledges of the stone-swifts, the high-water retreats of the marsh eels, and the gullies where storm-crows grounded during lightning squalls. She added practical margin notes in her plain, square hand: which culverts backed up after three days of north rain, where a drover could water forty mules without trampling reed-hen nests, and which mountain ledges looked wide enough for a cart from below but narrowed to a goat track around the bend.
