Anna let him ramble, even remembering to grunt or sigh- listening noises her sister had taught her. “It comforts people,” Molly had said. “Besides, it beats me having to say, ‘Anna, are you still there?’ into the damn phone every five minutes.”

The noises turned out to be worth a thousand times what Molly had paid AT amp;T for the phone time to teach her. A ranger could get more information from a few well-placed “oh reallys” and “uh-huhs” than from an hour’s by-the-book interrogation. People wanted to talk. Chewing over betrayals, disappointments, and unrealized hopes seemed to do for humans what licking wounds did for animals: a cleansing of poisons, a soothing of hurts.

Anna let Kenny talk, and she made Molly’s therapeutic sounds, but she didn’t listen. She had her own wounds to lick, her own dreams and disappointments. At that moment she would have given a week’s pay for one good hot, dry day, for the sight of one small fence lizard, the scent of sage on the wind.

The moment these thoughts blew in, Anna closed her mind to them. The lake didn’t allow for dreamers, not when the waves were three meters, not when a dilapidated sea anchor hung off the stern. The desert, with its curtains of heat and scoured, star-deep skies, was for dreaming. This land of mist and dark water took all of one’s mind up with the day-to-day chore of staying alive.

In the lee of Kamloops Island the water flattened out reassuringly. Even so, the Low Dollar was beginning to drag down the Belle’s stern. Anna cut throttle to an idle. All forward motion stopped immediately. She went up onto the deck where Hal stood staring morosely at the streaming blue hump that was his boat.

“We aren’t going to make the dock at Todd,” Anna told him.

“You can’t let her sink,” he said pitifully. “She’s not paid for.”

For a moment they stood in silence, the deck rocking gently. There was scarcely any wind, but thin lines of foam whipping white on the water beyond the Low Dollar never let them forget they were only there on sufferance.