Low Water

The snow peaked on the ninth of March at half of median. The river peaked on the sixth of May at a hundred fifty-four against a middling year's three hundred ninety-five. On the fourteenth of May the Wilder goes on call at eighteen eighty-three, eleven weeks early.

The order is not the one anybody expects. Undecreed ditches come off first, then every decreed one that cannot measure what it takes — so an eighteen ninety-one plank weir goes dry while nineteen eleven concrete keeps running. He explains it right, once, to a man who believes him. By Sunday the café will have it backwards.

The call went on in May and has not come off. Every ditch junior to eighteen eighty-three has been dry for weeks, and less reaches the senior's ditch than the river's fall explains. Her water runs a mile and the ground takes it. The last two miles of the oldest ditch on the Wilder are dust.

A Denver lawyer buys coffee at half past two, in front of the whole room, and lays out the case that will be made against Dale Merritt: four facts, all true, none of them requiring anybody to say he lied. The engineer will not sign a determination off a model. She wants it measured, in the river, by hand.

A man stands up at the annual meeting in the Grange hall at Sarvis in November and says he has sold his shares, and that he would rather the room had it from him than off a piece of paper. A hundred and twenty of four hundred eighty — a quarter of the company — and the buyer means to take that water forty miles west.

The court will not hand a buyer a decree. It asks one question: how much of what went on those six hundred acres was consumed and never came back to the river. There is exactly one continuous account of what that ditch took, in one man's hand, seventeen water years of it in a box on a shop shelf. Both sides will build a study on it, and neither of them will be lying.

The spring above the Halloran place has come through every dry summer anybody can name. This year it is down to a gallon a minute, and Dale Merritt carries a bucket up the last third of that pitch to get a number, because a number is the only thing anybody below it can use.

Above the spring is a bench of thirty-one lots, and on each one a well that is exempt: thirty-five acres, one well, fifteen gallons a minute, about an acre-foot a year. Every one of those permits was issued by the state and every one is being complied with. Nobody up there is cheating. Dale is not an owner on that bench and not an injured party, his office does not administer those wells and cannot be made to, and there is no right on the ground to argue about. What is left is a road, thirty-one mailboxes, and a man walking up to the first door with nothing behind him but the number in his hand.

A hundred acre-feet out of the company's storage at Cinnabar, sold to a shareholder at the tail of the Pilgrim, delivered in three runs of twenty days. The company president says it is the first one written in this county in his time, and on the line that asks who will verify delivery Dale Merritt prints his name and his title in full, against a quantity of water that has never been measured at all.

It comes down twenty-eight river miles of a free river, past five decreed headgates with no claim on it, in the same channel as everything else, and water carries no name. The company bought a hundred and thirty in order to be handed a hundred, because the state computed the loss in advance. Then at the far end the ditch runs, and the field below it is green at the top and pale in the last third, and it looks the way it looked last year, when he had not bought anything.