Chapter One

The earth of the Korowa Highlands was red and old and it kept things.

It kept the rain longer than other earth, dark under the surface for days after the sky had finished. It kept the heat of the afternoon deep into the night, so that a barefoot child crossing a yard after dark could feel the whole day still in the ground. And it kept footprints. After the rains, the red dirt held a footprint for a week, sometimes two.

Dara’s father believed the earth kept more than footprints. He never said it. She knew it from the way he touched the ground.

She was seven the morning he took her up the spine of the High Ridge, early, the mist still lying in the valleys. He walked the way he always walked, like the ground had been expecting him, and she half-ran beside him, two of her strides to one of his.

At a stretch of dirt still dark from the night’s rain, he stopped. He crouched and laid his whole hand flat against the ground. He did it the way the church people touched the Book. Palm open. Still.

Dara crouched beside him and did the same. Her hand fit inside the shadow of his.

“Running,” her father said, “is how you leave a mark on the world.”

He rose and walked out across the soft dirt, and she walked beside him. When she looked back there were two lines of footprints along the ridge. His were deep. Hers hardly showed.

She stopped and studied them. Then she turned around, balanced on one leg with her arms out, and put her small foot inside one of his.

It swallowed hers whole. She stood there in the middle of her father’s footprint and looked up to see if he had seen.

Her father laughed.

It came out of him all at once, a big laugh that bent him over with his hands on his knees, and she laughed too without knowing what was funny.

She was seven and she had heard that laugh maybe four times in her life. She kept count. Other children in the village collected stones, or feathers, or bottle tops. Dara collected her father’s laughs. There was nowhere to keep them and nobody to show them to. She kept them anyway.

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She was eight the day of her first race.

It was a children’s race, a chalk line in the cropped grass of the village field and a ribbon strung between two poles a hundred meters off, with half the Highlands sitting on blankets and the food already out. Dara stood at the chalk in a borrowed kit two sizes too big, and her heart was going hard, and she kept looking at the wrong things. Her feet. The chalk. The other children, who were all taller. The grass between her and the ribbon.

She didn’t hear her father come up behind her. His hands settled on her shoulders, one on each, and turned her until she faced straight down the field.

“The race is too big from here,” he said.

She looked up at him. He pointed at the tape.

“Don’t start here. Start there. See yourself there first. Then come back and run.”

She looked at the ribbon. She looked at it a long time, long enough that the noise of the field went somewhere else and something in her went quiet. The ribbon stopped being far away. It was just where she was going to be.

The whistle went and she ran. The strange part — the part she never told anyone — was that none of it felt like going somewhere new.

She won by so much that the cheering had laughing in it. Her father didn’t cheer. When she found him at the edge of the field, he put his hand on her head, briefly, the way he put it on the ground. Then there was the food, and the blankets, and somebody’s radio, and the long gold evening.

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The rain held the footprints on the ridge for nine days.

On the ninth day she walked up alone to look at them before the weather took them back. Two lines, side by side. One of his with her small print inside it.

She stood there a while. Then she ran home, downhill the whole way, as fast as she could go, for no reason at all.