The three ranchers were still laughing when the rope nearly pulled the young woman beneath the water.
For almost twenty minutes, they'd stood on the grassy bank of an old cattle pond in southern Halbert County, watching a beautiful thirty-four-year-old farm woman struggle with something they insisted was nothing more than a buried tree stump.
She was knee-deep in dark, muddy water, her faded blue denim overalls soaked almost to the waist. A blue-and-green plaid shirt clung to her arms, and strands of chestnut-brown hair had escaped the messy ponytail at the back of her head.
Her face was flushed from exertion.
Her tan leather work gloves were slick with pond mud.
And the thick rope stretched from her hands toward the middle of the water, where something heavy had caught the grappling hook she'd thrown earlier.
"Ma'am, that's mud," the oldest rancher called. "That's all that's ever been down there."
The woman glanced over her shoulder.
"Then it won't cost you anything to watch."
The other men laughed.
The heavyset rancher leaned against a wooden fence post, shaking his head.
"She's going to drag the whole pond out if we let her."
His companion, a gray-mustached farmer wearing a beige shirt and faded baseball cap, took another sip of coffee.
"I've seen folks do some strange things with inherited property, but this one's new."
The woman ignored them.
Her name was Naomi Vance.
She had returned to the forty-acre farm after a painful divorce, two years of financial uncertainty, and the death of the grandmother who had spent most of her life protecting the land.
Naomi wasn't a professional farmer.
She didn't own expensive equipment.
She didn't have a large bank account or a husband to help repair the broken fences.
What she did have was ten years of experience examining irregular water-system data.
And for the past seven weeks, the pond had been giving her numbers that made absolutely no sense.
The waterline had risen during a drought.
The surrounding ground was sinking.
Cattle avoided one particular section of the bank.
And every evening, just before darkness, something beneath the water produced a low, irregular bubbling sound.
The local ranchers told her it was mud.
They told her she was imagining things.
They told her to stop wasting her time on a pond that had been there longer than any of them.