By September 2009, three West Texas counties had turned the color of bone. Nine months without meaningful rainfall had emptied stock tanks, killed what remained of the native pasture grass, and forced ranchers to haul their cattle away in long, desperate convoys. The county road was lined with abandoned hay feeders, broken windmill pumps, and fences surrounding land that no longer seemed capable of supporting life. Yet half a mile beyond that road, something impossible remained green.
Four hundred sixty acres of land that everyone had once called worthless were covered with thriving patches of nopal cactus. Thousands upon thousands of thick green pads rose from the dry soil, their waxy surfaces catching the morning sunlight while the surrounding ranches lay brown and lifeless. The plants stood in carefully arranged rows and broad contour-following bands, separated by narrow access lanes, native vegetation buffers, and shallow drainage channels. Even after months without rain, the Caldwell ranch looked like a stubborn island of green in an ocean of dust.
And kneeling among those plants was Marlene Caldwell.
She was thirty-nine years old, with beautiful chestnut-brown hair tied into a loose ponytail, sun-darkened skin, and the strong, graceful features of a woman who had spent most of her adult life working outdoors. She wore a faded red-and-blue plaid shirt with the sleeves rolled to her elbows, dusty jeans, leather work gloves, and worn brown cowboy boots. Her pruning shears moved carefully around a mature nopal plant, removing a healthy pad that she placed into a wooden harvest crate. Sweat ran down her temple, but she barely noticed.
Beyond the fence, three men stood beside an empty cattle trailer.
Six years earlier, those same men had laughed so hard at Marlene's planting plans that one of them kicked over an entire crate of cactus pads. They had called her foolish, stubborn, and incapable of understanding the difference between farming and throwing money into the desert. They had predicted that her father's land would end up at a bank auction before the first cactus reached maturity. Now their own ranches were dying, and all three had come to the only property in the valley that was still producing green forage.
The oldest man removed his cowboy hat.
His name was Wade Haskins, and he owned nearly two thousand acres of grazing land northwest of Marlene's property. He was a heavyset fifty-eight-year-old rancher with a sunburned face, a gray beard, and an expensive silver belt buckle that looked strangely out of place against his dust-covered clothing. For thirty years, Wade had been one of the most influential cattlemen in the county. He had never needed to ask Marlene Caldwell for anything.