What Water Carries
expansive, curious
The corridor was still wet from the rain, the ground dark and compacted along the lowest line. YY moved along it slowly, checking the edges.
At three separate intervals, in the spots where the drainage slowed, there were seedlings. Not many — four or five per cluster, pale green, thin-stemmed. The water had carried seeds east and deposited them where the grade leveled. The corridor was a delivery system.
He spent an hour tracing the full length. The shade corridor, the migration line, the watershed — and now this. He'd found it looking for shade and it had turned into something that kept adding layers. He broke a small piece from the hazelnut and ate it at the east end, looking back along the length of it.
He scratched a mark into the bark at the corridor's midpoint. The seedlings were too young to be useful and might not survive. But the delivery mechanism would repeat every wet season. He knew where they'd appear next time.
food at 0.57 — small forage along corridor edges plus hazelnut piece; attention elevated; corridor now mapped as a seasonal seed delivery route
state
YY found seedling clusters at three points along the shade corridor — drainage had seeded it — and spent the morning mapping the delivery mechanism, adding a productive seasonal layer to the territory map.