The map had grown complicated without becoming complete. Several dotted lines led toward unexplored portions of the acreage. Tess had stopped trying to fill those gaps with guesses. Instead, she left them white and wrote questions in the margins where answers would eventually go.
One evening, Nora found her daughter at the barn wall with a ruler in one hand and the row ledger in the other. Tess was comparing the distance between two healthy trunks on the newest sketch. The pencil moved, stopped, and moved again.
"Trying to find another tree?" Nora asked.
"Trying to figure out where to put the next lane so we don't accidentally make it impossible to protect one."
Nora considered this. "That's a much less exciting sentence than the ones we used to say."
"And a more useful one."
Tess stepped back from the map. The marked pecan rows looked orderly on paper, but the actual property still required careful walking. Some trunks stood in open ground. Others were hidden by young privet that had flourished under the returning light. A few were surrounded by old stems strong enough to withstand several goat passes. Every uncovered tree changed the placement of the next fence, and every new fence altered how the goats could move safely.
"I think the next lane can follow this dotted line," Tess said. "It doesn't interfere with the access road. It might open the space behind the second row, and we can move the animals before they start testing those older trunks."
"What if there's nothing there?"
Tess smiled. "Then we'll write that down too."
Nora looked at her daughter's face and saw a confidence different from the one she had carried into the first summer. It was no longer the confidence of a young woman certain that good records would solve any problem. It was the steadier kind, built from accepting that records could reveal failure as clearly as success, and that both were useful if they changed what happened next.
The county returned for a routine access check not long after the first truffle sale. Ben Talley drove slowly down the lane in his white pickup, stopping where an early summer storm had dropped a branch over the shoulder. Nora had already cut it into manageable pieces and placed them beyond the cleared route. The gravel held, and the drainage toward the culvert was working better than it had during the first inspection.
"You're keeping after it," Talley said when she met him near the turnaround.
"It keeps after me," Nora replied.
He looked toward the numbered pecan rows. "I heard you found an orchard in here."
"We did. Or the goats did. Depends on who tells the story."
"The goats did the county a favor, then."
Nora thought of the first collapsed fence, the wounded doe, the rusty wire, and the days when she could not imagine a clear line reaching the culvert. "They helped," she said. "They weren't the whole job."