She spent the next hour building a guard from two spare fence posts and sections of welded wire panel. She braced it away from the trunk far enough that the goats could not press their noses through to the bark. Then she stood back and examined the result. The guard was ugly and crooked, and a dozen vines remained high in the branches. It was still the first thing on the property she had worked to protect rather than remove.
When Tess arrived after work, she found Nora measuring the trunk with a flexible tape and writing the result in the ledger. "What did you find?" Tess asked.
"Something worth not hurting."
Tess stepped closer and looked up into the leaves. "What kind of tree?"
"Not sure."
"Then why the number?"
"Because I want to know if there's another one."
They attached a small numbered tag to the guard, not the living trunk, and noted the position on the lane map. Tess chose the number one and drew a square around it. The symbol seemed optimistic. Nora did not object.
Three days later, the second green column gave way under the goats' browsing. Nora stopped them sooner this time, cut the vines herself, and exposed another broad trunk. Its bark carried the same ridged gray pattern. The low swelling was there too, a thickened seam that ran unevenly around the base several inches above the soil.
Tess came with a measuring tape before Nora finished clearing the last canes. She measured the distance between the trees and wrote it down twice, checking that she had not skipped a step. The number meant little alone. It became interesting when they found a third patch of similar bark through the next lane.
Nora stood beside the second tree and looked back. For the first time, she could see the wire guard around the first through the narrow opening the goats had made. Then she turned toward the third. The positions were not random. Three points lay almost on a line, though the ground between them rose and dipped enough to make a casual observer miss the alignment.
"People plant things in rows," Tess said quietly.
"People also build houses in the shade," Nora replied. "Wade warned me not to decide too much from one tree."
"There are three."
"Three is enough to ask a better question. It isn't enough to answer it."
Tess added the third symbol to the sketch and made a note about spacing. On her next visit, she brought a carpenter's line and a small compass. Nora laughed at the equipment but helped her position it. The line passed near all three trunks, close enough to make them both stop joking.
For the first time, Nora changed the direction of her planned grazing route for a reason that had nothing to do with reaching the culvert quickly. She angled the next narrow browse lane along the invisible line the three trees had begun to draw. It was a small choice on a wet afternoon, but it changed the nature of their work. They were no longer just removing vegetation. They were learning to see what the vegetation had hidden.