Ecosystem collapse

Ecosystem collapse is presented as a slow, tangible unmaking of the living landscape: streams warm and shrink, familiar fish disappear, drought kills livestock, and forests stand dead or burn. Its significance is not limited to a shortage of resources. For Hig, the loss of trout and the changing conditions of the creeks are losses of a place, a practice, and a way of recognizing home. The novel sets these changes alongside the pandemic’s human toll, but does not reduce ecological decline to a consequence of disease or social collapse.

A changing climate and accumulating losses

The signs arrive through departures from familiar seasonal conditions. In mid-April, a warm wind comes down from the mountains when Hig expects snow-cold air. The old seasonal benchmarks have become, in his view, mostly nostalgia: although there was snow in the mountains that winter, the peaks had been bare for two successive years before it. That contrast makes the present snowfall no assurance that the former patterns have returned. Hig is more frightened by this climatic instability than by attacks or disease.

The change is cumulative rather than a single catastrophe. A creek that nearly dries during one summer requires digging in its bed to gather enough water for drinking; half the cattle die. The stream continues to decline, and the next summer arrives with startling speed. After roughly two weeks of summer conditions, flowers are mostly gone. Water is visibly lower each day, and the creek bed seems to expose its ribs. The loss of water threatens not only trout but also carp, catfish, crawfish, and frogs. The signs point to a worsening drought and warming, while leaving the precise causes of each species’ decline unstated.

Warming waters and the disappearance of fish

Trout are the most intimate measure of ecological loss for Hig. He remembers brook, rainbow, brown, cutthroat, and hybrid trout as once-present kinds, then describes them as gone from the waters he knows. He had loved fishing for them, and their disappearance is the loss that makes him imagine waking in tears. Later, when he fishes in the mountains, he understands the trout to be absent because the streams have become too warm.

Fishing does not stop, but it changes with the water. Hig catches suckers and carp from the bottom, teaching himself to accept their taste and bones, and sometimes uses dry flies as carp begin feeding more at the surface. The adaptation is practical, but it cannot replace the old fishery. On one occasion he catches five carp and notices that they are thin; they seem to be starving, perhaps because water temperatures or their food supply have changed. He unhooks them carefully, holds them in the current until they recover, and lets them go. Then he stops fishing. The scene shows that survival knowledge can adjust to altered conditions without restoring what has been lost.

Place, memory, and ecological grief

The creeks matter to Hig beyond their value as food. Before the collapse, walking and fishing beside a stream could feel like a form of belonging: smooth stones, cliffs, spruce, and a cutthroat making rings in a pool belonged to a world in which he felt at home. He also associates Melissa with that sense of connection to the country. After the trout disappear, the prospect of losing the creek itself becomes a still greater loss.

Even after the trout are gone, Hig seeks stretches of forest that remain green or are beginning to recover. He sets down his pack and the Green kayak sled, breathes the smell of running water, cold stone, fir, and spruce, and remembers a time when many things still lived. The fishing rod he assembles is a Sage pack rod his father gave him for his sixteenth birthday; Hig taught himself to use it and learned from Uncle Pete. These details connect environmental change to memory and inheritance: the creek is both habitat and the setting of a practice carried across generations. His attention to it makes ecological grief more than a metaphor for personal bereavement; the fish and the place are themselves the objects of mourning.

Drought, survival, and the human world

Ecological decline changes the terms of human survival. The drought at the canyon ranch contributes to Pops and Cima’s decision to leave: the creek’s near-drying, the loss of half their cattle, and worsening warmth make the ranch less secure. Elsewhere, Hig’s daily patrol and food gathering take place in a world where people are also threatened by violence and disease. Nine years after the flu, the flu and the subsequent blood disease have killed most people, while survivors face continuing danger. These calamities overlap in the narrative, but the environmental evidence has its own course: shrinking water and missing species cannot be treated simply as a background to human disaster.

The city of Grand Junction makes that overlap visible in another way. From the air, Hig sees cottonwoods in the river parks that are still leafy on one side, while other old trees and street trees are skeletal or dead. The city is extensively burned, and the visible destruction of its built environment sits beside the drought-stricken trees. The scene does not establish that the fires caused the wider ecological changes; instead, it places damaged human settlements and stressed living systems within the same devastated landscape.

Uneven return, without restoration

The landscape is not wholly devoid of life. Bison move down toward their old range, as do wolves and bighorn sheep. Hig has seen osprey near Jasper’s creek and bald eagles, and he notes the abundance of mice, hawks, and crows. Spruce, fir, and aspen are also coming back among miles of dead forest. These observations register movement and renewal, but they do not cancel the losses. Trout and elk remain gone from Hig’s account, and the returning animals and trees coexist with drought, dead woods, and streams under pressure.

Hig remembers that in the old cycles, monsoon rains and snow would be followed by the return of life, though he never understood how species such as trout, cutthroat, leopard frogs, and salamanders returned. In the changed conditions, he can no longer rely on that renewal; even the possibility of recovery is uncertain. This distinction gives the ecosystem’s partial resilience its weight. The novel allows for surviving species and regrowth, yet refuses to present them as proof that the earlier balance has been restored. For Hig, the essential measure is not whether anything remains alive, but whether the familiar relations among water, season, habitat, and life can continue.