As is usual in the ranch world, things went from bad to worse. The drought settled deeper, like a lamprey eel sucking at the region’s vitals. He had half-seen the scores of trucks emblazoned CPC—Consolidated Petroleum Company—speeding along the dusty road for the past year, and knew that they were drilling for coal-bed methane on public land adjacent to his ranch. They pumped the saline wastewater laden with mineral toxins into huge containment pits. The water was no good, he knew that, and it seemed a terrible irony that in such arid country water could be worthless. He had always voted Republican and supported energy development as the best way to make jobs in the hinterland. But when the poison wastewater seeped from the containment pits into the groundwater, into Bull Jump Creek, into his alfalfa irrigation ditches, even into the household well water, he saw it was killing the ranch.