Elena has been digging at the rancho El Cedro since six eighteen in the morning. The spade is short-handled. The handle is worn wood where her hands have gripped it for seven years. The blade is soft metal, made for soil not stone, and at rancho El Cedro the soil is red and at forty centimeters becomes clay. Elena digs in squares thirty by thirty centimeters. Each square is a method. The method is a spade, a hole, a strike, and then forward.

At Pujiltic the rancho El Cedro is three hectares of land fenced with barbed wire. The madres buscadoras are fourteen today. The oldest is sixty-seven and is called Carmela. The youngest is twenty-eight and is called Lupita. Lupita has a son who disappeared on the eighteenth of January of this year. Her son is called Diego.

Elena's son is called Gabriel and disappeared on the fourteenth of November of two thousand nineteen. Six years. Six years and six months and seventeen days.

Elena digs in square G7 of the rancho, where the map they drew by hand the night before has a small red cross. The red cross had been made by Lupita, because Lupita had seen a hole freshly filled. A hole freshly filled is soil of a different color. Darker. Lupita knows.

At seven forty Elena's spade strikes something. It is not iron. Iron makes a full sound and this is a dull sound. Elena stops. She kneels. She continues with her hands.

The bone is white. It is a long bone, maybe a femur, maybe a humerus, and Elena does not know the difference because Elena has learned to dig but has not learned anatomy. The others arrive. Carmela kneels. Carmela says a femur. Carmela has learned anatomy since her granddaughter disappeared in two thousand twenty-one.

The bone is white and white is not soil. The bone is not a fence-post stake because fence-post stakes are rotted wood and this is bone. The bone is a human bone because the femurs of dogs are shorter and the femurs of pigs have a different curve and this does not have the curve of a pig. So it is human. So it is someone's son.

Elena stands up. She steps back two paces. She leaves the spade stuck in square G7.

Lupita looks at Elena. Lupita says nothing. Lupita's eyes are red but they have been red since January.

Eight hundred meters from rancho El Cedro there is another rancho. It is called Villa de Allende. It is in the municipality of Berriozábal. It is a federal reserve and inside the federal reserve someone burned flesh on the tenth of April of this year. Elena knows because Elena read the report. The madres have all read it. In the Villa de Allende reserve they found carbonized remains on the twenty-ninth of May, two days ago, and the carbonized remains are of two, maybe three people, and of one of the people they also found a tooth. A tooth is something that can give DNA. A carbonized femur bone cannot. So in the Villa de Allende reserve there is at least one person whose name they will know.

Elena knows. Elena knows that the son of one of the fourteen women present today might be at Villa de Allende, and Elena knows that Elena's son might be that tooth.

Carmela comes up to Elena. Carmela says Elena do you want others to go. Carmela says we can split up. Six women to Villa de Allende and eight here. Elena listens. Elena counts. Elena counts that at Villa de Allende someone is needed who can read the land registry map because the reserve is large and here instead the land is all in plain sight and here it is enough to dig.

Elena says I stay. Elena says Diego is here. Elena says Diego is Lupita's son.

Lupita hears her. Lupita comes over. Lupita does not speak. Lupita takes Elena's spade from square G7 and moves it to square G8 and starts digging again. Elena digs in G9. Carmela digs in G6. The others form a line.

By six in the afternoon the madres have found seventeen remains. Seventeen remains are not seventeen people because seventeen remains can be two people with many bones or four people with few bones. They do not know. The forensic examiner will know. The forensic examiner comes from Tuxtla Gutiérrez. The forensic examiner arrives tomorrow.

Seventeen remains. Elena has found four of them. The first was the femur. The other three are small and Carmela has not said what they were. Carmela only said to put them in the bag and to write the square and the time.

Lupita found a skull in square G8. Lupita cried for two minutes. Then she went on digging.

Around six thirty the madres leave the rancho on foot. Elena's spade stays stuck in square G9, blade in the ground, handle upright. Elena looks at it from outside the fence. Carmela tells her tomorrow you take it back. Elena nods.

Lupita walks beside Elena. Lupita says gracias, Elena. Elena does not answer. Elena counts. Elena counts seventeen remains, seven years, six months, seventeen days. Numbers are numbers. Tomorrow she comes back.

By the fence of rancho El Cedro, at seven in the evening, Elena's spade is still upright. A spade stuck in the ground is a spade that has found. A spade stuck in the ground is not a spade that has stopped.