FADE IN: EXT. HIGHWAY 11, NORTHERN MINNESOTA, DAWN The sun is not up yet. The sky above the tree line is the color of a bruise fading, deep purple giving way to a gray green that will become gold in forty minutes. The road runs perfectly straight through a corridor of birch and aspen, their trunks white in the pre dawn light. Wet snow in the ditches, going gray, going soft. Late March in a county that does not hurry about it. VERA COLE (36) drives with one hand. She is lean, practical in the particular way of people who spend months a year outdoors doing physical work. Her hair is pulled back without ceremony. She wears field clothes, well worn, the specific garments of someone who has figured out over years exactly what she needs. The cab of the truck is clean. Not tidied. Clean, the way a room is clean when only one person has ever used it. Behind the seat, racked upright and strapped: a tripod, a prism pole, two cases in hard plastic. A gas station cup in the holder. She drinks from it without looking. On the shoulder, a deer carcass, weeks old, mostly gone. She passes it at seventy. The trees stand where the trees stand. Right at the edge of the cleared right of way, a straight green wall on both sides, exactly as far back as somebody once decided they should be. A green county sign goes by. HOVDE 14