Dimo has the compact, weathered look of someone who has spent decades bent over wet ground. His skin is ruddy and roughened by wind, with pale bands at the wrists where his sleeves usually sit. He stands with his weight on the outside edges of his boots, as if testing whether the earth is firm, and angles his head to line up walls, posts, and distant ridges. His coat smells faintly of chalk and river mud. The unexpected detail is a tiny, carefully stitched patch depicting a plump goose on the inside of his collar, a keepsake from a childhood fair.

Dimo is methodical and exacting, yet more compassionate than he wants his clients to know. He can be generous with laborers and rigid with landowners, but the moment someone questions his judgment he clings to technicalities. When calm, he listens carefully and admits uncertainty; when embarrassed, he becomes brisk and hides behind measurements. In private, he is sentimental about small keepsakes and embarrassed by that tenderness.

Dimo learned surveying from his mother, who mapped drainage ditches for tenant farmers and taught him that a line on a page could decide whose cellar flooded. Years ago, he ordered a drainage channel cut through land below Tovaren's holdings. A spring flood followed before the work was finished, drowning a field and forcing Dimo to choose between saving the survey records and helping trapped workers. He saved the workers, but the papers washed away. Since then, he has kept redundant notes and treated every measurement as a promise someone may later deny. Now he presses a dubious claim to the channel, arguing that his paid labor and original route give him rights to its use. Tovaren is an old connection who knows Dimo's work was essential, but also knows the claim could deprive nearby households of water. Dimo is still paying Kett, the foreman who finished the cut, and avoids Brag, a farmer whose lower field was ruined in the flood.