An excerpt form the first full draft of his new novel, "Stolen Horses".

The sun was touching the horizon as Leo and Carl topped the ridge on the way back to the house. Purples and reds shot over their heads and fanned out toward the east. The air was dead calm and the world was as quiet as it can be. Carl was thinking back on the afternoon, engrossed in the detail of memory, when a trio of grouse winged overhead. He wouldn't have known the grouse were anywhere near if Leo wouldn't have heard them and looked up. When Carl followed his dog's stare he saw the birds flying high above just as the intermittent chuckles and the whir of their wings reached his ears. They cut the watercolor sky like tiny turbo-powered footballs and it was clear that they had a destination in mind. Leo perked his ear and twisted his head, first at them, then at Carl. He wanted Carl to shoot but Carl had no intention of shooting. Their day was done and instead of focusing his attention for a shot Carl let his mind wonder at where the grouse might be going.

He fantasized that the locus of their flight might not be linear but temporal. "What if they are flying backward in time?" Leo's lip puffed out with exasperation. They continued to walk to the ridgeline but Carl's thoughts stayed with the departed grouse and the idea that they could fly back through the decades. It was impossible to say what the grouse were seeing once they topped the next hill. Perhaps they were now looking down on the original line-shack that great-grandfather Butler built when he left McDermitt, with the little herd of thin long-horns he took as his last pay-check. Maybe they watched Arlo Abrahamson, the poor Swedish emigrant who tried to farm the bench above the river, as he sank his new plow into the native sod. Carl imagines the next fall and the grouse searching that field less desperately than Arlo for the grain that never grew. Did they witness the tearful aftermath of the daughter, Anglea, sneaking away in search of opportunity on the night of for seventeenth birthday? The grouse must have flown over the desolate pastures of the thirties when almost none of their kind had habitat enough to survive. They saw the rest of the Abrahamsons leave in the battered pickup. And the Hansons and the O'Learys, and the Gialotties.

Maybe, Carl thought as he and Leo continued toward home, at that very moment the grouse were seeing floods and devastating winter storms. Migrating swans and buffalo. Perhaps they were flying to the eternal mating ground that was now paved under the new highway north of the town named after McDermitt. The bird book said that grouse did not usually fly far. But who really knew? Perhaps some grouse, like the family group that had careened over their heads, never came to Earth. Perhaps they had been flying over the Pawnee River Valley forever and knew the ephemeral nature of it all.

by Gervase Hittle

Summer's End, 2005.

Learning to Feel the Land

In my travels, I have marveled at mountains and forests, deserts and prairies, glaciers and grasslands. My travels have been by almost every mode of transportation: car, bus, train, motorcycle, bicycle and boat. I have always been an outdoorsman: hiking, camping, fishing, and hunting; so I always thought I had a pretty good feeling for the land.

By learning to feel the land, I do not mean to empathize with all the wonderful vistas through which we move; I do not mean being in awe of mountain meadows, alpine lakes, fields of grass and wildflowers or fields of grain by the miles. I do not mean looking back on blizzards and floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, droughts, earthquakes, and all those seemingly capricious acts of nature we all have suffered and survived. I mean something different.

By learning to feel the land I mean acquiring the ability to know how and why things are as they are: the way a thunderstorm sends waves of water in successive sheets down the grass of hillsides. The results appear to the passerby after the fact by recognizing that the grasses have been pushed over and have collected debris as if in a flood, because the water came so hard and voluminous and fast that it had neither the time to soak in nor to run gently into rivulets and streams; the way certain plants thrive in certain terrains and a few yards away may never venture, owing to the conditions for which we may not have a ready and accurate explanation.

Recently I was fortunate enough to spend a couple of days with Pat Murphy, a very highly trained and skilled botanist who serves as a consultant for rangeland management. We set up several new study sites and conducted an annual monitoring of previously established sites. He sees the flora of the land as if his eyes had tactile contact with that on which they focused. For example, with Dan and Jill on horseback and up on Zebell Table (a mesa south of the Cheyenne River) we looked for some large circles that we had seen before and that show on Pat's aerial photographic maps. We have all heard the local theories about them, but they are too large to be tepee rings, and could perhaps be where haystacks had once been built. Pat looked at them, noticed the mushrooms growing on the rings' perimeters and immediately explained how the growth cycle of the mushrooms created the rings. At a glance he just about put the local wisdom on this phenomenon to rest.

Elaine Ebbert and Mark Keffler work for The Nature Conservancy. They are friends of ours and are very knowledgeable and well-trained botanists. It is a treat to explore the pastures and river bottomland, and the wooded draws on the hillsides with them. They see the demarcation lines of environmental zones with their eyes in ways most of us would glaze over without a thought. Dan and I and Erney spend time with these three people and that time helps to teach us better how to feel the land.

If we start with the soil types, the plant communities are a natural progression. When we observe birds and mammals, amphibians, reptiles, and insects in these communities, we learn something about the relationships among them all. When we move the buffalo herds from pasture to pasture, we notice what they forage on as they move. That tells us where the herds are likely to be found at any given season, which, if nothing more, saves a lot of time and energy when they are on a big land and we need to locate them.

We learn to feel the land by attending to our horses' responses to it. They know when they will sink into river sand up to their bellies before they ever step into it. We might ride blithely into it-left to our own devices, or lack thereof. The horses will not fall into a creek cut in a draw even though it may be completely obscured by grasses-not even at night. If we pay attention to the unobtrusive but nevertheless presentations before us, we begin to progress from a feeling for the land to learning to feel the land. It is part of the restoration of the prairie, a reinvigoration of what once was, not of what was lost, but of what was ignored, pushed back, deemed unworthy, useless. In this learning we restore ourselves in reciprocity as we restore the buffalo and the prairie simultaneously---and ain't it grand!.