Reflecting backward through the shrill audio haze of the screaming sirens and the echoing roar of fire engines and police cruisers that shake this house, rattle that window, seems surreal, dreamlike.
Upward the asphalt road wound past the water-carved, sagebrush-choked plain below, into the lushly green pastures, and finally into the Red Cut, the stream-fed meadow below a buffalo jump of the kind that abound in this land, a table of gently rising land that seems a slope from one side, a slanted table of grass from another and a cliff from yet another.
This, the base of this pass, watered and broad, overhung by rusty red cliffs of clay and ochre crowned with stunted pine to the right, dwarfed by the soaring spears of pine-covered stone to the left, rolling upward, spotted with black angus that once would have been brown buffalo—this is where an army would stop, water and set out from in the morning.
With sentinels posted above the buffalo jump, on the rolling heights above, or on the ridge of the low, Time-gouged red mountain to the right, a single man or small party could only avoid detection by travelling along the piney belt of blue-green at the base of the towering rock faces to the left, for no sentry could top their peaks.
Stones dropped from the freezing faces of these mountains in winter had tumbled down, grimly decorating this small world, a gateway of sorts to the harsh high desert below and the treacherous, forested defiles above and beyond.
The cattle followed the watered creases as men once would.
We, though, followed the winding, switchback road, up, and up, and up, over a deceptively rising green hump between two mountains, one beaten red, the other like a gray-granite spear-point threatening the sky.
Books by James LaFond
