Rising from green to brown, from deceptively flat meadow to wind-flattened hilltops, rise the scrubby Mesas, once places of prayer, now abandoned vantages on a man-sculpted world.

In the deepening distance rise the Bear Teeth, biting the sky beneath the admonishing banks of cloud. As the nearer hills flatten above a richly saged land, the foothills seem to bend in the distance, an unseen watercourse at its base—marked by cottonwoods marching greedily along its banks, sometimes trunk to stream, always within the wider flood banks.

From this unseen stream meanders a creek of the kind familiar to the eastern eye.

Northward more, the plain flattening with fields of maze ahead in the distance, turns the unseen stream, breaking into the open and flowing east. Lined with true green cottonwoods—water sentinels of the high plains—rushes a clay-colored stream, wide and flat, spilling over round pebbles and round stones.

From its basin a falcon rises and flies over the travelers even as the water rushes beneath their road north.

In the distance, to the northwest, the Bear Tooth Mountains jut more bleak-stone teeth, broadening their grayish dark shoulders in the distance—shoulders evermore white and bristling with pine, their waists ever more lush, even as the beaten mountains to the east brown, seemingly ground down by Time's cold breath.