Outside the finest town of the region, sunken in the hollowed floodplain, beneath the high plains, under the grassy, sage-choked mountain behind them, they stand, awed for the first time on their hypnotic ride.
The viewer shudders, tiny in the distance.
Across the sunken path a mile below, where the grazing "slow-elk" appear as brown and black dots, and wicked-carved, narrow clay flats choked with willow, sage, and cottonwood wind their way between the foothills, rises a mountain, it's rocky, pine-cloaked shoulder two miles distant.
The mountain is smothered by the deep-tiered gray clouds that vault the world, it's peak merely guessed, it's waist deeply creased and dotted with lush sage, its shoulders richly clad in bluish pine.
Beneath this shrouded fang of the Bear Tooth Range, which they had followed north, can be glimpsed snow-painted stone of deep gray to black.
The face of the wind-bitten giant, receiving the cold, summer-killing wind out of the North, is a palisade of splintered, brown, rock-face, dwarfing the trees, standing like shields before the whitish under-clouds that rush in upon it like a choking mist.
The mountain is smothered as they depart, seemingly puny before the creeping mist out of the unseen North.
Behind them it pierces the lowering sky—unforgettable.
