This is the big country, where you can drive for hours on empty road and never turn the wheel. The gently rolling hillsides covered with silver sage are speckled with hard chunks of snow—a painted pattern in which pronghorn antelope, rattlesnakes, quail, and pinto mustangs can easily disappear. Gray mist overhangs the rim rock to the east, silhouetting pointed junipers in a shifting white glow; to the west, the sun is bright and there are fluffy clouds. You are traveling across an ancient lake bed of frosty green that is hundreds of square miles wide. Beyond it is another ancient lake, and another, and in between, great volcanic buttes of obsidian and cracked basalt, witness to unthinkable power. Time is also a kind of power in the big country. It suspends the human brain in wonder. By afternoon, when the temperature has dropped to thirty-five degrees and the sporadic sun has given way to sleet, three small armies—the wranglers, the radicals, and the law—have mobilized in the struggle for the destiny of the wild horses, because genuine wonder—full-blooded and pure—is a rare and valuable commodity.
