The sunlight was yellow in our eyes by then, and our shadows fluttered for hundreds of feet, and we walked through high cheatgrass and sagebrush pulling the shadows behind us. It smelled like a long, long time gone by; like it had just rained, although it hadn’t, and like balsamroot was flowering everywhere, which it was, and the flowers glowed in the late sunlight so bright it hurt our eyes.

    From close to the edge of the cliff we saw most of Pahsimeroi Valley from Fort Quittence all the way north to the Salmon Canyon. The cottonwoods waved and snaked their way along the river through a patchwork of fields lit green and dun in the low sun like a cloisonné brooch soldered with fences and streams and farm roads.

     I told Dana, “Your mom always said, ‘Carlton, you’ve got a gentleman locked up inside. You need to let him out.’”

     “She didn’t mean gentleman, Carl. She meant gentle man. Mom would shake her head and laugh at you and Jason and your dad living like desperados alone on the place. She always thought the world of you, though.”

     I tried to tell him what she meant to me, too, but I couldn’t say the words any more than I could say them back then, so I just pointed at the storm clouds rolling down valley. We stayed quiet until the low sun worked its way between the clouds and almost blinded us. Cattle were grazing below. Even in the long shadows I could see them scattered over the pastures and following in long slow lines to the barn and the feed troughs. I wondered who was tending them now but forgot to ask when Dana pulled on my arm and told me to be careful. I’d gotten close to the edge. I said, “I get messed up sometimes with what went before and what came after.”