The house sat on the crown of a snowy hill, gleaming in the twilight. A big-shouldered stone fireplace dominated the living room, and next to it stood my mother. She wore the white robes of a vestal, cinctured with the silver and turquoise of the Navajo. From her neck depended a silver chain, and her earrings were like quoits. I had never seen her so gussied up, but the style was matchlessly Mother’s.

She acknowledged my presence, but not directly. “Look at the size of him,” she told Quillet. Raising her kohled eyes heavenward, “Where’s the little boy,” she asked, “who used to melt in my arms?” Finally she focused on me, floating in my direction like one of M. Montgolfier’s gassy balloons. “I feel almost sentimental,” she admitted.

Working on a ranch is like sailing a windjammer around Cape Horn; there’s always something to be done and you’re always uncomfortable doing it.

Stables had to be swamped, the tack room tidied, gear repaired, firewood cut in the forest—a dangerous exercise, for an ax or a chainsaw can bounce off a frozen branch and bite a chunk out of a leg. Lugging the harvest a half mile home through ass-high snow was like wading through a wind tunnel. I fed tons of evil-smelling stew to Lee Roy, who inhaled it faster than I could prepare it. He was big enough to eat hay, the only provender he didn’t relish. His thick tongue polished the bottom of the bucket and like a hockey stick whanged it across the kitchen floor until the last granule was gone. I learned to drive the pickup, tooling over the rutted roads, in and out of ditches, ignoring the piteous whines of protest whenever I shifted gears. I foddered the Morgans and led them to a high meadow potholed under the endless snow. Wherever I went, Lee Roy trailed after me. He seemed delighted with my company, particularly when a pothole got me. I’d go down and he’d pounce, joyously, kicking up a blizzard, blindsiding me, sniffing and slobbering in a cloud of frosty air. I knew that his was a cupboard love, but I yearned for companionship. Once he licked my hand and I was moved by the endearment until I realized it had nothing to do with affection; he was trying to eat the bandage that covered a nasty cut I had picked up rebuilding a lodgepole fence.

I was always numb with the cold and the wet, but there were days of compensation. When the huddle of horses pawed at the earth and shook their splendid manes and the dog raced in wild circles and the sun was a white shadow of itself—then I would feel the wonder of nature’s own cathedral, Quillet’s phrase, and without succumbing to Quillet’s convulsions of piety, yield nonetheless to the beauty of field and forest, mountain and sky.