Inspired by the blasts that rattled the house (or perhaps it was the borborygmus that rattled Lee Roy), Quillet treated us to a sermon on the williwaw, the sudden, violent wind that roared down from Alaska. As it cracked branches and toppled trees he lectured us on the ponderosas, growing on the sunny slopes, and the blue spruce, which flourished only in the bottoms where water collected, and the hardy juniper, which grew everywhere. He preached while it wailed across the meadow like a scourge, like God’s own bulldozer, peeling the blanket of snow from the bed of the earth, scraping it clean, exposing troves of what the Arapaho called knic-knic, delicate pale green tendrils with pale pink blossoms. Then the pronghorns would gather, loping over snow fences eight feet high. They seemed to be forever in flight, even when standing still, feasting among the knic-knic. And the coyotes would join the party, prancing high in the arctic air to land stiff-legged on the scurrying mice and gophers that their intimidating diet comprised. And finally the crows and the magpies would sweep down like chars to nice up the earth, pecking away at dead animals disinterred by the wind until nothing was left but bone.

So Quillet would favor us with the lore of his wilderness years, listening to himself with the keenest enjoyment while my mother, his partner in pleasure, would gaze on him fondly. “He knows so much,” she would say in an awed whisper, as if he were asleep, “and he never forgets anything.” She heaved a heavy-breasted sigh. “There’s so much I wish I could remember, but my mind abdicates.”

Every couple of weeks Quillet shared his erudition with Harry Swift, his lawyer and the only guest I ever saw in that house. Harry tried now and then to squeeze in a word or two—he knew something about knic-knic and the Arapahos and such, possibly more than Dil, for he was a past president of the Colorado Conservation and Historical Society, but he never had a chance. Quillet wouldn’t have shared his podium with John Muir.

Dil’s monologues seemed to take a lot of out of Harry; still, he kept coming back to listen politely and fidget incessantly. He must have been lonely, a short-assed, thick-bellied, solitary man on a mile-high mountain.

Now our host was crowing about his Morgans, how strong they were, how docile, the lovely arch of their necks “so unlike the giraffe neck of the Arabian.” He stressed the need for breaking them gently, his preference for snaffles to the brutality of bar bits or rowels. Some ranchers, he hinted darkly, twisted, even bit the ear of an animal to instill obedience, but once you bite or twist, a horse becomes head-shy.

“Not Dawnette,” said Mother with a delicate shudder. “Dawnette would never…”

“Certainly not Dawnette,” Quillet concurred.

“Which one’s Dawnette?” I asked. All the Morgans looked alike to me.