He was a believer in pen and ink. He’d even brought more blank postcards along, a pack in a tight rubber band in his saddlebag: Attractively sunlit bison. Prairie dog families. Wolves. A whole rubber-banded pile of high plains skylines by some modern miracle transferred onto three-by-five glossy cardstock, each snapped in a patient moment at the widest of wide angles, rendered with perfect panorama lighting then altered by filters, etc., God knew what, each spectacular natural event thus captured and stored as if eternal and not in fact ephemeral, as if not pure luck, chance, fate, effort of walking high for the images, as if not blinked by the expansion and contraction of the one of millions of manufactured metallic eyes but rather some divine eye (a lie), though now made available to all forever and whenever by the viewer (the receiver of the card). How revolting. But still he liked stamps. To lick them. The cards were gentle hints. A teaching tool in hopes that the recipient (he sent them only to her) might wake up to modern catastrophe. Though even the tool was necessarily tainted. The miracles of nature on the cards delivered by a vast network of steel-hinged slots and steel-walled rattling and smoky conveyors into the backs of identical left-handed trucks, all undreamed of when those hills back around town were first spotted with cattle. It was lonely to see all this, to be the rare one, by default both a Luddite and a modern man, to partake and grieve that the mass dissemination of the visions (postcards) were only made possible with the very best and most professional cameras, advanced, even futuristic devices, gestated by the glories of scientific, philosophical, technological, and therefore man-made mutation (progress) and that these evolutions were no less profound in effect than Darwin’s type of evolution, though profundity didn’t mean it’d turn out well. How could it? There was no comparison. One evolution was divine. The man-made kind—though some argued that man was God-made (as Eve was Adam-made) and therefore it was all one and the same, and this was an interesting point—would rust in the false certainty that evolution always travels in one direction: for the better. Buses and trains and food in plastic! How people back home loved them! Delivered as they were by the current gods, the great inventors, by the great tycoons, the great factory builders, the great men bestowing all their largesse on the not-great, assisted in this bestowing by their multitudes of slaves on the factory floors inhaling ink and steel shavings. The deputy was not a great man, he knew that, but he was no longer a slave. He was free, at least, here, on this yellow horse (with packhorse in tow to boot) on a rescue mission requiring old-fashioned grit and muscle.