Great brooms of light and shadow swept the plain, and beneath the sky, inside its shifting burnished light, a rough-hewn cabin stood, alone, on a low hill above a river. Dry wind whined through the tattered sage and skirled the corners of the house, hissing dust and grit against the only window, a single pane of rippled isinglass. Inside the window, an old man’s face looking out.
The man stood at his window and looked out at the mountains that rose jagged and white from the valley floor. Through the scalloped pane, in the middle distance, seams of aspen blazed gold atop the foothills, in the draws. From the far side of the house, with its sagging porch and view of the river, came the sound of a violin. And from the north, a faint calligraphy of smoke unscrolled above the low sagebrush hills that hid the pyre upon which, that morning, the man had watched a body burn. It was autumn.