He sat his horse on the rimrock and watched what had not yet happened.

The horse did not move. Neither did he.

Below, the valley ran a long pale color like the belly of something dead and the sky above it was the sky that had watched everything and cared for none of it. The wind came from the west as it always did. As it always would.

Then the fires.

Wagon ruts cutting the earth like wounds that would not close. The buffalo down in their thousands, their tongues taken, the rest left to the sun. Children at the perimeter of something he could not name but knew. He had always known. The treaties written on paper that the rain would find. Forts rising from the alkaline dust, flags above them snapping in a wind that did not distinguish between the living and the dead.

He watched it all unspool across the valley floor like smoke from a fire already set.

When it was done the land was quiet in a way that had no peace in it.

Mark West sat his horse on the rimrock a long time. The sun moved. The shadows of the rocks moved with it. After a while he touched his heel to the animal’s flank and they began to pick their way down the switchback toward the valley below.

He did not look back.

There was nothing behind him now.