The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)

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The Snow on the Sweetgrass (Cont.)

BY THE TIME I REACHED the Sweet Grass Hills, the first snow of autumn had coated the high country. Like Chief Mountain, the three main peaks of the Sweet Grass Hills rise unexpectedly from the prairie, formed ages ago by magma pushing against layers of sedimentary limestone and shale. Now these 7,000-foot buttes are a sanctuary for elk, which were plains dwellers before ranching and grain farming drove them into the mountains. From the foothills I could still see Chief Mountain, gleaming in the sun a hundred miles across Montana.

I parked in the ruins of an abandoned mining camp near Middle Butte. As I picked my way along a cow path up the slope, the mountain slowly rose into view. From this angle its perfect cone made it look like a volcano. On top of the ridge I sat down and stared at the sun, glowing through the clouds above the left side of the peak. The omnipresent psychic noise of the world began to fade away. Then that humming-vibration thing started again, the same sensation I'd experienced back at Dinwoody. It must be the high blood pressure I was diagnosed with before the start of this endless Indian summer, I thought. The doctor said it would kill me.

But she didn't say when.

Or maybe it was something else, after all. In 1992, somewhere around here, four Canadian campers discovered a treasure in a cave that established the antiquity of the Sweet Grass Hills as sacred ground. It was a pair of seashells six inches in diameter, bored and carved to resemble ghostly human faces. Called gorgets, they might have been status symbols as well as religious icons, probably worn around the neck. They're believed to be about 500 years old, and were probably left in the cave as a spiritual offering. It's unknown what role they played in religious practices, but the possibility that they were traded here from as far away as the coast of Florida suggests how vast was the network of aboriginal commerce in North America.

Growing up, I spent part of every summer at Boy Scout camp on the Blackfeet Reservation, next to Glacier, and I had always thought of these places the way kids do; that is, that the world must have been made the day I was born and nothing of any significance happened before that wondrous moment. But to realize while looking at these sacred sites how long human beings have been here, and how over thousands of years they developed very intimate relationships with the natural world, is to suddenly experience a kind of dizzying sense of how new we are, how tenuous and expendable and weak and unimportant, and how strong and enduring is this landscape.

"We've been here a long time," Narcisse Blood said last winter. "And we're going to be here for a long time to come."

Suddenly exhausted, I lay back in the sweetgrass and let its luxurious vanilla perfume wash over me. When I woke up, the sun was on the other side of Middle Butte. And I was covered in snow.

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