From where Maya stood the land stretched out for miles. The terrain was deceptive. What looked like open, navigable grassland from a distance dissolved on approach into a maze of draws, dry creek beds, and unstable clay formations. She knew from personal experience that that rolling almost oceanic expanse of grasslands would be interrupted without warning by abrupt claws, clay buttes, and gullied breaks that dropped thirty feet into shadow. (Excerpt from The Road Not Taken)
In the distance she could just make out black lumps dotting the landscape. Black angus cattle, popular among ranchers in Nebraska, grazed lazily. The cattle themselves were one of the best tools for renewing grasslands. Rotating where they grazed was proven to mimic the behavior of bygone bison herds. The movement helped ensure they didn’t clear out patches, and their hooves and mouths stirred up soil where native seeds could take root. But rotation was critical as was the density of cattle per acre. . .
The sun rose high into the sky and began its afternoon descent. She was nearing the end of the designation transect when she reached a depression in the landscape about four feet wide so subtle that she hadn’t noticed it when she paced off the boundaries for her research. Dried brush had accumulated in the swale which added to the deception.
She crouched to push away some of the brush. The earth was compressed along a line forming an unnatural path. It was too straight to have been formed by grazing animals. She pushed aside some more of the brush. And then she realized what she was looking at: wagon ruts compacted by hundreds of metal-rimmed wheels, the soil between the ruts trodden upon by oxen until the ground was so hard that more than a hundred years later no grass seed could penetrate it. With heart hammering, she reached into her pack to retrieve her GPS unit to record the exact longitude and latitude of her finding. Then she spotted an anomaly, something slightly shiny lying on the surface of the reddish soil. It looked like a small round disk.
She grabbed her knife and carefully pried the object out of the packed earth. She gently scraped at the surface. It looked like a coin fixed in a clump of soil. She scraped her thumb over the writing that was embedded with dirt. Quickly she pulled out her magnifying glass and held it over the face of the coin, its date was 1850.
She looked up at the swells of prairie that surrounded her, a grassland located north of the Platte River Valley that was part of the grand corridor of America’s westward expansion. A number of famous trails converged in the broad valley of the Platte, forming a kind of primitive superhighway for the great covered wagon migration from 1841 to 1866. She had been so fascinated with the story under her feet that she had read the history voraciously.
She put the coin in her pocket. It weighed heavily there, prodding her conscience. She knew the rules. Artifacts found on public lands must remain in situ. She had to return the coin to the land. But first she would record its location for the record.
She was so focused on her task that she only just became aware of the shift in the atmosphere The light changed first. The golden afternoon bleached out of the grass, leaving everything, the buffalo grass, the distant tree line, a rock outcropping, in an eerie, amber-tinted stillness. Shadows sharpened and then disappear entirely as the clouds swallowed the sun whole.
Towards the east, the sky along the prairie’s edge was beginning to bruise—deep indigo and charcoal swelling upward in great churning columns, as they drew moisture from the earth. The mass moved with a deceptive slowness, rolling and folding over itself like smoke from a hidden fire. Its edges tore and reformed, tendrils reaching down as if feeling for the ground. The immense cloud spread flat and wide at the top, sheared by high winds into a smooth, ominous shelf, while below it the darkness was total—a curtain drawn across the world.
The prairie grasses, so recently swaying in idle afternoon warmth, went suddenly still. Then the wind shifted, cold and sharp, carrying the metallic scent of rain and something electric, something ancient. The first rumble of thunder reached across the flatland, a long, rolling groan, as if the sky is being slowly torn along a seam. Lightning forked somewhere behind the black curtain of rain racing across the prairie, illuminating the cloud mass from within for just a moment—backlit, towering, vast. Seconds later, the thunder arrived, a concussive crack directly overhead that Maya could feel in her sternum before she heard it in her ears, followed by that long, rolling dissolution into the distance.
Maya quickly began to gather up her materials. As she bent down to replace the coin, the ground began to hum. With a start, she dropped her compass. Reaching for it, she stared at the spinning needle in disbelief. She felt a low vibration in her sternum. And then she felt a pulling sensation. It drained her downward like water finding a crack in the stone. In her subconscious she fell through 176 years of accumulated electromagnetic memory—every storm, every buffalo migration, every wagon rut that scored the plains—compressed into what felt like thirty seconds of cold blue light and a roaring that was not sound.
Then the wind stopped . . .
She stood on the bank of a river—broad and brown, fast moving and smelling of spring. Not far from where she stood hundreds of white-topped wagons stretched back across the green prairie well into the distance. The air was thick with dust, woodsmoke, and the smell of animals and humanity. In the distance on the bluffs she saw a raw settlement of timber buildings.
She stood very still. She told herself it was a dream. She’d been telling herself that since the moment the light went strange and the prairie dissolved around her. In the back of her mind, she could still sense her lightning-fast movement through time and space. Dreams could be vivid. Dreams could smell real. She knew that.
But dreams didn’t smell like this.
