Holding Fire Quotes

“The Madison’s eastward peaks—Sphinx, Helmet, and others—are fine to behold, but the valley’s beating heart is sunlight. Late on a summer afternoon, it floods across the Gravelly Range. Clear, stark, and yellow, the light singles things out from the landscape, showing each in turn. See this lone juniper on a slope of August fescue. Pruned five feet up by browsing cattle, it is a green-black gumdrop on a pin. See, says that remarkable light, how a tree contains uncommon darkness. Look at these antelope crossing the plain, hides afire. One hundred white-flanked pronghorn, small on the expanse, stick-legged. See them run, eddying together, beading into a long thin line, disappearing into cottonwood galleries along a creek.”
― Bryce Andrews, Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West – A Cowboy's Memoir of Inherited Violence and Indigenous Landscapes