Surrounded by scattered yucca and clumps of sage, low tough coarse grass coiling close to the ground, older growth weaving and knotting a gray mat in the loose soil. Desiccated yucca pods lying about. Meadowlark calling one to another in the low grass, hidden after a short, ricocheting flight not three feet above the ground.

From above a Medusa, a starburst cutting into the prairie flat as a billiards table and flaring downstream. Water that cascades in walls and sheets down the slick sides of the butte funnels furiously into the gullies, rills and washes gouged by previous storms, tearing into layers little more than compressed talcum, really, undercutting banks, clots exploding into the rushing water, flushing through the fragile landscape, then slowing, spreading over the land, absorbed into the subsoil, feeding underground tributaries of parts of North Pawnee Creek.

The incredible, profound still silence, only the gray noise, low quiet static background of blood through capillaries or base noise of metabolism. A slight, slight breeze caresses my jaw, more gentle than the softest hand, listening to scant air turbulences on the other side of my head swirling around my ear. Afraid to breathe, afraid to disturb the quiet, while a few miles farther sunlight breaks through clouds and illuminates a patch of still prairie.

Leaving, a sparrow hawk heralds my departure -- from 100 yards, a quarter of a mile? -- unseen, with a repeated rapid high klee, klee, klee. As night falls, pinpoint lights over dozens of square miles - any direction - few enough to be counted on the digits of one hand, the light of a full moon filling the sky.