She looked up the walls of the badlands to where the crenulated tops and drip castle spires met the tufted grass of the broken plain. She let her eyes come back down over the layered strips of earth, each stripe a message from a different age, the black volcanic basalt, the red sediment crush, the white lime, and the broad layer of brown dust, the petrifying prairie. Annie dismounted and walked over to the wall of earth. Something white had caught her eye, something jutting out. She kicked at the earth around it and watched it crumble away. She leaned over and pinched a piece of white bone between her fingers. It would not come loose so she kicked beneath it with more conviction, and more earth crumbled, revealed more bone. Annie could see now that the white bone was a skull. She used both hands to tug at it until it came free. She lifted it up to the light. It was nearly as long as her forearm, some kind of cat, the incisor teeth longer than any cats for thousands of years. With its eyes plugged with earth, it looked like and it's bone-white smile it looked like some hilarious blind seer. Spider whinnied again and Annie turned around with the skull in her hand.
"Relax," she said. "It's dead."

She put the skull back into the crumbled earth. Something black caught her eye now, just by her boot in the pile of rubble there. She bent over again, reached her fingers through the sandy crumbles, not quite earth not quite rock. The black stone was cool to the touch, soft feeling, heavy. Annie picked it up, the size of a shooting marble. It was perfectly round. Maybe it wasn't a rock, it felt too smooth, too soft. She picked at it with her thumbnail but could not mark it.
"If I'd listened to you I wouldn't have found this," she said, holding the rock up.
She tucked it into her shirt pocket, buttoned it up, and went back to her horse. At the end of the wide section of the draw the canyon forked, one leg was wide and vegetated, the other narrow, rocky. Spider turned to the smaller one and Annie let him go that way. The path rose steeply. Spider scrambled through the scree, levered himself with his two-jointed knees over the lip of land that marked the edge of the badland and they emerged at the bottom of a pulsing sweep of meadow. Annie looked down at the secret herb garden, recognized the bear root plant, the green-star leaf pattern of the prairie turnips, the patches of sage burnt white by the sun. From the top of the hill, Annie could see the vast expanse of the Le Gris ranch beneath her, the flattest piece of rangeland in that part of the country. The herd was close by and Annie rode down to it instinctively. She skirted around the mass of cattle on the far side of it from the ranch buildings and she looked for her Q brand on the hindquarters of the steers as she ghosted by. She saw none and she was glad to put the ranch and the herd behind her. The sun was high when she reached the wagon road to town and Spider was lathered with sweat. Big clouds moved high overhead, their bottoms flat and the great mass of them mounded up above, marbled busts of the gods. Sheep Mountain, a high tabled butte with a grass range on top, loomed to the west like the raw stump of the planet's first tree.

The road was empty, two chalky ruts and a vanishing point. Annie let Spider make his own pace. The town of Baker had been laid out exactly as Colonel Baker had wanted it laid out. The main road ran straight through the middle of it and there was one street on each side, one for grain and stock and all the stuff that came with it, and the other for commerce and business. The courthouse/jail was at one end of the main street, the Colonel's colonial house in the middle, and the little A-frame church at the other. If you came down to Baker from Rapid City or Buffalo Gap you saw the church first, then the colonel's house, and it gave you the impression that you had entered a small and well-appointed Mississippi town. If you came from the south, from the direction of the Oglala Reservation, the abandoned garrison fort and the gallows platform were the first shapes to form clear in the empty prairie.