The river—pale-brown with sediment, the color of fossilized soil—moves in one great heap, a sweeping rush like wind through a tunnel, and I swear I can feel it, the low-down coolness it forms from itself. The river is high, and in places it has risen halfway up the willows and alders, painting dark rings on their trunks, submerging their roots as though they are mangrove trees in some tropical estuary. The day has a tropical quality to it, warm-clouded and humid, even though we’re thousands of miles from the tropics, not even by the sea, but on the other side of things, across the mountains, in the dry Columbia Plateau; the sagebrush desert.
As we walk, we keep our eyes on the basalt cliffsides, looking for bighorn sheep who are supposedly sitting up there, napping with their lambs, heads bowed, pink noses tucked against red-rock crevices. A few times we think we see them, little white dots against the cliffs, but they turn out to be white speckles on the rock.
Around us, the mint-blue sagebrush gives off its incense scent, especially in certain areas, certain turns in the trail where for some reason the smell is stronger, perhaps from the shade and the morning dew.
By afternoon, the sun comes out. We don’t see any sheep, but we see several geese floating the river, looking gangly and out of place in the desert, and we hear white-crowned sparrows hopping the hackberry trees, and red-winged blackbirds making their glock call from the scouler willows. At one point we look up, and we see hundreds of cliff swallows darting in frantic circles, dark as bats, their v-forked tails streaming behind them. A larger bird flies among them. It calls out, and I realize it’s a red-tailed hawk, probably hunting the smaller birds. The swallows don’t seem to be fleeing from the hawk, though—they’re just circling there, like a school of fish trying to confuse their hunter.
Eventually we part from the river and head up to the grasslands, wading through the dry bunchgrasses and yellow balsamroots. We stop to have lunch on a hillside, and from there we look down on the river, on the sagebrush plains, on the ancient plateaus, once piles of lava, where the bighorn sheep are hiding. The shadows seem plastered to the cliff faces, clinging there like wet curtains against glass. And between the plateaus there is the river, now golden and glinting in the sunlight. We look down on it, all of it, knee-deep in silver-tipped grasses where cattle once grazed, surrounded by purple lupines and tiny white woodland starflowers, watching the valley as it flows.
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