Excerpt

Part One

The Old Animal

DUST LIFTED in slow streaks off the alkaline playa in the dry basin called Long Lake. Tiny orange and white flowers blossomed among boulders of black lava-flow basalt.

Ten thousand years ago, when the first humans came to the Great Basin highlands where I stood, Long Lake was part of a sweep of swamps and vast watery basins fed by melting glaciers. Waterbirds lifted to wheel and settle, refolding their wings. Their movements, to my dreaming, are a flowering of momentum—in this, much like music.

At the end of a rocky two-track road, Long Lake is lost among the ridges rising from the east side of Warner Valley into an enormous run of uninhabited lava-rock and sagebrush highlands. I grew up believing there was nothing in the vicinity of Long Lake but shimmering distances.

Then, sixty-five years old, I found that I'd spent my boyhood near an ancient holy place. Over hundreds of thousands of years, the lava-flow ridge at my back had fragmented into intricate, smooth-sided boulders, which were everywhere inscribed—drawn on by ancient humans attempting to manage their luck and their fate. The inscriptions were particularly thick in places next to fractures, breaks where souls and spirits could be thought to have emerged from an underworld, and through which they might be fortunate enough to reenter.

Thousands of designs and figures had been pecked into the basalt surfaces with stone or bone tools, ranging from entropic (behind the eye) patterns of the sort seen in trances—grids and dot complexes—to discernible figures metamorphosing from moss to fish to men and women. Some were