Maupin on Deep Creek (pronounced crick) in the baking summer tan-sand-hills and winter-bleak-snow-drifted valleys, stringing fences, doctoring cows, and taking in the hay; and on Friday nights drinking beer and dancing with Tess until 10, when they’d adjourn to the Young family home and he’d fall asleep on his mother’s old tan couch with his head in Tess’s lap, her fingers combing his blond hair or tracing the faint white lines that ran across his palms and the backs of his wrists—scars from years of handling barbed wire.

His mother Gertrude and father Lucas had worked the land all their lives, seldom driving their 1972 Dodge pickup farther than Maupin or the Dalles except when they went to the cattle auctions in Portland. Although neither had a college education his parents were well read, never having owned a TV and not being much on socializing. Winters were long, dark, and cold. Lucas had inherited the family ranch when his brothers and sisters had all moved off to the cities and he had hoped the same for his eldest boy, Dan.

Even after Dan graduated Harvard law school, Lucas had still wanted Dan to take the ranch, even conspired with Tess’ dad to expand it. There was talk of merging the Young ranch with a portion of the Johnson ranch, making the “JY” a sprawling place with 500 acres irrigated, maybe 20,000 acres total, beginning two miles further down Deep Creek.

Gertrude Young knew what her husband wanted to deny, that Dan was uncommonly gifted and that his mind was even more than his considerable body, and that it wanted to roam and travel places over times and subjects, and with people, that could not be found in the backlands of Oregon. Tess was just like Dan in that regard, and as Gertrude saw it, Dan and Tess would be together forever some place far away from Deep Creek, barns, mesas, canyons, and livestock.

As Gertrude predicted, Dan and Tess ended up exchanging snow-coffined Maupin for damp-souled Palmer. But Tess always said, once a cowboy, always a cowboy, and to this day Dan occasionally roped a calf, although he’d long since gone cold on the bronc- and bull-riding.

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