There’s a place just north of the Milk River, west of Writing-on-Stone, where large mounds of rocky, dusty soil appear and a coulee winds its way, tough prairie grass and shrubby sage along the bottom. There are silty streams of pale damp earth, their edges scattered with haphazard groups of large stones lichen patched in shades of red and rust and black. Large stones also sit atop the various mounds while the silty ground below holds footprints of various animals that have walked through, my prints joining them.

Yesterday the west wind whipped between these mounds and on the top it was too cold and strong to stand for long without getting all the warmth driven from my body. But on a sheltered eastern side of one of the hilly mounds, I sat and opened Napi’s Dance and read aloud to the land.

The Sweetgrass Hills rose up in the southeast, snow-covered already, blue-gray above the dry brown grasslands on the border of winter.

This fulfilled a promise I made – to read aloud to the land, in gratitude and in recognition of its great presence. And the land listened.

Pretty sweet day indeed.