The thoughtful reader will have recognized that this book is not just a story. It is a story, but a philosophical probing of virtues (in the Aristotelian sense), as well. It is a story of home and family, of neighborliness, generosity, and spaciousness in living. It is free of the clutter of humanity in bustling cities. Nothing could be further removed from the ethic of this story than that confronting a congested population where the faces of humanity blur from sheer numbers and the pace of life, a pace which frustrates long lasting commitments and relationships.

This story is a story of change and growth, but also of constancy, an idea which has lost considerable ground to change in recent times. It is a story which somehow seems to say that the best of life's experiences do not need to be searched out in some foreign country or even outer space, but can be found right in our back yard, or within confines of our own homes, be that a dwelling or a land. There are limitless novelties in these places. All one has to do is open up to them like an artist who spends a lifetime going back and painting one scene over and over because of the new things she or he sees in it.

There is change in life, but also constancy, and in seeing something new one builds on something old. Because all material things change and pass away, the constant must always be understood as the spiritual or psychic dimension of a person or place, something like life or the idea of an enduring self.

The most satisfying thing about writing this story is that it has given me the opportunity of living life twice, for spirit to meet spirit, to see something new the second time around, to realize where I came from and where I am going as spirit embedded eternally in the universe.

This story is about knowing one's friends (and by implication enemies) well. It has an ethic of work and play, one touching on the development of a sense of place, a psychic bonding with the land and interacting with its wild creatures, a reciprocal interpenetration which changes all actors. It is not about subsistence living, but without recognizing one's dependence on place one cannot subsist anywhere for long.

Thus, it is fitting that the story conclude with the story of the Schmoyer place, part of the Winchester Ranch that had formerly been the home of another agricultural family, an old homestead that had lost its inhabitants, but through its artifacts begged someone to tell its story, put it into history while restoring its spirit, bringing it back to life.

Yet, in the rocks and soil of the Schmoyer place there are artifacts that tell of another people who lived on this land and carved pictures in the ledges. Their story must also be mentioned to put the Schmoyer place in context. The story must also include me, because I became a part of that place. Thus, I provide the spiritual continuity between the past and the present.

Fifty years after my first visit, drawn by the constancy which remains despite change, I returned to the point in the circle where I began, a point that as much as I writes the final pages of this book.

One fall, sometime during my thirteenth year, my father took me over to the Schmoyer place on the north side of the Big Wind River, several miles below its confluence with Bull Lake Creek, to scout out the land. Supplementing work and enriching leisure, in the fall and winter months we were hunters and trappers. On the north side of the valley along that stretch of the Wind, high sandstone ledges stand above the river bottom. Early settlers took advantage of the protection these ledges offered from northerly storms and built cabins and out-buildings along their base.

We descended from the flats above by way of what my father called an "arroyo" (a term he no doubt picked up from Mexican sheepherders), a deep cut into the sandstone escarpment made by water running down from the high country into the river. A light dusting of snow was imprinted with fresh bobcat tracks. We followed them up river until they disappeared then reappeared through the open door of an old root cellar dug down and into the erosion mound at the base of the sandstone ledge. The root cellar seemed to be the only visible evidence that this place had once been inhabited.

"The old Schmoyer place," the words seemed to come involuntarily from my father's lips. I asked my father about the Schmoyers, but he had not known them. Years ago, he said, they sold out to the Winchesters and left, "God knows where they are now-maybe dead." I made my way to the cellar to look inside.

This was, I thought, the best built root cellar I had ever seen. Timbers, still in amazingly good condition, lined its sides and trussed up the cedar pole roof. Over many years, more sand and rock had eroded from the top of the ledge and fallen onto the dirt mound that formed its roof, but it had withstood it all. I reasoned that this cellar with a little work could easily be made usable again, but it would be a long way to bring carrots and potatoes to store.

This was a good place for trapping. The river swung in toward the sandstone ledges bringing the river bottom almost to an end except for a narrow finger of land along the cliffs that provided continuity with land farther down stream. This feature, plus the arroyo which offered a trail through the sandstone cliffs to the flats above, spoke clearly to those who understand wild things that many paths-both seen and unseen-converged here.

We used steel traps for coyotes, beaver, muskrats, and mink, but for bobcats my father and I used box traps. Strange as it may seem we had an almost affectionate prey-predator relationship with bobcats. We liked to take them home alive, even tried to make pets out of them. But we eventually pelted them out and sold the furs.

We set a box trap near the old root cellar door. We knew the ways of the cat. This bobcat would visit the cellar again.

Daily, as I checked that box trap on the old Schmoyer place I was drawn by the stark desertion of that place to contemplate change, change dictated by philosophical and economic forces that at the time I knew nothing about. It seemed to me that in the scheme of things there was the potential, almost determinism, for displacement for one people or family, by the acquisition of others who had larger interests. "Big fish eat little fish," the proverb goes. It just seemed to be the way things were.

That fall, after the wind had cut the snow to expose the ground, I could make out a rock foundation where a cabin had been. It did not seem to have burned down, there was no charcoal to be seen. It had probably been torn down and hauled away by someone who wanted the logs. A tree was growing through the center of some old bed springs, and a rusty oil-burning stove, half buried by time and soil, barely stuck through the frost browned grass. There were other things revealed by a sweep of a foot across the grass or a kick at heavier brush: bottles, a crushed milk pail; here an old tin cup, and there a porcelain coffee pot. Inside a broken crock I found a girl's shoe, brittle and shrunken by time and the elements.

I reasoned that this family must have had a cow, at least. They would have had milk and cheese to eat along with the root vegetables stored in the cellar. Cows have to freshen, so there would have been a calf to sell for a little money-if it lived. They must have had a garden to grow the vegetables. But times must have been hard, the going too tough, and so they sold out and moved on.

The old shoe awakened my imagination to the girl who had worn it. I wondered about the color of her hair and eyes, the sound of her voice. Was she was pretty; would I have liked her? Did she have brothers and sisters? The artifacts remaining didn't reveal any of these things. What about her mother and father; were they happy on this isolated homestead, or was life a relentless grind of hard work and finally failure? Did her father turn to whiskey? There was a whiskey bottle, unmistakable by its shape, among the debris. What would my life have been like on this remote farm had I lived here? I studied that place, those ruins, and artifacts, full of haunting unremembered things, and I feared that this was no happy place.

When after many years I returned to the Schmoyer place, drawn by the resurgence of a latent sense of place, the site had changed some. The foundation stones of the house were hidden by heavy brush; try as I might, I could not locate a single stone. The timbers of the root cellar's roof had finally rotted sufficiently for Winchester cattle walking over it to cave it in. Rain and melting snow were doing the rest of the destruction, or maybe reclamation. It won't be many years until the timbers are returned to the soil-reclaimed by the wild which always waits on the down hill side of settlement.

A five foot bull snake slithered out of the ruined root cellar to remind me that this was his home now.

My interest no longer being in trapping bobcats, but my disposition for meditating on those ruins still strong, I decided to cross the river to the Winchester ranch house and ask Hazel, now a widow and well up in years, if she knew anything about the Schmoyers. I can't imagine why I hadn't asked years before. I must have been too engrossed in the inner, psychic life of the place to engage its external history.

To my surprise Hazel remembered the Schmoyers well, although it had been sixty years since the Winchesters had bought their place. She recalled that Schmoyers milked nine cows, raised chickens, sold eggs, and made about $200 a month, quite a good living during the years of the Great Depression.

The clue for my understanding this family should have come from the quality of the old root cellar rather than a girl's weathered shoe. The cellar would have provided a more realistic picture of life on the Schmoyer place.

Hazel also informed me that although Schmoyers would have had a root cellar, most every one did, what I thought was a root cellar may have been the Schmoyer chicken house which was also dug back into the erosion mound at the base of the cliff. Furthermore, there were five Schmoyer children: four girls-Ferrell, Beyrl, Marion, and Ruth-and a boy, Ray.

Old enough to strike out on his own about the time the farm was sold, Ray left home and went to Montana. Hazel wasn't exactly sure why Ray left, or why Schmoyer had decided to quit farming. Perhaps the older Schmoyer felt he couldn't continue without Ray's help, had developed poor health, or he just couldn't turn down the money the Winchesters offered him for his farm. Ray may have left because he had a conflict with his father, or Schmoyer wouldn't consider turning the farm over to him. Obviously, the girls didn't inherit the farm. Farm property was seldom turned over to women in those days.

But the fact is, the Schmoyers sold out and left. Neither they nor their progeny remained on the land. Time and circumstances seemed to have swept them away.

Through newspapers and computer searches I managed to locate the remnants of the Schmoyer family: one daughter, Ruth Jacques of Casper and one grandson living in Arizona. There was still an affectionate feeling for the old place, even though memory had dimmed.

Upriver from the Schmoyers' place lay the Nations place. During the time I was a boy, over a period of years, the Nations family would still come back occasionally to visit the old ranch. There was something about it they did not want to leave, or something of it they took with them which kept taking them back.

Constancy and change are two ideas we human being wrestle with. Constancy suggests stability, security, and belonging. Change offers freedom and the pursuit of novelty. It seems we have difficulty holding the two together, to provide a suitable analogy or model as to how constancy and change can function together. Because everything physical changes, is constancy to be found in the metaphysical; and is there any constancy even there? As may be recognized, at this point we are in the domain of philosophical and religious faith.

In the ripple and flow of time across the territory now known as Wyoming, mountain men trapped beaver, hunters exterminated the buffalo, and the Shoshones settled their territorial disputes with the Crow over the land cradling the upper stretches of the Wind River.

It was the enticing force of the slip stream of Manifest Destiny that brought my European ancestors to Wyoming. In the history of the West my father came late, but like most of those who came before him, he too sought to live by exploiting the natural resources of the land.

But the land, especially a vast and wild land, has seductive power over those who would try to tame it, to wrestle a living from it. Eventually, in the struggle for survival there comes an understanding, and the relationship between the human and the land deepens into a marriage and a birthing, an exultation of raw beauty, shared experience, mutual dependency, and productivity.

Successive waves of new immigrants brought rapid and continuous change to the land. My father watched those forces work in Wyoming with mixed feelings. He knew as well as anyone that change was inevitable, but he did not like the way things were changing. He did not think the world should remain static, but believed that change should take place within some kind of constant based on what it meant to be a person in a community attached to some place. Perhaps it was his own experience as a Scottish immigrant that sensitized him to the importance of place and the tragedy of displacement as the consequence of change.

My father had never heard of Heraclitus, that ancient Greek philosopher who argued reluctantly that reality instead of being grounded in permanence seemed to be characterized by change, but in his own way he wrestled with the same vexing problem. He had an aggrieved feeling for things that once were-not literally everything, but for the spirit of those times expressed in the people who engaged the raw spaciousness of the land. It was as though he felt the loss of that first bride, that common law linkage with the land and the people he had first come to. "Change should take place within a marriage," he used to say, " but the marriage itself should not change."

He would call my attention to remains of old sheep camps and deserted homesteads, frontier institutions that had once supported families whose names he remembered, but who had mostly disappeared, he said, "like dust blowing in the wind." Some had gone broke and moved on, but most had sold out to larger "outfits". Whichever way it was, their presence had vanished, their voices had faded away into whispers of his memory, and the richness of their characters lived on only in the stories he told.

The Schmoyers and the Nations were just one more phase of a process tied to a particular ideology about land and people. They claimed land which once supported nomadic American tribes-the latest, the Crow and the Shoshones. But they, too, gave it up to someone with greater resources and a wider economic vision.

Despite the belief that under certain circumstances it is deemed necessary, one would think it a difficult decision to give up one's place on the land, whether it is surrendered for financial reasons, an opponent's superior weapons, or someone's greater purchasing power. But the land seems always to be changing hands, and each time it does part of the personal bond that makes it home, part of what makes community, is threatened by the loss. With contemporary society's fixation on mobility, the sense of place as space inseparable from one's identity is progressively weakened. It is no wonder that many of the younger generation are content to spend so much time in cyberspace!

But those with strong sense of place develop a reciprocating relationship with the land. The land becomes a subject like ourselves, not an object to be exploited. If we take care of it, the land will take care of us.

With this relationship, something additional arises in our consciousness, something greater than the sum of the parts. This extra element may be called spirit. If the relationship with the land is not broken or violated, the spirit may be transmitted from one generation to another. We remain one with the land, and by extension with our planet. This idea embodies a potent environmental principle. The earth and humanity, including our psychic dimension of being, are parts of one reality.

It is in this spiritual dimension of reality that one grasps the constancy of what changes.

A bit of Buddhist wisdom says that to call a place home you must have lived there for a thousand years. By this view one is joined with the ancestors and the community, past and present, in a spirit of continuity with the land. This doesn't seem to be the popular viewpoint of the western world. Here, there seem to be successive waves of displacement and acquisition largely driven by the creation of new economic situations and the needs of those with the power to bring these economic conditions into being.

Within this economic process, the monetary value of land is seductively inflated as it changes owners. In addition, the social value of the survival and continuity of a community, whether a family farm or a small rural town rooted in the idea of "the land as home," is eroded and subordinated to the values of acquisition, consumerism, individualism, and competition. These counter-values progressively compromise and subvert the idea of permanence rooted in the personal and community values of "land as home." They also distract us from esteeming that home as a place of endless novelty and adventure.

In the story of settlement, corporations and affluent individuals, who are usually new to a locality, are among the latest to stake their claim to the land. Of course, corporations are the formations of the affluent, the stock holders, but corporations threaten the idea of land as home in more impersonal ways than individuals do. Corporations have no ideological or spiritual ties to place, moving on when motivated by purely economic considerations. Furthermore, corporate survival is more important than the survival of any of the individuals within it or outside of it.

Corporations operate with detachment from bonds which join people to place, thus are among the newest forces of large scale human displacement from the land. Agribusiness swallows up the small farmer and undercuts the economic base of small towns. Industrial and technological corporations turn fields into factories, and by economic promises dissuade the dispossessed and the unwary from esteeming land and community as home.

There has been an iniquitous philosophical failure of economics, equal to that of scientism which separated the subjective from the objective, subordinating that feature which makes us truly human. When people are removed from the land, the land loses its living personal dimension and becomes a dead geographical feature of the corporation and a means to an economic end.

Of course, it would be simplistic and wrong to describe farmers and ranchers who enlarge their holdings by buying out smaller operators as promoters of the corporate model. Those farmers and ranchers who have expanded their operations can still feel close to the land, still consider the land their home. But the corporate spirit of acquisition and competition which pervades our economy works against it for future generations.

It is hard for me to imagine there not being a Winchester Ranch. My psyche is too permeated by memories of helping put up its hay, irrigating the alfalfa fields, branding the calves, building its fences, and trapping the river bottom to let go of that reality. I have lived to know all four generations of Winchesters living on their cattle ranch from Jack the patriarch to his great-great grandchildren. Old Jack and Albert died on the land: Jack killed by a horse, and Albert from a stroke and a fall from a hay wagon, coincidentally in the same field his bother at age 14 was dragged to death by a horse. The ranch is sacred space, and for many years the attraction for family reunions, people who knew the meaning of living and dying on the land.

But for years there have been other eyes on the Winchester Ranch. They were not corporate eyes, but those of affluent people from both the East and West Coasts who wanted to own a piece of the West. We can look further up the Big Wind River to see what has happened to other ranches which have been sold to investors and outside interests.

Some ranches on the headwaters of the Big Wind have already been developed into small acreage ranchettes. Conditioned by the mobile nature of our society, some of the buyers are interested in the property only for a summer home; others are simply real estate speculators.

Purely from the perspective of modern economics, it is difficult to fault a rancher who takes the opportunity to turn land into more cash than it is worth as agricultural land. And this practice is gaining in popularity.

Other ranches on the head waters of the Big Wind have been purchased by the affluent. Sometimes they are stock holders in major corporations like Morton Salt and Disney. Then for some reason they are resold. The "Diamond G" was once just a cattle ranch in one of the most scenic areas of the Absaroka Mountains. Since then it has been bought and sold several times. Mrs. Walt Disney once owned it. The present owner is a former New Yorker who operates the ranch by employing a ranch manager.

These are the new forces in the settlement of western lands. There is no appeal to treaties, land is not taken by force of arms, or by the doctrine that applying the labor of one's hands to the land renders the land the property of the laborer. These acquisitions are largely driven by developers, real estate speculations, or the desire to have something which few others can have. In most cases, for the new owners, the land is not a condition of existence, nor is there any ancestral or sacred significance attached to it. It is an object to be acquired, not a subject with which to share identify, to give oneself to and to be received by it.

Correspondingly, the spirit of community erodes with this flux of population detached from the values that promote a sense of place and of vocations wherein people and land bond. The unity of people and place eventually deteriorates until the need for community is replaced by the demand for individuality and privacy. As my father observed, change has taken place not only within the marriage, the marriage itself has changed.

A new set of values has come to dominate our belief systems, and in the process has predisposed us to accept, with few questions, ideas of impermanence, flux, and temporality. But to compromise our intuitions that somehow the nature of reality also consists of both the constant and the changeless amounts to an unwarranted philosophical surrender. When those with a long relationship with the land and its people move on, there is a disintegration of that marriage, a loss of home as well as the sense of belonging to some particular place and to someone.

It would be incredulous to insist that everyone should remain in the place of their birth. The different kinds of interests we cultivate and the diverse talents we have often take us elsewhere. But we should not think of this as dispossession. We can always know were home is, always feel the power of the land and a people to draw us back to the place where we were born and reared, where we learned that the soil and our flesh were the same, and that we, community and land, share a common spirit. The tragedy is that too often we return to find the land violated and the community in tatters. Such conditions bring to mind a passage of a Ute Indian poem collected by Nancy Wood, which laments their loss of the Colorado mountains:

The land is worn out and sick.

Even now, they fight to divide it even more.

We would not welcome the return

of these mountains to us.

We would not desire to know the freshness

of what is left over air.

The first inhabitants of the land were the first to lose it. Then came settlement. The old Schmoyer place, which fills the chambers of my memory, is a microcosm of the world. In a way, we fail our home when we allow our sense of place and community to be devalued by something deemed of greater importance. We become too inured to uprooting, too willing to be uprooted by novelties and the promise of greater prosperity. If our sense of place is among our highest values we should devise ways of building communities with economies that embrace the land as an intrinsic and non-negotiable value for the character of the community. This would assure that more people would remain at home on the land, and that those who leave would retain the value of the land and a love for its people. It is an ideal difficult to achieve, but one which should be pursued.

Change may be inevitable, but we live in a world where everything seems to be following the arrow of time at breakneck-speed. The evaluative mind simply cannot keep pace in a world where novelty and impermanence outrace constancy and stability.

The essence of life is to be found in the back current behind the head of the arrow, in that space which swirls against the forward motion, something which resists its progressive nihilism and creates an enduring structure. If the surge for stability within the relentless motion of change and relativism is not joined, values which define our humanity and our community will be swept away in pure process. Likewise, if the constancy of a value, born of a people living in a place inseparable from their personal and communal identity is not affirmed, then displacement will be assured, the new settlers will keep coming, and the inhabitants of the land will continue to blow away like dust in the wind.

The Winchesters have sold the ranch. Regulations on grazing on the summer mountain range, cattle losses from wolves and bears, even rustlers, and the fact that there is too much work and too few who are willing to do it at the wages ranchers are able to pay were the reasons given for the decision.

When Jack Winchester left South Carolina, for whatever reason, he was in search of a new place and a new identity. One has to realize that the Civil War had ended just a few years before Jack's birth. The South lay in ruins, and many young men went north and west. Ignoring his past, his displacement, Jack said his origin was a buzzard egg hatched by the sun. That statement expressed the essence of Jack's psyche. He created his identity on the Big Wind River, that was where Jack Winchester was from, no other place. His history began and ended there. The Winchester mystique was born among the sage and cottonwood trees growing on the river bottom, sprang up from the pines and mountains above Dubois. It grew out of the hard work Jack and his sons, especially Albert put into the ground and the building the herd of cattle.

The ranch has been sold! The question now arises whether the land will lose its Winchester identity. In addition, can the Winchesters maintain their own strong familial identity without the ranch, that tangible force which one feels drawing them together at family reunions? The glue for this cohesion has always been the ranch which Old Jack and Albert created in the midst of a sea of sage brush. If this sense of name and place, this identity, is lost, then change has overwhelmed constancy.

The Nature Conservancy has a theme, "Saving the Last Great Places," and The Nature Conservancy has purchased the Winchester property. While I have a hard time imagining the Winchesters vacating their ranch, I can think of no other buyer I would rather have acquire it. The Nature Conservancy will not allow development. The ranch will not be divided up into ranchettes or be carved up for people to have a summer home in the West. The ranch will largely retain its character. There is a bit of constancy in the Nature Conservancy's view of this property tempering the forces of change, planting a stake in the soil, tethering oneself to it and standing its ground despite the power of the oncoming wave of change.

I can go back home there because the spirit of the place will be preserved, from the petroglyphs left by the first people to the crumbling buildings of the old homesteads. I shall not have to say as the ancient Utes did, lamenting the loss and changes to their mountain home, "the land is sick, I would not have it back." The Winchester Ranch, the people who lived and worked there, now embedded in my memory, are still a significant part of my sense of "self." I can still feel the spirit of that place on the Big Wind River, and it is in the spirit that there is constancy.