Sagebrush
Sometimes it seems that we’ve brought just a little less than we need. Then suddenly we find the right thing and can’t believe our luck.
We spent our first night dispersed camping on a ridge overlooking the Buffalo Gap Grasslands, just outside the Badlands National Park in South Dakota. We’d been listening to Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry’s endless tome about cowboys driving a herd of longhorn cattle from Texas to Montana. They could see and hear others miles away on the plain. Now we could understand.
As we stood at the edge of the ridge we could hear a coyote yipping and barking. It could have been just below us, or half a mile away to the north where the wind was coming from. We were too green to know.
After a while the barking stopped, and there was just a soft breeze and the sweet smell of the sagebrush.
