In a preface to this volume of thirty-five stories, Merrill Gilfillan reflects, "Most of these stories took shape during the latter twentieth century, a period when I was regularly exploring the topography of the American Great Plains (especially the 'Indian country' of Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas) and beginning, with hesitant steps, to engage that landscape as the rich, if airy, theater for human action and culture that it is and has been for a humbling number of centuries. Having made a certain peace-of-understanding with the vast reaches of the domain, I slowly sensed that the landscape itself, the high, honeycombed visibility of the grasslands, was rendering, offering up at its own sweet pace, the human tales—above all, those of the deep-rooted native peoples—afoot within its wind-cut spaces."