As I leave one such meadow, my eyes are drawn to a glint of black in the muddy trail. It is a thumbnail-sized chip of obsidian, far from its birthplace in the volcanic basins east of the Cascades. Its faceted face bears the marks of having been flaked from a larger piece, and the edges are as sharp as would be expected from a piece of broken glass. Handling it, I manage to slice my finger.

    Obsidian flake
    Worked by an ancient hand
    Still makes the blood flow

This is the haiku that comes to me. But it is an illusion of time that the hand that shaped this flake was “ancient.” Though separated from me by centuries or millennia, the maker was almost certainly much younger than my age of 51 years. Perhaps he paused here to make a quick repair to a damaged projectile point, restoring the edge by chipping away this flake. Perhaps he was pursing deer, hoping for a feast and for the look of delight on the faces of his children. He was at home on this mountain in a way I cannot imagine.

Wagner Butte is named, my trail guidebook informs me, for Jacob Wagner, “an early pioneer and prominent civic leader.” Undoubtedly a man of great energy and courage, Wagner must have journeyed west with the unshakable conviction that this land was free for the taking – and so he took it.

Moved by an obscure impulse, I place the blood-filmed piece of obsidian on my tongue, and carry it forward up the trail in my mouth.

About halfway up the mountain, the conifer forest breaks apart for the last time, and I enter the landscape of an Idaho summer. A silver and green sagebrush glade, fragrant in the sun, stretches up to the fir-studded ridgeline. This is a world of wildflowers and deliriously busy bees, which dart between scarlet clumps of Indian paintbrush, bunches of delicate azure flax, and deep purple penstamon clustering among the rocks. The smooth sweep of the slope is interrupted here and there by scattered granite monoliths and boulder fields beset with dark witchy groves of mountain mahogany. The twisted trees, bearded with brittle black lichens, somehow remain shadowed in full sun.