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Bruce E Whitacre
a book bubble about
The Elk in the Glade
Literature & Fiction
Author Insight
Returning to the Hi-Line
This past April I returned to the Hi-Line to see the show of Jennie's paintings at the Dawson County Historical Society. Family came from all over and we visited the Fitch homestead, where Jennie's family first settled in Nebraska. Perched atop a deep canyon, where they had dug their first well to be closer to water, sat the ruins of the frame house Horace built to replace his sod house. It had burned down a few years ago, but many of us remembered living there or visiting it. The vast horizon, the wandering county road, the scraggly fences...it still felt like a frontier.
Book Excerpt
The Elk in the Glade
They climb a plum-trimmed canyon and reach the bare Hi-Line.
No houses. No trees.
Sunset, and the white crib is carried
across the sod house threshold.
Horace himself planed that threshold, framed the windows.
He lifts Mary down. “Well?”
She strides to the door and lifts the latch.
Gleaming pine floors catch the fading light.
“Nice, Horace. I’m here,” is all she will give him.
Jennie leaps from the wagon still clutching the buffalo robe.
Red gold purple green the twilight scoops deep below the low hills.
Stars twinkle in the east.
The country rolls out like a carpet in a long run to the sky.
She spins on the short grass.
No one notices or chides.
She can see forever.
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