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"   Through buffalo grass that reached to the knees of his mare, Eli rode out across the rising brown tableland, dismounted to climb a tumble of limestone, and there, standing on a flat rock the size of his mother&amp;#039;s old piano turned on its side, he scanned the terrain with his father&amp;#039;s glasses, stopping finally at a distant swale where he saw them lying in the sage, regal and shaggy, by all accounts the last wild herd between here and the ocean.  Okay, that&amp;#039;s a pretty long sentence. But I&amp;#039;m in rough draft mode now, trying only for an approximation in words of a vision I have, inspired by a place I&amp;#039;ve seen and a moment in history that may or may not have occurred in the way I imagine it. Last fall, after I put the wraps on Undiscovered Country, I hopped into my truck and drove west from my home in Minnesota all the way through North Dakota and into Montana, which has a pull on me like gravity, maybe because of a bicycle trip I took at twenty-one across the length of it, west to east, eight hundred miles, up and over its rocky spine and through its long dry desert. It&amp;#039;s a magnificent landscape that burns and freezes beneath a sky so immense it can obliterate any self-important notions a person might be tempted to entertain. When I drove out there in October, I had only three days\u2014including ten hours on the road each way\u2014to visit two sites, both of them graveyards. To find the first one I asked around at various dusty gas and junk stops, then took a gamble and turned onto a private gravel trail that cut through the high country separating the Yellowstone watershed from the Missouri breaks. I drove for some thirty miles, no buildings in sight, braking occasionally for meandering Angus cattle. Then I turned onto a ranch trail that led through buffalo grass and sage toward the highest ground in view, a place\u2014according to my best calculations\u2014where the last wild bison herd of the nineteenth century was chased and hunted down. I left my truck, climbed to the top of the limestone rocks piled at the top of the hill, and much like my young protagonist Eli, stood there looking out across the brown land that rolled away on every side. A herd of antelope, a dozen or so, watched me from below until my foot slipped on a loose stone and I nearly fell. The antelope startled and sprang away, so smooth in their movements they may as well have been flying. I saw no bison: no shaggy bulls, no brown cows, no yellow calves. I didn&amp;#039;t even find any bones. Not that I expected to. They&amp;#039;ve been gone for a hundred and twenty years, and it&amp;#039;s my fascination with their disappearance that set me on a journey to explain to myself what their absence means, and what it meant to those who were most affected. Which brings me to the second graveyard I visited. In the books I read as a kid, it was called a massacre. The Indians call it a battle. Whichever term you choose, there&amp;#039;s a fact you can&amp;#039;t escape. On June 25, 1876, Custer&amp;#039;s Seventh Cavalry attacked a village of men, women and children. But unlike the village on the Washita, which Custer had attacked eight years before, this one\u2014unknown to him\u2014was large, its thousands of men in no mood at all to be routed by a force of a few hundred soldiers. Having found the site without any problem\u2014it was a matter of following the highway signs\u2014I walked the brown hills above the Little Bighorn river and wandered among the hundreds of white markers where men fell, glad I was there in that haunted place during daylight hours. My feelings were mixed, knowing as I did that many of the soldiers were immigrant boys from Europe, nineteen or twenty years old and working for pay, knowing how they died and were butchered, and how they were buried in shallow graves only to have their bones dug up and scattered by wolves and coyotes, then picked clean by birds. I say mixed feelings because I knew too why those who killed them had done so. Already under orders to report to the reservations, they saw a life ahead that looked like nothing they had known, like nothing they wanted to know\u2014restricted to a small place beneath the immense circle of sky, living in the shadow of the square agency buildings, farming little squares of dry soil for the pale vegetables they produced, and of course, eating the tasteless meat of the cattle whose lives were as restricted as their own. They may or may not have known that in seven or eight years the buffalo would be gone. About the author: Lin Enger&amp;#039;s novel, Undiscovered Country, was just released by Little, Brown and Company. His short stories have been published in a number of journals, including Glimmer Train Stories, Great River Review, American Fiction, South Dakota Review, Wolf Head Quarterly, and Ascent. During the 1990s, he published five mystery novels (Pocket Books), writing in collaboration with his brother, the novelist Leif Enger. 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<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a4771/lin-enger-last-line/>