On a wide stretch of sage,
a pronghorn stands in wind that never quite settles.
She lowers her head
and begins to move.
There’s no trail.
Hints of hoofprints from last year.

A few pale hairs caught under barbed wire.
Just a faint line in the earth
pressed thin by hooves
you
might mistake for nothing at all.
Each year, some pronghorn herds travel hundreds of miles across the Rockies.
They follow routes worn into memory long before fences,

long before towns or highways.
Still, they find it.
Generation after generation
they step into a path
laid down by animals they will never see.
From a ridge, the prairie looks empty.
Down in the sage,
there are stories pressed into the dirt so lightly
most of us walk right over them.

Spend enough time in the Rockies
and you begin to notice those faint lines 
the ones that have been leading something home

long before we ever thought to notice.
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