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worked in opposite directions. I always tried to beat him to the halfway point, but never did. Panting, bleeding from a half dozen cuts, and stretching wire like a maniac, I would look up to see James’s battered cowboy hat, red goatee, and broad shoulders pop over a ridge. Once in sight, he fairly whizzed down the line, stopping hardly long enough to see the breaks, let alone fix anything. His forearms stayed unscathed, as if the barbs were scared of them.
    When the work was done, James took his time heading back to the shop. If there were cattle around he would suggest we ride through, “to settle them.” Otherwise he devised some long way home that took us up into the foothills, past an old homestead or to some spot where he thought we might find elk antlers.
    Once we were fixing a fence on the Forest Service allotment, a ragged one that snaked along a ridge and then shot straight up the face of a mountain. It ended where the slope got too steep for cattle. About halfway up the ridge, the fence met a public trail at right angles. When Jeremy had given us our marching orders, he’d mentioned that hikers and hunters often cut the wires, eventhough he had built a gate for them to use. Between that and the fact that a couple hundred head of elk had been crossing the ridge every dusk and dawn for six months, Jeremy figured that the fence would take us all day.
    “After that,” he said, “you’re done.”
    We flew up that fence like dogs on a scent. The prospect of an afternoon off was that rare in early summer. Despite the fact that the whole stretch was uphill and torn to shit, I trotted from one break to the next, driving each new staple into the weathered posts with four hard swings of my fencing pliers.
    The idea was to finish, turn around, and go home to take it easy, but at the top we were both gripped by a strange euphoria. Neither of us had ever fixed a fence that just plain ended. All the others turned corner after corner and put you right back at the start.
    This was different. We stood uphill of the drift fence’s end, feeling as though we had climbed beyond our ken. A sweeping view of the Madison River and the Gravelly Range unfolded to the west. Above it, the sky was pure blue. To the east was the steep-sided valley that held Squaw Creek, shaped by long-gone glacial ice into a broad-bottomed U. The slope around us was tattooed with the overlapping heart shapes of elk tracks and studded with dozens of roundish stones.
    I slipped on a little boulder, knocking it loose. We watched the rock bound down the face of the mountain, leaping higher than a man’s head, until it disappeared with a satisfying crash in a thicket of aspen. James climbed over to a basketball-sized stone and rocked it forward with his foot until gravity took over. The stoneraced downhill, leaping higher and higher as though it wanted to fly. When it hit an old, gray pine, the snag shattered into half a dozen pieces. The game had begun.
    We rolled rocks for an hour, dislodging every available boulder, competing for distance and to see who could flatten the biggest tree. It took both of our efforts to move some of the real Goliaths, and those huge stones cut wide swaths through the forest.
    The whole business was as destructive as it was unnecessary. We smashed a lot of tree trunks, and couldn’t have explained why we did it at the time. But now, at a little remove, I remember the thud and clatter of falling stone and the simple joy of watching trajectories unfold. As we chose our favorite rocks and sent them crashing through the woods, it seemed like our lives were consequential. For a few brief minutes, we were more than two specks on the steep shinbone of a mountain. We were shaping the wilderness, if only by punching holes. The land was stunning, enormous, and so empty that we didn’t have to yell warnings to people down below. And for a handful of ecstatic moments, it all felt like our dominion.
    When the best stones were gone, we