Where the world began : or, the life and deaths of Adeline Snow

Abstract

A girl went out West one summer to work the reception desk of the Emigrant Hot Springs Hotel, a long white lodge with emerald green shutters and cliff swallows nesting under the eaves. The girl had spent her entire life east of the Mississippi, and the dusty heat of Montana alarmed and excited her. Through this landscape of scrubby cedars and bright yellow grasses, of creeks pouring out of mountains and the cottonwoods they watered, she moved her limbs more than she'd moved them anywhere else. That same summer, a boy living on his grandparents' ranch in Pray spent his free time speeding along the dark face of the Absarokas in his red pickup truck till he hit the turnoff for the hot springs, where the main road curved away towards Yellowstone without him. Past the lodge and the settlement behind the lodge, through the avenue of cottonwoods flanking Emigrant Creek, he entered a landscape of quarry tailings. There, his senses peeled by the invisible presence of rattlesnakes, he would climb to a high rim of stones and throw himself into the cold blue shock of the Dredge.