Bright Horizon

Two men stand on a rock ledge above a river valley. One, bearded, in a brown suit and soft hat, is pointing. The other, in a dark three-piece suit, holds his hat at his side and follows the arm.

Their clothes put them around the turn of the twentieth century, and that matters: what the bearded man is pointing at had nearly disappeared by then. Bison once ranged across the West in the tens of millions. By 1902 the largest wild, free-ranging herd left south of Canada, in Yellowstone's Pelican Valley, was down to 23 animals.

That same year the park brought in 21 more from herds in Montana and Texas and kept them at a Buffalo Ranch in the Lamar Valley, fed through the winters. It worked. Yellowstone's bison are counted in the thousands today, and a herd grazing along a river is something you can point at again.

The painting runs the valley straight back to a low sun between pale cliffs. A river catches the light and bends through the grass, six bison graze along its bank, and a dark bird of prey rides the air on spread wings. Everything is washed in the gold of late afternoon, in soft strokes in the manner of the nineteenth-century painters of the West.