One in the Valley

I found the bison alone in the valley below the treeline, the river curving through the meadow behind it and the pines climbing the hillside beyond that. The sky was high and blue, and the light was the clean, direct light of a Yellowstone summer morning that hasn't yet picked up the haze of midday. The bison was grazing, as bison graze - head down, moving slowly, entirely occupied with the business of eating in a landscape that provides.

Yellowstone is one of the few places in the lower forty-eight states where you can watch a bison in a landscape that approximates what this continent looked like before the great herds were reduced. The scale is still there. The meadows, the river, the mountains: the stage is intact. The animal moving through it reads, in that context, as something more than itself - as a remnant of a larger picture, a single example of what was once uncountable.

One in the Valley is an image about the landscape as much as the animal - about the particular relationship between the bison and the Yellowstone valley that makes both things more meaningful in combination than either would be alone. At large scale on metal, the depth of the valley - the foreground grass, the curve of the river, the distant treeline and peaks - holds completely, and the solitary bison finds its place in that depth the way the species itself has found its place: quietly, and against considerable odds.