Explore "Out of the Blue" by Bertrand W. Sinclair on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Viewed from the southern approach, the triple buttes of the Sweet Grass Hills rise like immense cones abruptly from the level of the plains. Gold Butte stands in the middle. West Butte looks toward the Rockies. East Butte faces the rising sun. Between each the prairie flowed in glades, carpeted with grass, dotted with sloughs, and threaded by aimless streams. It was, indeed, as if some whimsical giant had snatched three peaks off some distant mountain range and set them there for geologists to puzzle over.
Upon East Butte, the larger of the three and the most northerly, where the plains began to wrinkle and lift to foothills, like a grassy sea frozen into immobility, as it laved the shore of the peak, Rock camped his wagon. At daybreak, while the sun was yet merely a promise uttered by a golden haze in the east, he rode with all his men up that precipitous slope. An hour's climbing brought them to the top, but not to the uttermost pinnacle; for that was a gray, rocky spire, where bands of mountain sheep took refuge against less sure-footed creatures. They had climbed to a shoulder that brought them under the rim rock, around to the head of the north slope.