Includes bibliographical references (pages 243-246).

In the tradition of Terry Tempest Williams, Gretel Ehrlich, and Linda Hasselstrom, Page Lambert looks to the West in a wide-ranging search for a heritage to pass on to her children. When she and her husband move their young family north to Wyoming from Colorado, they transplant five generations of family roots to new soil but find that it is ancient land - land that the Lakota, the Crow, the Cheyenne still consider sacred. Page Lambert is an authentic voice of this land, and in telling her story, she tells the story of the West. In writing about loss of a heritage and the quest to find it anew, she speaks of ranching traditions and Native American beliefs that go back many generations and of the cycles of life and death so elemental to ranchers. She tells of learning about her deaf grandmother Effie, a young wife pioneering in the Mojave Desert, and about her grandmother Helen, whose own trail of ancestral tears has meaning for Page.

As she and her family face heartbreak and ultimately prevail, Lambert finds balance and strength from the one unbending link to the future: the land itself.