It’s 31 degrees centigrade. I am riding a mountain bike up the Kettle Valley Trail. But for a washout I would have missed seeing a family of geese tucked against the opposite shore of the river. There are fluffy chicks hanging closely to their mom.

After a wheat truck bounces past the ranch house and the dust that it raised settles, I can hear bird song coming from the shelter belt. Meadow larks and red winged blackbirds, perched on the bare tips of blend in their songs. My grandfather planted the row of Russian olive trees to give the house some protect from storm winds. Today it shelters meadow larks, pheasants, and the occasional deer.

I ride toward the site of the one room schoolhouse that my mother and uncles learned to read and write. The building is gone now. Some of the bench families have buried their dead in a small cemetery near the old school site. It offers a beautiful view of wheat fields and Square Butte beyond.

Even though the road toward Square Butte is just drying out from a recent storm, I take it. Two prong horn antelope trot across a wheat field and seem to pose with the butte as a backdrop. Later I surprise a mule deer reclining in some summer fallow. It will stand up, shake off sleep, spot my bicycle, and run full speed toward the nearest shelter belt.

Aki would not have liked the barn cat that greeted my arrival at my grandfather’s Montana ranch. I still think of it as his even though he died in 1923. He homesteaded the bench land before he passed and left my grandmother with three children under 8 and a crop in the ground. Thanks to her two bachelor brothers, she held on to the ranch through the depression, surviving drops in wheat prices and hail storms that flatted the whole year’s crop in minutes.

Last night I slept alongside the Missouri River in the hotel where my grandparents spent their one night honeymoon. The next day they rode 40 miles to the ranch in an open buckboard. It was well below zero and snowing. They lived in a one room shack until grandpa built the Craftsman style house where I ate dinner. It was ordered from a Sears catalogue and shipped in parts from Chicago.

Meadow larks sang while I visited the family cemetery and later when I walked among the abandoned tractors, harrows, and shacks that have accumulated over a hundred years of farming. I spotted a loaping bear cross the far side of a field of winter wheat. A half an hour later an antelope trotted into view near the same place. Beyond the antelope low rounded hills and a flat topped butte rose above the field. The farmers of my family are responsible for beauty of the ground where the antelope stands. It enhances the natural beauty of the high ground beyond.

Yesterday, an osprey watched me peddled along the Washington shore of the Snake River. I always considered the fish eagles birds that only work clear waters. From it perch in a cottonwood tree, this citified eagle could watch cars and trucks clank over the interstate suspension bridge. Across the river, a factory cranked out bullets. What it did next left no doubt that it was the real deal.

The bird launched from its perch and hung in mid-air above the river, beating its broad wings to tread air like a swimmer can tread water. It dived toward the river. A sceen of trees blocked my view of the osprey until it had pull back above the tree line, its talons empty.

This morning I passed another urban marmot as well as a great blue heron that let me approach much closer than its Alaskan cousins. Later in the day a coyote crossed the road in front of me. I have long known of that trickster’s ability to thrive on a city’s margins. I suspected that herons can handle the stress of suburban living. But the osprey really surprised me.