IN DARKNESS I HEAR the stories come down from the Douglas Plateau like a summer herd of cattle, ranging for grass as they move into the valley. Such beauty in their coming, rustling through rabbitbrush, bringing their ripe smell, their mouths working their way around clumps of bunchgrass. Each story has a separate mouth, yet together they tell something larger and deeper, as all the individual grasses — bluebunch wheat grass, sweetgrass, coyote’s needle, the giant wild rye often found near gravesites — growing with the sedges and buckwheats, make up a pasture. I have walked in the high pastures, picking blue flax and brown-eyed Susans, scratching at the foxtail barley seeds hooked into my socks. On distant hills the cattle watched, mild-eyed at a distance, and from every draw, a story waited until the dark. I lie in the blue tent and listen.

I have come to find someone I know only through an impression, a packet of photographs found in a box of memorabilia. The box itself is a few slats of old wood, stencilled with Smith, Spences Bridge, Grimes Golden, lined with a cardboard carton. Unsorted, unsung: letters bound with faded rose-coloured ribbon; a program from a concert; newspaper clippings; a copy of Camera Work, dated Autumn, 1906; a length of thin, hollow bone. But the photographs have a voice: quick vowels of sunlight articulating reeds in a body of water, the studied language of horses, long dissertations of pastures, and, huddled together like the generations in a family portrait, decorated baskets on rough planks. On the envelopes, a name, Margaret Stuart, and an address, Cottonwood Ranch, Nicola Lake, British Columbia. And postmarks that tell their own narrative of travel: Seattle; Astoria, Oregon; Fargo, North Dakota; New York.

The letters have been so lovingly bound that I was reluctant to break their embrace, but I studied the photographs, carefully opened the magazine, read the newspaper review of a concert in an unlikely place nearly a century ago. The box has been donated to the small museum where I work and has sat in a dusty corner, waiting to be catalogued or for someone to arrive with an eye to filling in a branch on a family tree. A colleague said, Anna, this is a place you go to, isn’t it, the Nicola Valley? Have you looked in this box yet? It might be interesting to see what’s in it. So I put aside my regular work, columns of notation and surmises based on external evidence, and took up each item to look at in the clear light of day. A shiver ran down my spine, as though someone had walked over my grave. Yes, my family does visit the valley regularly, feeling a kind of belonging we never have words for, needing the dry air and birdsong. Yet our grandmothers and grandfathers never farmed there or recorded their dead in the parish books. Still, drawn by scent, by pollens, by the caress of wind filtered through the high branches of pine trees, we come to find what we can: the pattern of cattle trails in the aspen groves, a phrase of lark call, a lake named for a beloved daughter. And would it make a difference to have a history, even this briefest of histories, incomplete and fading, to link to plants and horses, settlements of graves in two locations — one alongside the plain board church in what was once a thriving townsite, the other on a gentle shoulder of field leading down to a marsh of blackbirds trilling in the rushes?

This could be any summer. We’ve driven here in sunlight and rain, though the rain never lasts long, only wetting the rocks to release their flinty smell and washing the sagebrush and mulleins lining the roadsides clean of their dust. On one stretch of the road, erratics sit impassive among the sage, and marmots whistle from their shoulders. How long ago did those erratics ride the glacier down to this slope? They sprout a few pale, dry lichens, crisp to the touch. Cattle rub against their warm sides, leaving tufts of coarse hair.

We have been to the Douglas Plateau in all seasons, driving up in summer to drink a thermos of coffee after dinner while the children turned cartwheels in the falling light, driving up in winter to see what the groves of cottonwoods looked like, bare of leaves, the ponds and small lakes brittle with ice. Once, in autumn, twenty, perhaps thirty, horses approached the truck, their eyes calm and curious. I took apples from a paper bag and walked to meet them, a girl again among horses. One, a bay mare with a star and white socks, came up to me, lowering her head so that I could rub between her ears and pull a few burrs from her forelock. She wouldn’t touch the apples but blew softly through her nostrils as she sniffed my hair, my face. It was though we’d known each other all our lives and had just been reunited after a long absence. I’ve smelled her since in various winds, salt sweat and pungent grassy dung, and I’ve dreamed of her, dreamed that I vaulted onto her back the way I’d mounted my own horse years earlier, balancing with a handful of mane. I have a photograph of her, taken by my husband from the safety of the truck, and I’ve thought of approaching someone — but whom? — to ask about her. Do you know this horse, I imagine myself asking, can you tell me where I might find this horse? But then what? I can’t think how the story might continue.

I lie in the blue tent and listen to the little brown bats, straining my ears to catch the pulse from their larynxes, seeing shadows of their wings on the walls. By day they roost between the bark and cambium layers of standing dead pines, coming out a dusk to hunt insects. When we walk, we see them flitting between trees. Once we found a dead one here and examined the odd wings, like fine leather, the fierce face reminding me of a wolverine.

Some nights I’ve stood out on the slope by the lake in moonlight to see what I could see. The dark silhouettes of loons, moving lights coming down the Pennask Lake Road, disappearing as a truck rounds a hidden corner, visible again in the open, the moon passing across the sky like a soft lamp, and once a spade-footed toad on its way down to the lake to cool off. When the traffic is scanty and the campers few, I feel as though I’m seeing the valley in its innocence. Nothing but the animals following their nocturnal habits, climbing out of holes in the sand, swimming from the safety of reeds to bask in moonlight, taking wing in the dry air. Big moths fly toward the candle on my picnic table, and before I can call a warning in a language resembling moth, the delicate wings have sizzled to ash.

I hear the stories coming down from the high plateau, attended by coyotes and burrowing owls, the tiny swift shape of a bat. One might be her story, Margaret Stuart of Nicola Lake, a gathering of small details that might make up a life. Weathers, generations of insects to riddle the fenceposts, a swatch of muslin from a favourite gown. The grasses are beautiful in moonlight — pinegrass, timbergrass, brome grass, giant rye. And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.