Gart flicked his flame on in his hand and lit the pipe that was hanging loosely from his mouth. Touching the flame to the bowl and igniting its contents, he drew deeply, letting the uncomfortably strong smoke into his lungs. A few more draughts and the curtain of tobacco fell lightly over his eyes and mind. Exhaling in contentment, Gart turned his gaze back to the horizon and noted its fire. The sun was setting, clashing with the wispy cloud cover and turning everything into slow-motion flames. It was a sight.

Sometimes he came out here and found a solitary perch on the bluffs. In the dry season, the temperature often became intolerable, but during dusk, it was a pleasant heat.

He continued smoking, watching the thin gray wisps dissipate into the sky and dissolve into a formless haze. Maybe they added to the clouds and refracted more sunlight. He liked to think he was helping contribute to the rarefied sunbeams that slashed through the atmosphere.

A bird called in the east. It was a natural, sleepy sound that seemed to fit neatly into the craggy, jagged rocks of the canyon below. It threw echoes down the serrated sides of the canyon walls, landing inevitably on the river below. The slow-seeping water would carry it onward for miles down to the coastline and eventually into the basin. It was a cycle that Gart enjoyed contemplating.

The heat from the pipe was a welcome, comfortable presence. Almost sentient, if Gart gave any credence to the superstition that lighting a tobacco pipe conjured the ghosts of past wanderers and lit a beacon in the wilderness. It was their subtle warnings (so it was said) that intoxicated the mind in the mild delirium contained in the pipe contents. Gart enjoyed such myths but believed in them no more strongly than any other.

His hand throbbed from the wound he had sustained the night before. He had done a fine job setting the splint but it would be some time before he could use it again. Part of him liked the injury. The healing process fascinated him, kept his mind fixated on a process of change. In his slow state he considered the lost memories that had given rise to the ritual behind lighting the pipe. A woman. A handful of women, a perplexing chain of women who all had tapped into the spirits in their own ways. Carda was the latest, a sharp-eyed artist who could scarcely be found without a flame in her hand. He wondered where she was now. Her own nameless sadness still infected parts of his thoughts.

More birds sounded below him. Evening birds - the evening dove unless his ears had fallen off - were circling, looking for a perch to watch their own scintillated version of the sunset. If the legends were true, evening doves were attracted to smoke. Or more specifically, attracted to the whispers in the smoke. The old wanderers had not passed completely into the next world, so the legends went, and so preserved their ability to communicate to the wildlife that already had half a foot (or wing) in the spectral halls they inhabited.

There was no telling if the evening doves sensed Gart’s presence, but his tobacco pipe flared with another cherry-red flame and sent another vanilla-flavored burst of smoke skyward.