On a Montana summer evening, Hannah Hinchman calls out to a black widow spider. “Anybody home?” she asks aloud as she stoops to poke a stiff blade of prairie grass into an abandoned gopher hole. Hannah suspects that one of the widows bit her little blonde pup, Sisu, on a previous walk across these Rocky Mountain front rangelands, and now she wants to see for herself.

This field, on the windy eastern side of the Rockies just south of the Glacier peace park, belongs to Pat Troy, a local rancher, and has probably been grazed for as long as the region’s been settled. Decades of cattle have worn the soil down, but in drought years like this one, when the cows are moved elsewhere, even overgrazed land proves a rich prairie habitat — if, like Troy’s acreage, it has never been plowed. Once the ground is turned over, many native species won’t come back.

A naturalist, writer, and painter, and author and illustrator of three beautiful books about the art of careful observation, Hannah visits Troy’s on a weekly basis. The waterfall-spill of her blonde hair checked by the glasses perched atop her head, she will often sit at the edge of a buffalo wallow still dusty bare from the days when giant herds roamed these western plains. In her hard-bound journal she sketches wheatgrass, fescue, and needlegrass; blackbirds and curlews and horned larks; abstracted soundscapes tracking hawks’ cries, the wind’s song through the prairie grass, grasshopper ratchets. Her thumbnail sketches are ringed with narrative notes in a marvel of studied calligraphies. The journals she’s kept for more than thirty years are as much a record of what she’s learned of the western landscape as of the shifting centers of her own life.

Hannah has come to see her task as one of quiet witness to the moments and places she inhabits. Her newest book, Little Things in a Big Country, unfolds across the Western prairies that are her refuge, the places and beings that are her most intimate companions.

Her reverence for the land arises from something greater than its usefulness, and that view sets her apart from her neighbors in this little ranching town. Most of the folks in this area, the residents of little Augusta, Montana, have lived here all their lives, and most work closely with the land, as ranch hands or government workers, landowners or rough-hewn journeymen.

With only two decades of history in these western mountain states, Hannah’s considered a relative latecomer, lumped in all too easily with the wealthy outsiders from the coasts who seem to sweep in for weekends at their hundred-acre hideaways. But Hannah ekes out her artist’s living year-round on three cozy acres just north of town. She joins the other locals for drinks at the Buckhorn, Augusta’s main watering-hole, and knows this land as well as anyone — if from a different point of view. As she neither hunts nor keeps a husband’s house, she remains something of a curiosity, although by now a familiar one.

In the years she’s lived here in Augusta, Hannah has earned Pat Troy’s respect, along with his permission to walk and study and sketch his land. But she knows that even after twenty years she is still considered an outsider to the rural west. One cowboy she meets from time to time at the Buckhorn persists in telling her, “Just go back to where you came from. You’re not doing anybody any good here, you’re just taking up space. Probably more animals could survive if you and the hundred thousand people who come here like you would just go home.”

He’s absolutely right, she figures, and maybe I should go home. But I don’t know where else home is, if it’s not here.

“Anybody home?” Hannah says again as she crouches on Troy’s untilled prairie, looking for the black widow. Her grass stem’s yellow tip circles round the gopher burrow’s basin-like doorway, but nobody comes out to see who’s knocking.

Hannah got her first taste of “fall on your knees kind of worshipful” western reverie as a girl of twelve, when she joined a neighbor family on a week’s vacation to a dude ranch in the canyon of Colorado’s Big Thompson river. An Ohio girl used to farms and woody marshlands, Hannah was awed by the Rockies reaching like wings to the west, the stones’ colors beneath the river surface, the sky stretched taut like still water.

Back home in Kettering, she spent her days walking the Ohio marshlands, following the birds’ movements across the seasons. But she had an Alka-Seltzer bottle full of Big Thompson river water to remind her of where she knew she was headed.

Half a lifetime later she still remembers the trip as an awakening. The whole of the west became a holy place, and for years she would let herself be swept up in the liquid swell of the western landscape. A spiritual connection, a reason for living — what do they call it, this deep and fleeting sadness that is at the same time a kind of heightened joy, a sense of everyday tedium dissolving into rapture? A Japanese empress’ understanding of the cherry blossom.