The Yellow Plume

A broad valley in the Montana Rockies on a hot dry afternoon at the end of summer, hard sunlight from the west, on a bare hill above a copper smelter a freestanding round brick smokestack of immense height, tapering gently toward its mouth, its fresh brick an even pale buff with fine horizontal mortar lines, standing on an octagonal concrete base with tall narrow openings at its corners, from its mouth a long yellow-grey plume of smoke drifting low across the whole valley, in front a split-rail fence, withered brown pasture and bare grey pine trunks on the slope, the smelter halls small and hazy far below the hill, snow-streaked ridges beyond.