The valley looks the same from one year to the next, changed only by season.

The mountains are unchanged on any human timescale.

And somewhere in the landscape, the child rests again, returned to a context more appropriate to an ancestor than to a scientific specimen.

The 13,000 years between the original burial and the reburial were not a void.

They were filled with the entire history of the Americas — the rise and fall of cultures, the development of languages, the building of cities and the abandonment of cities, the trauma of contact and colonization, the survival of Native American peoples through conditions that were designed to eliminate them.

The child in the Montana earth is connected to all of that, through the specific genetic thread that runs from the Clovis founding population to the living descendants who came to honor that child in 2014.