When the November rifle season opens, families gather at deer camps across the plains for a tradition that is as much about the fellowship as the hunt for the whitetail and the mule deer.

In the brief weeks of spring runoff, paddlers slip onto the Little Missouri and drift the length of the badlands, past buttes and bighorn and bison, in the quietest way to see the wild country.

Far from the glow of cities, the western plains hold some of the darkest night skies in the country, where the Milky Way throws shadows and the aurora dances on winter nights.

In the far northeast, the Pembina River has carved a deep, forested gorge — a pocket of rugged, wooded country that surprises everyone who expects the plains to stay flat.

When winter locks the lakes in thick ice, whole villages of fish houses appear overnight on Devils Lake and Sakakawea, and the angler's season simply moves indoors and onto the ice.

Once nearly lost, the bison again graze the plains in the national park and on tribal and private lands, a shaggy emblem of the grassland's slow and hopeful recovery.