Nature of Colorado
The imagery of nature in the novel serves the function of enforcing the effect of the depicted events. It shows how nature and human soul are connected, it gives the picturesque background for further episodes: “The sage slopes below her seemed rosy velvet; the golden aspens on the farther reaches were on fire at the tips; the foothills rolled clear and mellow and rich in the light; the gulf of distance on to the great black range was veiled in mountain purple; and the dim peaks beyond the range stood up, sunset-flushed and grand.”, “The coyotes were howling. Wild, sharp, sweet notes”, “Nature was prodigal with her colors that autumn. The frosts came late, so that the leaves did not gradually change their green.”
Coyotes howling
Columbine loved coyotes and their howling was like a melody for her, the melody with “wild, sharp, sweet notes!”. These sound was a reflection of her soul – wild, mysterious and beautiful. She got used to their howling and now she couldn’t imagine her life without it, the coyotes howling became a part of her life, something special for her: “They soothed her troubled, aching head, lulled her toward sleep, reminded her of the gold-and-purple sunset, and the slopes of sage, the lonely heights, and the beauty that would never change.” This imagery emphasizes Columbines’ unique, somehow strange personality of wild girl of the Wild West.
White Slides Ranch
White Slide Ranch is the place where the whole story takes place. It is a gorgeous land where a cattle is grew up and Columbine lives. Wade was watching this place from the hill and he was fascinated with its beauty: “The scene was pastoral and beautiful. Wade saw it clearly and whole. Peace and plenty, a happy rancher's home, the joy of the dawn and the birth of summer, the rewards of toil—all seemed significant there”. But still there was one thing that spoiled this place. It was Jack Bellounds, the cruel thief, who stole cattle from his fathers’ rancho and lied him. “But Wade pondered on how pregnant with life that scene was—nature in its simplicity and freedom and hidden cruelty, and the existence of people, blindly hating, loving, sacrificing, mostly serving some noble aim, and yet with baseness among them, the lees with the wine, evil intermixed with good”. This imagery highlights the contrast of the place where everything seems good at the first sight but there is a hidden evil which poisons its beauty.
Nature, prodigal with colors
Columbine found out that Wade was her father, but it was too late, he was dead. It made her suffer, she felt miserable and lost, because she loved him, but for all her life, the old Bellounds was her father and she couldn’t imagine that one day her real father will come. And her blue and gloomy mood is contrasting with nature around her, a beautiful autumn with a variety of colors: “The frosts came late, so that the leaves did not gradually change their green. One day, as if by magic, there was gold among the green, and in another there was purple and red. Then the hilltops blazed with their crowns of aspen groves; and the slopes of sage shone mellow gray in the sunlight; and the vines on the stone fences straggled away in lines of bronze”. The imagery expresses contradiction between changes in nature and changes, which happened in her soul.
