“When they came South out of Grant County Boyd was not much more than a baby and the newly formed county they’d named Hidalgo was itself little older than the child.”

The opening lines of the novel establish the family’s arrival in Hidalgo County and provide a loose time period for the novel as set in the late 1930s and 1940s. The Parham family are setting up their homestead when government is first being established in Hidalgo, suggesting that they are part of the effort to civilize the land. Their existence is defined by their relationship to The End of Frontier Life and its corresponding era, and their very existence on the land is a defiance of the wilderness that was there before.

“Crouched in the broken shadow with the sun at his back and holding the trap at eyelevel against the morning sky he looked to be turning some older, some subtler instrument. Astrolabe or sextant. Like a man bent at fixing himself someway in the world. Bent on trying by arc or chord the space between his being and the world that was. If there be such space. If it be knowable.”

This description of Billy’s father raises one of the central tensions of the novel: humanity’s relationship to the elemental, natural forces that it thinks it has risen above. Throughout the narrative, different characters alternately argue that man is connected to the primordial through an unbroken history of existence and that the only thing that truly exists is the present, as all will crumble into dust. Billy’s viewpoint remains connected to the physical, historical world of the former.