Jean, a young woman living in the city, travels to Montana to visit her two great aunts, Emily and Dorothy, who still live in the old family farmhouse. Jean's grandmother, who was Dorothy's sister and Emily's sister-in-law, had just passed away a week ago, so Jean had decided to visit her elderly relatives out of obligation. She thought that farm life was relatively boring and ultimately meaningless compared to her life in the city. They all sat on the front porch, and Jean listened as Emily and Dorothy talked, as always, about the limited subjects of state of their farm and their relatives. When they mention that Jean is beginning to look like her grandmother Lavinia, Jean gets a little upset, not wanting to be associated with the worn-out, aging people of the farm. Dorothy goes inside to get the family photo album. Jean can identify most of the people in the album after spending countless hours asking her aunts about who's who. After looking through it for a few minutes, they find a picture of Jesse MacGregor, a Scottish sheepherder employed by Jean's grandfather. Jean hadn't ever heard his story, so her aunts told her. They said that he was a dependable man as long as he wasn't drinking, which he did often. He had been romantically interested in Lavinia, but Lavinia was not interested in him. When she had gotten engaged to Jefferson Evers, Jean's grandfather, Jesse was heartbroken. He took his sheep herd north, onto someone else's land, where he was shot for trespassing. Dorothy and Emily speculated that he had done it on purpose, since he would have known the land well. Hearing this story, Jean realizes that her preconceptions about how uninteresting and pointless life on a farm is were wrong.