SEATED IN SILENCE ATOP A BROKEN COLUMN, halfway up the stone cathedral called Devils Tower, my feet dangling over 400 feet of air, I'm entranced. Two tiny white-throated swifts are chasing each other, deftly cutting left and right, up and down, along the vertical walls of rock. Their agility is astonishing. They buttonhook and corkscrew, wheel and reel in the sky.

Screeching jee-jee-jee-jee, the swifts buzz me from below, passing so close their feathers nearly brush my cheeks. They shoot straight up into the air, almost disappearing, then drop, twirling together, copulating, falling in a 100-mile-per-hour death spiral, separating at the last possible second.

The white-throated swift, Aeronautes saxatalis, is my favorite bird. One-ounce bullets, they are nature's miniature fighter pilots, masters of aerial acrobatics and one of the fastest birds in North America. They nest in remote cliffs, like here at Devils Tower, but spend most of their lives in flight.

My eyes follow the swifts skimming down the curtain of lichen-green granite, before spotting a kestrel floating just above the treetops. Beyond the kestrel I watch three Canada geese gliding along the surface of the muddy Belle Fourche River and a great blue heron flapping onto a nest.

At dawn, quietly hiking to the base of this monolith, I saw three wild turkeys bounding through the underbrush, a dozen hightailing whitetail deer, and one mountain bluebird flickering limb to limb. I felt as if I were entering a sanctuary. I couldn't believe it had been 30 years since I was last here.

Somewhere directly below me, hidden beneath an overhang, my climbing partner, Patrick Fleming, inches his way up the 200-foot 5.9 crack called Waterfall. Whenever I hear grunting, I instinctively take in rope, but my mind is engaged in the gestalt of this place.

A shadow rakes across my head and I peer up at the sun. A solitary turkey vulture is circling on the updrafts rising from the south face. Devils Tower has drawn all these different birds to its walls, sharing the same air space and nesting in the same sawed-off mountain.

It occurs to me that I have the same aerial perspective they have, and it feels like a gift. From this vantage, the lay of the land is evident—the path of the past as circuitous as the Belle Fourche, the present as ephemeral as the wind, the view so clear I might almost see into the future.