I think at the most basic level, the nature descriptions give us a sense of place, a landscape to put the characters into. It's glaringly obvious, but you need some sort of context to put the people into. Like much of the SS, the description of Aguirre's office at the start of the story is very sparse, but even from those few words, it paints a vivid picture in your mind just from the words she uses of what the inside of Aguirre's office is like, and you form a mental image of it.
With nature it's not so simple though. When they first went up the mountain - "ascent into heaven" (I'm sure I've seen it described as that somewhere before) -
"Ennis and Jack, the dogs, horses and mules, a thousand ewes and their lambs flowed up the trail like dirt water through the timber and out above the tree line into the great flowery meadows and the coursing, endless wind." She could have said, "Ennis and Jack, the dogs, horses and mules, and the sheep climbed up the trail up the mountain through the trees and then up through the meadows", but apart from being a rather boring description, it gives us no sense of scale, no sense of how they moved up the mountain. I'm not a big fan of "how to write" books, preferring to just get stuck in myself and writing by instinct, but I do own a couple, and one of them has a chapter entitled "show, don't tell". Annie's not telling us simply what they did, but giving us that viital information that allows us to form a picture in our minds. It gives us the information to imagine how all of those thousand ewes and their lambs would have looked, making their way up the mountain, and so much more. They made their way through the trees and the meadows, and not only visually can we picture those flowery meadows that are "great" (sense of scale again), but the "coursing, endless wind" tells us about the climate up there so that apart from
seeing the landscape we can also
feel it - we can feel that wind and we're using all our senses now, not just the visual ones.
„ ...and they packed in the game and moved off the mountain with the sheep, stones rolling at their heels, purple cloud crowding in from the west and the metal smell of coming snow pressing them on. The mountain boiled with demonic energy, glazed with flickering broken-cloud light, the wind combed the grass and drew from the damaged krummholz and slit rock a bestial drone.“
(coming down the mountain)
Again, having been given the visual descriptions of the landscape throughout their time on the mountain, this time there's more emphasis on the
feeling of the place, and the way it echoes their emotions. We're given details though from the tiniest level "stones rolling at their heels", which is something we can relate to, the way when you're walking downhill small stones roll after you, to the visual again "purple crowd rolling in..." - a visual description which also carries a sense of the mood, and also another sense - "the metal smell of coming snow", and then a more detailed description of the weather with sound "a bestial drone".
"It was just the two of them alone on the mountain, flying in the euphoric bitter air, looking down on the hawk's back and the crawling lights of the vehicle on the plain below. Suspended above ordinary affairs and distant from tame ranch dogs barking in the dark hours"Again, a sense of scale - looking down on the hawk and vehicles on the plain below, but in with that there's mixed so much more about their relationship - two words she uses "flying" and "euphoric", but contrasts that with "bitter air" (bittersweet?). They're "suspended" both physically with the height of the mountain, and emotionally, separate from everyday life and "tame ranch dogs". Life on the mountain is far separated from everyday life, and though as Penthesilea says,
She herself said in interviews, that in a short story every single word has to be right, has to carry meaning, that even the punctuation is important.
...it's that description that tells us more about their life together on the mountain and how it contrasted with "real life" than any amount of dialogue between them could.
If you have read Close Range, the collection of Short stories in which BBM appears, you will realize this is unique. AP's characters are crushed and contorted by the harsh economic, social and physical environment in which they try to survive. but in BBM she lets nature ease up just a bit to allow the tender and fragile love of these two boys to flourish.
As Vermont Sunset says, it really feels as though with BBM she does let up and lets nature ease up just that little bit. I bought a friend of mine Close Range, and she started reading the other stories and about half way through gave up and skipped to BBM on the grounds that the stories were "Far too damned depressing!" lol! (and BBM's not? lol!)
I do feel that as Penthesilea quoted AP as saying, in a short story the choice of words is so important, but with the nature descriptions in BBM they really are vital to the story - the story of the mountain described through those descriptions, is just as important as the boys' story, and mirrors their story (in calm times we have descriptions of a peaceful mountain and the nature that surrounds them and in times of trouble, dramatic descriptions of the weather and the feel of the mountain that mirrors their moods), and that continues through the whole story. Those natural descriptions are integral to the story, and without them it would lack a lot. In the film we get the majestic landscapes and the subtle gestures and the looks and the expressions. In the SS though we have only the descriptions of their surroundings and we need those words to fill in the sense of place and to reinforce the dialogue and the snippets we are told about their thoughts. For linguistic artistry, how AP uses those words, on a scale of one to ten she gets and unequivocal fifteen - every single word
is right, and
does carry meaning, and BBM should be up there amongst the literary greats.