Evan

It was a patchwork of private parcels and leased grazing and BLM land, stitched together with gates and informal agreements and decades of, we've always done it this way.

We drove south and east on roads that started as pavement and ended as washboard dirt.

The landscape opened into a series of benches and draws and then dropped into canyons.

There were old uranium roads out there that dead-ended at collapsed adits and forgotten tailings piles.

There were ghost traces of other eras.

A stone foundation.

A line of cottonwoods where someone once tried to make a life.

A scatter of rusted cans that looked like they'd been thrown yesterday, even though they might have been there since the 50s.

Dale gave me a short history as we drove, and it wasn't the tidy kind you get in a visitor center.

It was the kind people tell when the land is personal.

He talked about drought years and hard winters, about a neighbor who'd lost sheep back when coyotes were worse.

About a time his grandfather had found a man dead in a wash after a flash flood.

No crime, no mystery, just the desert being the desert.

Then, without shifting his tone, he said there were stories older than all of them, and the old-timers used to talk about witchery in a way that made it sound like weather.

Not a monster, not a fairy tale, just a thing that happens if you step wrong.

We rolled through a gate and down a two-track that followed a fence line.

The cattle were scattered in small groups, heads down, not alarmed.

That mattered.

Livestock react to predators in ways that are hard to fake if you know what to look for.

You'll see bunching.