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Show 66 in a rookery in the trees along the river bank. Once a pair of golden eagles hunted the greasewood side of the mesa, until a neighbor shot one of them and the other disappeared. Hawks hunted our fields and ditchbanks, the great red-tail sailing. Swallows and snipe and bee martins and hundreds of pheasants; crows and magpies and thousands of other birds. Like the beauty of summer itself the red-winged blackbird perched on a cattail in the swamp to sing cheee, cheee. Coyotes had burrows on the mesa side, roamed in the bottomland and through the fields hunting birds' nests, rabbits, mice. Once I heard a rabbit scream and turned in time to see a weasel killing it. Deer lived in the bottoms down at the far end of the place; porcupines and skunks and even house cats gone wild roamed free. Up the draw in the sagebrush lived jackrabbits and a prairie dog town and an old surly badger. Lots of water snakes, an occasional bull snake a yard long. No rattlers. I roamed the place afoot or on horseback, my dog at my heels, and found it only natural every evening to sing for happiness. Memories of Arcadia. Eden-after the fall. Our fall, my fall. I was first tossed off a horse when I was two years old. The twins put me up on it, put the reins in my hand, and then turned the other horses out of the corral so that I could ride around in it unmolested. My horse wanted to go out too though, I clutched the mane screaming, the horse gave a flip of his ass and I went sailing. Not the last time either; we fall and fall. The last time I was bucked off was ingloriously by a work horse, a big young bay named Dick whom I was going to ride back to the house from the fields, and who had never been ridden before. When he started bucking I could have grabbed the hame and held on, he didn't get up very high, but with the harness it was uncomfortable and I bailed out, hoisted one leg over and jumped. But I caught my other foot in the trace and hit the solid earth harder than ever before. |
