r. The fox is no great talker, but
the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in twenty keys at once,
gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light treaders, the split-feet,
so that the solitary camper sees their eyes about him in the dark
sometimes, and hears the soft intake of breath when no leaf has stirred
and no twig snapped underfoot. The coyote is your real lord of the mesa,
and so he makes sure you are armed with no long black instrument to
spit your teeth into his vitals at a thousand yards, is both bold
and curious. Not so bold, however, as the badger and not so much of a
curmudgeon. This short-legged meat-eater loves half lights and lowering
days, has no friends, no enemies, and disowns his offspring. Very likely
if he knew how hawk and crow dog him for dinners, he would resent it.
But the badger is not very well contrived for looking up or far to
either side. Dull afternoons he may be met nosing a trail hot-foot to
the home of ground rat or squirrel, and is with difficulty persuaded to
give the right of way. The badger is a pot-hunter and no sportsman. Once
at the hill, he dives for the central chamber, his sharp-clawed, splayey
feet splashing up the sand like a bather in the surf. He is a swift
trailer, but not so swift or secretive but some small sailing hawk
or lazy crow, perhaps one or two of each, has spied upon him and come
drifting down the wind to the killing.

No burrower is so unwise as not to have several exits from his dwelling
under protecting shrubs. When the badger goes down, as many of the furry
people as are not caught napping come up by the back doors, and the
hawks make short work of them. I suspect that the crows get nothing but
the gratification of curiosity and the pickings of some secret store
of seeds unearthed by the badger. Once the excavation begins they walk
about expectantly, but the little gray hawks beat slow circles about
the doors of exit, and are wiser in their generation, though they do not
look it.

There are always solitary hawks sailing above the mesa, and where some
blue tower of silence lifts out of the neighboring range, an eagle
hanging dizzily, and always buzzards high up in the thin, translucent
air making a merry-go-round. Between the coyote and the birds of carrion
the mesa is kept clear of miserable dead.

The wind, too, is a besom over the treeless spaces, whisking new sand
over the litter of the scant-leaved shrubs, and the little doorways
of the burrowers a