In the sand near the ruin of a Hispanic homestead, a chicken house woven of barbed wire. Lacking rabbit fence or hardware cloth, the settler had laboriously knitted his own: the enclosure’s six sides were crocheted like an afghan, crossed and criss-crossed, basted and pleated and pleached.

The wire itself was old, corroded by the patinating desert sun. Someone desperately wanted to keep coyotes out of the poultry—yet even the bristling homemade mesh wouldn’t have kept out weasels. The patient work of dead hands had been abandoned with the house.

Tumbling chant of a canyon wren.

Boots