A tiny harlequein horned toad with reddish body, gray legs and stripy gray tail. Was it so variegated because it lived among multicolored gravels? It was barely the size of a quarter.
Later in the day we came upon truly horny horned toads, a mating pair. The female was fat and tan, the male slender and ash-colored. When we came close to look they fled, but they fled together. The male, even in fear, followed the female and would not lose her.
Penistaja Mesa, tohellandgone west of Cuba. Cabezón dim and blue on the horizon. Tertiary strata, sometimes black with almost-coal. Everywhere petrified wood: enormous whole logs weathering into chips, as though we walked through slash left by a mad stone woodcutter.
Penistaja is probably a corruption of the Navajo binishdaahi’, “I forced him to sit.” So we sat.
To the Ojito Wilderness with a friend and his big German shepherd, Chaco. Not thirty yards from the car, Chaco joyfully jumped me. I tried to yank my hands out of the pockets of my $2.50 Goodwill vest to fend him off. It tore, and clouds of duckie down floated away on the wind.
We patched the rips with radiator hose repair tape and Band-aids.
Arroyo de la Caña. A small, gray-tan bobcat caught by its hind leg in a “legal” trap. Not much bigger than a house cat. It growled at us in a singsong. We came as close as we dared. One of us—not wise to the strength and wildness of bobcats—wanted to throw a coat over it and try to release it, in spite of its broken leg.
As we hiked away a fierce-faced, bearded man drove up in a big pickup. Bobcat skulls, and probably skins, bring a price. I’m not sure how much, but New Mexico is very poor.
In the Cebolla Wilderness, an abandoned ranchito with tin shack and corrals. North of it was a steep, stone arroyo with a spring at its head. Filling the gap between two huge stones, a springhouse had been built around the frozen pool. Inside, back in the dark and the smell of water, a tiny shrine was cut in the living rock.
The chisel marks were clear. The santo that had stood there was gone, as was the grille that had protected it, though the scars of the grille’s hinges remained. The empty nicho was touched with blue paint. Carved in front of it was a shallow bowl—for a votive candle, or for water from the spring? There was a stone to kneel on.
The dim interior, the narrow rock passage and frozen pool, the tiny shrine: it felt like a megalithic tomb, something much older than itself.
*
Bushwhacking near the Continental Divide Trail. Broken land: stone, mud, sand, concretions. Overall colors are dun, but sometimes, bright against the yellow, a deep red or black. Weathered, skeletal, not a land friendly to humans. No water but the distant Puerco River. Sagebrush and juniper—the piñon is dead from drought.
The particular crisp softness of walking on frost-heaved Cretaceous dirt.
A doe and her grown fawn floated away from us, bouncing light as…but nothing bounces light as a deer.
*
Warm sun, nippy wind. Socks full of stickers, had to stop every quarter mile to pick them out.
North of Stud Stallion Wash we crossed the pitted sandstone to the ridge. Tucked in a cliff face below a little ponderosa and above a cluster of dry tinajas—natural rain catchment tanks—we came upon what was probably a nineteenth-century sheepherder’s hole-up.
It was a smoke-blackened rock shelter partly enclosed by a stone windbreak. Cozy place. You could spread your skimpy bedroll behind the stone wall and look out over the wide saddle of the syncline with its mysterious stone circles and prehistoric deer-hunter meadows and, at night, a field of stars.
*
Season of dry grasses.
The road turned to dirt, then to a two-track that petered out and became a trail. Two young buck deer moved away from us quietly, up the far side of the draw. Two-year-old males: Jan calls them “forkéd horns.”
On a pumice outcropping lay, face down, a Surfer Ken doll in board shorts that had once been blue and yellow. I turned him face up, to catch some rays and even out his tan.
*
Rambling in a rubbly, lunar, black-and-tan landscape where nothing grows but saltbush. Water-scoured sediments, here and there a hunk of dinosaur bone, and hundreds of stones so polished they might have been tipped from a rock tumbler. John, the geologist, says they’re gastroliths: dinosaur gizzard stones.
“Swallowed by dinosaurs as they traveled their migration routes,” he said. “Maybe hundreds of miles long. None is bigger than a grapefruit; if they were the result of normal deposition they’d be more varied in size, with no upper limit. And they’re all exotics, not from any source near here.”
“Then where are they from?”
He said, “The mountain range they came from has long since worn away.”
*
The first cactus: I hopped the fence onto the Malpais, and with my first step ran into a cholla. Guess I haven’t been hiking for a while.
The second cactus: side-hilling down from the sandstone ledges, I slipped on the scree and my right hand, which I put out instinctively to catch myself, landed smack in a prickly pear. Stabbed full of big spines, furred with gloccids. I had to stand where I was and pull the spines out; got most of them, but a few I’ll bear to my grave like shrapnel.
*
BETSY JAMES: Worldbuilding and Wilderness 