More than fifty elk, cautious but unworried, moved slowly away from us around the base of a narrow mesa. We hoofed it up the slope and across the mesa top in time to watch them leap two fences and head single file up the next ridge.
Not the best focus, but the best behinds.
I bit a dried ball of piñon pitch. It tasted like cloves.
The wide horseshoes of mesa canyons, naked slopes of the Morrison formation, eroded, sleeked by rain and full of the sandy tongues left by its torrents: a water-made landscape without a drop of water in it.
The Morrison slopes were fissured, pristine—sandy corries where only animals had walked. Footprints of coyote, mice, ravens, deer.
*
WORLD-BUILDING and WILDERNESS: 