Prairie Dog Quotes

The problem with ideas is that they never come all at once. They emerge like prairie dogs. An edge of ear, or the tip of a nose, and sometimes even the whole head. But if you look straight at an idea too fast, it can vanish back into the ground before you're even sure of what you've seen. Instead, you have to sneak up on it slowly, looking out of the corner of your eye, and then and only then you might glance up to get a clear look.

The pathetic thing I wanted to say to him on the phone – but didn’t – was this: When you're a little kid, you have something. Maybe it's a blanket or a stuffed animal or whatever. For me, it was this stuffed prairie dog that I got one Christmas when I was like three. I don't even know where they found a stuffed prairie dog, but whatever, it sat up on its hind legs and I called him Marvin, and I dragged Marvin around by his prairie dog ears until I was about ten. And then at some point, it was nothing personal against Marvin, but he started spending more time in the closet with my other toys, and then more time, until finally Marvin became a full-time resident of the closet. But for many years afterward, sometimes I would get Marvin out of the closet and just hang out with him for a while – not for me, but for Marvin. I realized it was crazy, but I still did it. And the thing I wanted to say to Tiny is that sometimes, I feel like his Marvin.

As for Republicanism, no analogy could be found for it upon the face of the earth—unless we except the case of the "prairie dogs," an exception which seems to demonstrate, if anything, that democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs.

If you take away all the prairie dogs, there will be no one to cry for the rain.

He unlaced his arms and took a step forward. "You hurt?" "Not badly." She tried to smile, but her lips only curved on one side. "My main problem is that I'm stuck to a cactus." (...) "How'd you manage to get tangled up with a cactus?" J.T. crouched beside her and started extricating her from the prickly plant. "Well, believe it or not, I was on my way to apologize to you when a prairie-dog hole jumped up and grabbed my shoe heel.

I longed for the pitter-patter of little feet, so I got a dog. It’s cheaper, and you get more feet.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests underground with the dogs.

I guess I might be bi-curious," Ben said quietly." "What?" "I said I could be sorta bi-curious," Ben said loudly. "That's someone who is fundamentally straight but is curious about sex with men." Joshua grunted his opinion of that. "You've been checking out my ass since you were eleven years old, Ben. That's ain't curious, that's convicted.

Austin could do little more than stare at the woman. "It's a prairie dog," he reminded her. Cautiously, she brushed her fingers over its head. "It's just a baby. Please help her." Dee was looking at him with so much hope in her big brown eyes that he couldn't do what he knew needed to be done. He slipped his gun into his holster. Thank God, she was married to his brother and not to him. Dallas could break her heart. Austin wouldn't.

film crew up there, enraptured by the charming rodents. The crew had come to shoot a documentary about the massacre; they had expected teen angst and American social Darwinism. They were seduced by the tranquillity—less than a hundred yards from the school. They shot hours of footage of the twelve-inch prairie dogs. The Japanese crew saw this place somewhat differently than Americans did. Their depiction was by turns tumultuous, brutal, explosive, and serene.

He became his own blues song, a Tom Waits loser, a Kerouac saint, a Springsteen hero under the lights of the American highway and the neon glow of the American strip. A fugitive, a sharecropper, a hobo, a cowboy who knows that he’s running out of prairie but rides anyway because there’s nothing left but to ride.

The story of the Utah prairie dog is the story of the range of our compassion. If we can extend our idea of community to include the lowliest of creatures, call them 'the untouchables', then we will indeed be closer to a path of peace and tolerance. if we cannot accommodate 'the other', the shadow we will see on our own home ground will be the forecast of our own species' extended winter of the soul.

I’ve never seen her laugh like this before. It’s a sight to behold, a wonder, like the Eiffel Tower or the World’s Largest Prairie Dog.

Unless Frank wants to turn into a mole,” Leo suggested. “Or a prairie dog. Those things are awesome.” “Shut up,” Frank mumbled. “Or a badger.” Frank jabbed a finger at Leo’s face. “Valdez, I swear—

Sara," I ask finally, "what do you want from me?" "I want to look at you and remember what it used to be like," she says thickly. "I want to go back, Brian. I want you to take me back." But she is not the woman I used to know, the woman who traveled a countryside counting prairie dog holes, who read aloud the classifieds of lonely cowboys seeking women and told me, in the darkest crease of the night, that she would love me until the moon lost its footing in the sky. To be fair, I am not the same man. The one who listened. The one who believed her.

Three hundred types of mussel, a third of the world’s total, live in the Smokies. Smokies mussels have terrific names, like purple wartyback, shiny pigtoe, and monkeyface pearlymussel. Unfortunately, that is where all interest in them ends. Because they are so little regarded, even by naturalists, mussels have vanished at an exceptional rate. Nearly half of all Smokies mussels species are endangered; twelve are thought to be extinct. This ought to be a little surprising in a national park. I mean it’s not as if mussels are flinging themselves under the wheels of passing cars. Still, the Smokies seem to be in the process of losing most of their mussels. The National Park Service actually has something of a tradition of making things extinct. Bryce Canyon National Park is perhaps the most interesting-certainly the most striking-example. It was founded in 1923 and in less than half a century under the Park Service’s stewardship lost seven species of mammal-the white-tailed jackrabbit, prairie dog, pronghorn antelope, flying squirrel, beaver, red fox, and spotted skunk. Quite an achievement when you consider that these animals had survived in Bryce Canyon for tens of millions of years before the Park Service took an interest in them. Altogether, forty-two species of mammal have disappeared from America's national parks this century.

I am leaving this tower and returning home. When I speak with family, and comments are always the same, 'Won't you be glad to get back to the real world?' This is my question after two weeks of time, only two weeks, spent with prairie dogs, 'What is real?' What is real? These prairie dogs and the lives they live and have adapted to in grassland communities over time, deep time? What is real? A gravel pit adjacent to one of the last remaining protected prairie dog colonies in the world? A corral where cowboys in an honest day's work saddle up horses with prairie dogs under hoof for visitors to ride in Bryce Canyon National Park? What is real? Two planes slamming into the World Trade Center and the wake of fear that has never stopped in this endless war of terror? What is real? Forgiveness or revenge and the mounting deaths of thousands of human beings as America wages war in Afghanistan and Iraq? What is real? Steve's recurrence of lymphoma? A closet full of shoes? Making love? Making money? Making right with the world with the smallest of unseen gestures? How do we wish to live And with whom? What is real to me are these prairie dogs facing the sun each morning and evening in the midst of man-made chaos. What is real to me are the consequences of cruelty. What is real to me are the concentric circles of compassion and its capacity to bring about change. What is real to me is the power of our awareness when we are focused on something beyond ourselves. It is a shaft of light shining in a dark corner. Our ability to shift our perceptions and seek creative alternatives to the conundrums of modernity is in direct proportion to our empathy. Can we imagine, witness, and ultimately feel the suffering of another.

With their sinewy legs, lean flanks, and narrow muzzles, coyotes appear to be designed for speed and savage assault, and yet even as they face you down with a predatory gleam in their eyes, they have some of the appeal of dogs. Prairie wolves, some people call them, and although they lack most of the charm of wolves, they do have a puppylike quality because their feet are too big for their bodies and their ears are too big for their heads.

LAUREL CANYON PERCHED DIRECTLY ABOVE LOS ANGELES, one of the most expensive collections of winding hills and valleys in the country. Luckily, there were roads that twisted up and down the tortured ridges, or the only things that would have been there were hippies, backpackers, prairie dogs, and the occasional mountain lion dining on the aforementioned hippies, backpackers, and prairie dogs. Unfortunately, because of those roads and the billion-dollar real estate, the most common life-forms were douche bags, plastic surgeons, fading film producers, and labradoodles.

We bound into the prairie through ages of Winter grass, taking the path Ina took. Her name long gone, though her roads linger. The ground will not forget. or   Longing to be sprayed (the green snake writhing in his master’s hand), back and forth into that stream – jump, rinse: coat slick with soap.

...there should be a few places where prairie dogs can just be prairie dogs, where they can kick back and fulfill their niches in the grand scheme of the shortgrass prairie, work on their whistles, try to dig to China or least to Amarillo. Sooner or later a hungry mother kit fox will strike blood, but until then there should be a few places where prairie dogs don't have to worry about two guys bumping chests behind a pickup truck after a single exploding bullet launches them heavenward for an extra eleven points. "Montana Mist!" If not on public lands like the Cimarron National Grassland, then where?

I realized I still had my eyes shut. I had shut them when I put my face to the screen, like I was scared to look outside. Now I had to open them. I looked out the window and saw for the first time how the hospital was out in the country. The moon was low in the sky over the pastureland; the face of it was scarred and scuffed where it had just torn up out of the snarl of scrub oak and madrone trees on the horizon. The stars up close to the moon were pale; they got brighter and braver the farther they got out of the circle of light ruled by the giant moon. It called to mind how I noticed the exact same thing when I was off on a hunt with Papa and the uncles and I lay rolled in blankets Grandma had woven, lying off a piece from where the men hunkered around the fire as they passed a quart jar of cactus liquor in a silent circle. I watched that big Oregon prairie moon above me put all the stars around it to shame. I kept awake watching, to see if the moon ever got dimmer or if the stars got brighter, till the dew commenced to drift onto my cheeks and I had to pull a blanket over my head. Something moved on the grounds down beneath my window — cast a long spider of shadow out across the grass as it ran out of sight behind a hedge. When it ran back to where I could get a better look, I saw it was a dog, a young, gangly mongrel slipped off from home to find out about things went on after dark. He was sniffing digger squirrel holes, not with a notion to go digging after one but just to get an idea what they were up to at this hour. He’d run his muzzle down a hole, butt up in the air and tail going, then dash off to another. The moon glistened around him on the wet grass, and when he ran he left tracks like dabs of dark paint spattered across the blue shine of the lawn. Galloping from one particularly interesting hole to the next, he became so took with what was coming off — the moon up there, the night, the breeze full of smells so wild makes a young dog drunk — that he had to lie down on his back and roll. He twisted and thrashed around like a fish, back bowed and belly up, and when he got to his feet and shook himself a spray came off him in the moon like silver scales. He sniffed all the holes over again one quick one, to get the smells down good, then suddenly froze still with one paw lifted and his head tilted, listening. I listened too, but I couldn’t hear anything except the popping of the window shade. I listened for a long time. Then, from a long way off, I heard a high, laughing gabble, faint and coming closer. Canada honkers going south for the winter. I remembered all the hunting and belly-crawling I’d ever done trying to kill a honker, and that I never got one. I tried to look where the dog was looking to see if I could find the flock, but it was too dark. The honking came closer and closer till it seemed like they must be flying right through the dorm, right over my head. Then they crossed the moon — a black, weaving necklace, drawn into a V by that lead goose. For an instant that lead goose was right in the center of that circle, bigger than the others, a black cross opening and closing, then he pulled his V out of sight into the sky once more. I listened to them fade away till all I could hear was my memory of the sound.

I have a deep thought for you. Science fiction is just beginning to catch up with the Old Testament. See artificial nitrates run off into the rivers and oceans. See carbon dioxide melt the polar ice caps. See the world's mineral reserves dwindle. See war, famine and plague. See barbaric hordes defile the temple of virgins. See wild stallions mount the prairie dogs. I said science fiction but I guess I meant science. Anyway there's some kind of mythical and/or historic circle-thing being completed here. But I keep smiling. I keep telling myself there's nothing to worry about as long as the youth of America knows what's going on. Brains, brawn, good teeth. tallness.

quite so sure. We rather think, upon

I swear to God, Boss,” he said one day. “Ya ain’t never been a talker, but lately, if ya’d a had to rub two words together to make a fire, you’d a done froze to death.

You see more people walking now. With children, dogs. We always wave from our front porch and think if they just keep on walking that direction, pretty soon they’ll find themselves out on the prairie. Think of that. An aerial view of all these kind, goodhearted, small-town people, kids in tow and dogs on leashes, walking across the prairie in a kind of trance, a kind of resignation.

When you’re a little kid, you have something. Maybe it’s a blanket or a stuffed animal or whatever. For me, it was this stuffed prairie dog that I got one Christmas when I was like three. I don’t even know where they found a stuffed prairie dog, but whatever, it sat up on its hind legs and I called him Marvin, and I dragged Marvin around by his prairie dog ears until I was about ten. And then at some point, it was nothing personal against Marvin, but he started spending more time in the closet with my other toys, and then more time, until finally Marvin became a full-time resident of the closet. But for many years afterward, sometimes I would get Marvin out of the closet and just hang out with him for a while—not for me, but for Marvin. I realized it was crazy, but I still did it. And the thing I wanted to say to Tiny is that sometimes, I feel like his Marvin.

You wouldn’t recognize this land back then. Over thousands of years, the plants and animals worked with wind and fire until the land was covered in a sea of grass that was home to many relatives. The bison gave us everything, from thadó, our meat, to our clothing and thípi hides. His dung fertilized the soil. The prairie dogs opened up tunnels that brought air and water deep into the earth. Grasses that were as tall as a man set long roots that could withstand drought. When my grandfather was a boy, he woke each morning to the song of the meadowlark. The prairie showed us for many generations how to live and work together as one family. “And then the settlers came with their plows and destroyed the prairie in a single lifetime,” my father said. What I remember most, now, is his voice shaking with rage, his tobacco-stained fingers trembling as they held a hand-rolled cigarette, the way he drew smoke deep into his lungs.

Joshua tried to find the right words to explain how things were--how they'd always been. "It's like... prairie dogs." Ben quirked an eyebrow at him. "You see the holes. 'N' you know the dogs are around, even if you don't see the dogs themselves." "What the hell are you talkin' about?" "Gay. Cowboys. They're there. Like a lot of single cowboys, they go into Billings once a month, only they ain't there so see women. There's no point in flingin' yourself around in public, 's all.

During the first two days of travel north of Miles City, in a country tht was custom-made for pronghorn antelope, they did not see a single one; the only living creatures they saw were prairie dogs, rabbits, and turkey vultures, wheeling high overhead as if scouting for the last meal in Montana. It was forlorn, abandoned country, a country of great absences, which had once been filled by the dust and noise and dung of one of the planet's greatest zoological spectacles but ws now almost completely silent.

See, I've had this notion about you and me since you was seventeen. I shouldn't have expected you to read my mind or wait till I was ready to do somethin' about it. I am sorry for that." Ben smirked. "You're a little slow on the draw there. I was ten when I got that same notion.

Thanksgiving List Prairie birds, the whistle of gophers, the wind blowing, the smell of grass and spicy earth, friends like Mad Dog, the cattle down in the river, water washing over their hooves, the sky so big, so full of shifting clouds, the cloud shadows creeping over the fields, Daddy’s smile, and his laugh, and his songs, Louise, food without dust, Daddy seeing to Ma’s piano, newly cleaned and tuned, the days when my hands don’t hurt at all, the thank-you note from Lucille in Moline, Kansas, the sound of rain, Daddy’s hole staying full of water as the windmill turns, the smell of green, of damp earth, of hope returning to our farm.

WINTER HAS settled down over the Divide again; the season in which Nature recuperates, in which she sinks to sleep between the fruitfulness of autumn and the passion of spring. The birds have gone. The teeming life that goes on down in the long grass is exterminated. The prairie-dog keeps his hole. The rabbits run shivering from one frozen garden patch to another and are hard put to it to find frost-bitten cabbage-stalks. At night the coyotes roam the wintry waste, howling for food. The variegated fields are all one color now; the pastures, the stubble, the roads, the sky are the same leaden gray. The hedgerows and trees are scarcely perceptible against the bare earth, whose slaty hue they have taken on. The ground is frozen so hard that it bruises the foot to walk in the roads or in the ploughed fields. It is like an iron country, and the spirit is oppressed by its rigor and melancholy. One could easily believe that in that dead landscape the germs of life and fruitfulness were extinct forever.

At milking-time Ma was putting on her bonnet, when suddenly all Jack’s hair stood up stiff on his neck and back, and he rushed out of the house. They heard a yell and a scramble and a shout: “Call off your dog! Call off your dog!” Mr. Edwards was on top of the woodpile, and Jack was climbing up after him. “He’s got me treed,” Mr. Edwards said, backing along the top of the woodpile. Ma could hardly make Jack come away. Jack grinned savagely and his eyes were red. He had to let Mr. Edwards come down from the woodpile, but he watched him every minute. Ma said, “I declare, he seems to know that Mr. Ingalls isn’t here.” Mr. Edwards said that dogs knew more than most folks gave them credit for.

In roughly that same time period, while General George Armstrong Custer achieved world fame in failure and catastrophe, Mackenzie would become obscure in victory. But it was Mackenzie, not Custer, who would teach the rest of the army how to fight Indians. As he moved his men across the broken, stream-crossed country, past immense herds of buffalo and prairie-dog towns that stretched to the horizon, Colonel Mackenzie did not have a clear idea of what he was doing, where precisely he was going, or how to fight Plains Indians in their homelands. Neither did he have the faintest idea that he would be the one largely responsible for defeating the last of the hostile Indians. He was new to this sort of Indian fighting, and would make many mistakes in the coming weeks. He would learn from them. For now, Mackenzie was the instrument of retribution. He had been dispatched to kill Comanches in their Great Plains fastness because, six years after the end of the Civil War, the western frontier was an open and bleeding wound, a smoking ruin littered with corpses and charred chimneys, a place where anarchy and torture killings had replaced the rule of law, where Indians and especially Comanches raided at will. Victorious in war, unchallenged by foreign foes in North America for the first time in its history, the Union now found itself unable to deal with the handful of remaining Indian tribes that had not been destroyed, assimilated, or forced to retreat meekly onto reservations where they quickly learned the meaning of abject subjugation and starvation. The hostiles were all residents of the Great Plains; all were mounted, well armed, and driven now by a mixture of vengeance and political desperation. They were Comanches, Kiowas, Arapahoes, Cheyennes, and Western Sioux. For Mackenzie on the southern plains, Comanches were the obvious target: No tribe in the history of the Spanish, French, Mexican, Texan, and American occupations of this land had ever caused so much havoc and death. None was even a close second.

Subsequent experiences with rattlesnakes taught me that my first encounter was fortunate in circumstance. My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn't owe rattlers a living.

When the dung beetle moves,” Hosteen Nashibitti had told him, “know that something has moved it. And know that its movement affects the flight of the sparrow, and that the raven deflects the eagle from the sky, and that the eagle’s stiff wing bends the will of the Wind People, and know that all of this affects you and me, and the flea on the prairie dog and the leaf on the cottonwood.” That had always been the point of the lesson. Interdependency of nature. Every cause has its effect. Every action its reaction. A reason for everything. In all things a pattern, and in this pattern, the beauty of harmony. Thus one learned to live with evil, by understanding it, by reading its cause. And thus one learned, gradually and methodically, if one was lucky, to always “go in beauty,” to always look for the pattern, and to find it.

Here,” he said abruptly. “Turn here.” A rutted path ran up a little rise toward a beige trailer. “This is Grover's place.” The trailer sat exposed on a treeless hill. A perfectly ordered woodpile stood in the yard to the left. Each log seemed to have been cut to an identical length, and they were piled in a crisscross fashion, with each layer running perpendicular to the one below and above. A small patch of earth to the right of his stoop had been cleared of brush and raked smooth. Two lawn chairs sat evenly spaced against the skirting of the trailer. There were no junk cars, no engine parts, no kids' bicycles — just Grover's old Buick parked in a spot marked off by a frame of fist-sized rocks arranged in a perfect rectangle. Dan glanced over at me. The twinkle was back in his eye. “Goddamn reservation Indian,” he muttered. “Lost his culture.” Then he sat back and let out a long rolling laugh that seemed, like prairie thunder, to come from the beginning of time.

My big rattler was old, and had led too easy a life; there was not much fight in him. He had probably lived there for years, with a fat prairie-dog for breakfast whenever he felt like it, a sheltered home, even an owl-feather bed, perhaps, and he had forgot that the world doesn’t owe rattlers a living. A snake of his size, in fighting trim, would be more than any boy could handle. So in reality it was a mock adventure; the game was fixed for me by chance, as it probably was for many a dragon-slayer.

build it had to be carried by wagon many miles. There were four walls, a floor and a roof, which made one room; and this room contained a rusty looking cookstove, a cupboard for the dishes, a table, three or four chairs, and the beds. Uncle Henry and Aunt Em had a big bed in one corner, and Dorothy a little bed in another corner. There was no garret at all, and no cellar--except a small hole dug in the ground, called a cyclone cellar, where the family could go in case one of those great whirlwinds arose, mighty enough to crush any building in its path. It was reached by a trap door in the middle of the floor, from which a ladder led down into the small, dark hole. When Dorothy stood in the doorway and looked around, she could see nothing but the great gray prairie on every side. Not a tree nor a house broke the broad sweep of flat country that reached to the edge of the sky in all directions. The sun had baked the plowed land into a gray mass, with little cracks running through it. Even the grass was not green, for the sun had burned the tops of the long blades until they were the same gray color to be seen everywhere. Once the house had been painted, but the sun blistered the paint and the rains washed it away, and now the house was as dull and gray as everything else. When Aunt Em came there to live she was a young, pretty wife. The sun and wind had changed her, too. They had taken the sparkle from her eyes and left them a sober gray; they had taken the red from her cheeks and lips, and they were gray also. She was thin and gaunt, and never smiled now. When Dorothy, who was an orphan, first came to her, Aunt Em had been so startled by the child's laughter that she would scream and press her hand upon her heart whenever Dorothy's merry voice reached her ears; and she still looked at the little girl with wonder that she could find anything to laugh at. Uncle Henry never laughed. He worked hard from morning till night and did not know what joy was. He was gray also, from his long beard to his rough boots, and he looked stern and solemn, and rarely spoke. It was Toto that made Dorothy laugh, and saved her from growing as gray as her other surroundings. Toto was not gray; he was a little black dog, with long silky hair and small black eyes that twinkled merrily on either side of his funny, wee nose. Toto played all day long, and Dorothy played with him, and loved him dearly. Today, however, they were not playing. Uncle Henry sat upon the doorstep and looked anxiously at the sky, which was even grayer than usual. Dorothy stood in the door with Toto in her arms, and looked at the sky too. Aunt Em was washing the

Aunt Lou and Grandfather drank tea at the kitchen table. “That was very fast,” I said. “I’ve never gone that fast on the prairie. Except maybe galloping on a horse.” Aunt Lou smiled at me over her cup. “If I’d been writing in my journal, my dog husband would have chased the car,” I said. “I almost looked out the back window to see if he was there.” Aunt Lou put down her cup. “If he’d been chasing the car, I would have stopped for him,” she said. “Thank you,” I said. She looked at Grandfather. “And how did you like the ride?” she asked. “You’re a madwoman,” he said. Aunt Lou smiled. “I live life to the brim,” she said. “And a little over the top, I’d say,” said Grandfather.

All my life, I'd been accustomed to thinking of life as things that moved: rabbits, dogs, fish, other people. Life that mattered had been life like me, life that breathed and bled, life that ate and slept. I'd been aware of that other layer of life, of the still but living things that supported it all, but I'd thought of it as the lower layer, as the less important stratum of life. Empty prairie was for plowing or grazing; land that was too poor for farming or cattle was wasteland. I'd never lived near a forest like this, but when I'd come to one, I'd understood why it existed. The trees were to be taken for lumber. The land had to be cleared to become useful. The idea that forest or prairie or even wasteland should be left as it was had never occurred to me. What good was land until it was tamed? What good was a piece of earth that did not grow wheat or fruit or grass for cattle? The value of every bit of land I'd ever trodden, I'd reckoned in terms of how it could benefit a man. Now I saw it with the eyes of a forest mage. Here life balanced as it had for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years. Sunlight and water were all that was required for the trees to grow. The trees made the food that fed not only whatever moving creatures might venture through this territory, but also became the food that replenished the soil when their leaves fell to rot back into earth. This working system was as refined and precise as any piece of clockwork ever engineered by man. It worked perfectly.

In the evening he saddled his horse and rode out west from the house. The wind was much abated and it was very cold and the sun sat blood red and elliptic under the reefs of bloodred cloud before him. He rode where he would always choose to ride, out where the western fork of the old Comanche road coming down out of the Kiowa country to the north passed through the westernmost section of the ranch and you could see the faint trace of it bearing south over the low prairie that lay between the north and middle forks of the Concho River. At the hour he'd always choose when the shadows were long and the ancient road was shaped before him in the rose and canted light like a dream of the past where the painted ponies and the riders of that lost nation came down out of the north with their faces chalked and their long hair plaited and each armed for war which was their life and the women and children and women with children at their breasts all of them pledged in blood and redeemable in blood only. When the wind was in the north you could hear them, the horses and the breath of the horses and the horses' hooves that were shod in rawhide and the rattle of lances and the constant drag of the travois poles in the sand like the passing of some enormous serpent and the young boys naked on wild horses jaunty as circus riders and hazing wild horses before them and the dogs trotting with their tongues aloll and footslaves following half naked and sorely burdened an above all the low chant of their traveling song which the riders sang as they rode, nation and ghost of nation passing in a soft chorale across that mineral waste to darkness bearing lost to all history and all remembrance like a grail the sum of their secular and transitory and violent lives.

Doremus Jessup, so inconspicuous an observer, watching Senator Windrip from so humble a Boeotia, could not explain his power of bewitching large audiences. The Senator was vulgar, almost illiterate, a public liar easily detected, and in his "ideas" almost idiotic, while his celebrated piety was that of a traveling salesman for church furniture, and his yet more celebrated humor the sly cynicism of a country store. Certainly there was nothing exhilarating in the actual words of his speeches, nor anything convincing in his philosophy. His political platforms were only wings of a windmill. Seven years before his present credo—derived from Lee Sarason, Hitler, Gottfried Feder, Rocco, and probably the revue Of Thee I Sing—little Buzz, back home, had advocated nothing more revolutionary than better beef stew in the county poor-farms, and plenty of graft for loyal machine politicians, with jobs for their brothers-in-law, nephews, law partners, and creditors. Doremus had never heard Windrip during one of his orgasms of oratory, but he had been told by political reporters that under the spell you thought Windrip was Plato, but that on the way home you could not remember anything he had said. There were two things, they told Doremus, that distinguished this prairie Demosthenes. He was an actor of genius. There was no more overwhelming actor on the stage, in the motion pictures, nor even in the pulpit. He would whirl arms, bang tables, glare from mad eyes, vomit Biblical wrath from a gaping mouth; but he would also coo like a nursing mother, beseech like an aching lover, and in between tricks would coldly and almost contemptuously jab his crowds with figures and facts—figures and facts that were inescapable even when, as often happened, they were entirely incorrect. But below this surface stagecraft was his uncommon natural ability to be authentically excited by and with his audience, and they by and with him. He could dramatize his assertion that he was neither a Nazi nor a Fascist but a Democrat—a homespun Jeffersonian-Lincolnian-Clevelandian-Wilsonian Democrat—and (sans scenery and costume) make you see him veritably defending the Capitol against barbarian hordes, the while he innocently presented as his own warm-hearted Democratic inventions, every anti-libertarian, anti-Semitic madness of Europe. Aside from his dramatic glory, Buzz Windrip was a Professional Common Man. Oh, he was common enough. He had every prejudice and aspiration of every American Common Man. He believed in the desirability and therefore the sanctity of thick buckwheat cakes with adulterated maple syrup, in rubber trays for the ice cubes in his electric refrigerator, in the especial nobility of dogs, all dogs, in the oracles of S. Parkes Cadman, in being chummy with all waitresses at all junction lunch rooms, and in Henry Ford (when he became President, he exulted, maybe he could get Mr. Ford to come to supper at the White House), and the superiority of anyone who possessed a million dollars. He regarded spats, walking sticks, caviar, titles, tea-drinking, poetry not daily syndicated in newspapers and all foreigners, possibly excepting the British, as degenerate. But he was the Common Man twenty-times-magnified by his oratory, so that while the other Commoners could understand his every purpose, which was exactly the same as their own, they saw him towering among them, and they raised hands to him in worship.

Certain animal species who burrow into the Earth for places of solace or safety, or who inhabit the sheltering arches of caves alongside the spirits of the rocks, are the bridgers between these inner and outer levels of reality. Rabbits, gophers, moles, prairie dogs, wolves, and bears in hibernation all remember and recreate their rootedness in Mother Earth.

She can't be that hopeless, Ma'am. Can't you teach her what's right— a fine, tight-stitched, dignified lady like yourself? Don't look like much could squeeze by you and not have some of that high class varnish smeared off on it. Surely those fancy manners are like horse sweat and hound dog; a man can't be rid of the stink once he's rubbed up against plenty of it." Her eyes took on the hollow stare of a cadaver. One that suddenly awoke to find itself abandoned in a morgue reserved for undesirables and the unclaimed. "It seems there has been some misunderstanding, Mr. Piper. I chaperone young ladies in society and make introductions that can lead to marriage. Advantageous, mutually beneficial marriage. I don't herd wildebeest across the prairie.

Underground is my specialty. It’s safest for all of us if I go first.” “Unless Frank wants to turn into a mole,” Leo suggested. “Or a prairie dog. Those things are awesome.” “Shut up,” Frank mumbled. “Or a badger.

This went on for four hours. By Millie’s count, four hours was enough time to kill twenty-seven prairie dogs. They might have a language of sorts, but they didn’t use it to tell each other not to have a look-see at what all the commotion was topside.

The residents [of Vicksburg] spent much of their time, as one of them said, watching the incoming shells "rising steadily and shiningly in great parabolic curves, descending with ever-increasing swiftness, and falling with deafening shrieks and explosions." ...Children observed the uproar with wide-eyed evident pleasure, accepting it as a natural phenomenon, like rain or lightning, unable to comprehend that men could do such things to one another and to them... Some took to it better than others, in and out of uniform. There was for instance a Frenchman, "a gallant officer who had distinguished himself in several severe engagements," who was "almost unmanned" whenever one of the huge mortar projectiles fell anywhere near him. Chided by friends for this reaction, he would reply: "I no like ze bomb: I cannot fight him back!" Neither could anyone else "fight him back", least of all the civilians, many of whim took refuge in caves dug into the hillsides. Some of these were quite commodious, with several rooms, and the occupants brought in chairs and beds and even carpets to add to the comfort, sleeping soundly or taking dinner unperturbed while the world outside seemed turned to flame and thunder. "Prairie Dog Village," the blue cannoneers renamed the city on the bluff. (pp. 411-412).

finish cleaning up. A creak overhead let her know Mama was in the small attic. Again. Belinda grasped the lip of the sink, lowered her head, and closed her eyes. Lord, bring healing to Mama’s heart. She misses Papa so, but it’s not healthy for her to sit beside the trunk of his clothes and relive past days. She needs to move forward. A dog barked outside, and Belinda looked out the window. A dark figure moved through the alley—a man, tall and wide-shouldered, his head down and hands thrust deep in his pockets. She recognized him by his size. Herr Ollenburger. No other man in town carried such proportions. His posture exuded sadness, and Belinda’s heart caught in sympathy. So many of Gaeddert’s former residents seemed to have lost their sparkle. She leaned closer to the open window, watching as he turned into the backyard of the house across the alley. If he glanced her way, she would reward him with a cheery expression. To her delight, his chin angled in her direction. She called a greeting. “Good evening! Did you enjoy—” She drew back in embarrassment when she realized the man wasn’t Herr Ollenburger after all.

The rattlesnake represents the very acme of serpentine sophistication. It has superlative sensing organs that exploit infra-red and chemo-sensory stimuli to enable it to locate its prey. It is armed with one of the most powerful of all venoms with which it can inject its victims with surgical precision. It is long-lived and produces its young fully formed and immediately capable of fending for themselves. But it has one vulnerability, one way in which human beings who see rattlesnakes as a threat to their own dominance are able to attack it. In North America, in the northern part of the rattlesnake’s range, winters can be so severe that a cold-blooded snake cannot remain active. So many species that are common elsewhere in North America do not spread far north. Rattlers are among the few that do. They survive the winter by another special adaptation. They have developed the ability to hibernate. On the prairies of the mid-West and north into Canada, they choose to do so in the burrows of prairie dogs, rodents related to marmots. Elsewhere in the woodlands, they find outcrops of rocks that are riven by deep clefts. But such places are not abundant. As autumn approaches and temperatures fall, great numbers of rattlesnakes set out on long cross-country journeys of many miles following traditional routes to the places where they and their parents before them hibernate each year. Some of these wintering dens may contain a thousand individuals. So those human beings who hate snakes and who, in spite of the rattler’s sophisticated early warning system, believe that they are a constant and lethal threat, are also able, at this season of the year, to massacre rattlesnakes in thousands. As a consequence one of the most advanced and wonderfully sophisticated of all snakes — perhaps of all reptiles — is now, in many parts of the territories it once ruled, in real danger of extinction.

We have not been able to ascertain from travelers why the owls have gone to live with these doggies, so we beg humbly to offer our own private opinion to the reader. We assume, then, that owls find it absolutely needful to have holes. Probably prairie-owls cannot dig holes for themselves. Having discovered, however, a race of little creatures that could, they very likely determined to take forcible possession of the holes made by them. Finding, no doubt, that when they did so the doggies were too timid to object, and discovering, moreover, that they were sweet, innocent little creatures, the owls resolved to take them into partnership, and so the thing was settled—that’s how it came about, no doubt of it!

Crusoe did not bark; he seldom barked; he usually either said nothing, or gave utterance to a prolonged roar of indignation of the most terrible character, with barks, as it were, mingled through it. It somewhat resembled that peculiar and well-known species of thunder, the prolonged roll of which is marked at short intervals in its course by cannon-like cracks. It was a continuous, but, so to speak, knotted roar.

Save it, pup,” cried Dick, pointing to the child, which had been caught in an eddy, and was for a few moments hovering on the edge of the stream that rushed impetuously towards the fall. The noble Newfoundland did not require to be told what to do. It seems a natural instinct in this sagacious species of dog to save man or beast that chances to be struggling in the water, and many are the authentic stories related of Newfoundland dogs saving life in eases of shipwreck. Indeed, they are regularly trained to the work in some countries; and nobly, fearlessly, disinterestedly do they discharge their trust, often in the midst of appalling dangers. Crusoe sprang from the bank with such impetus that his broad chest ploughed up the water like the bow of a boat, and the energetic workings of his muscles were indicated by the force of each successive propulsion as he shot ahead. In a few seconds he reached the child and caught it by the hair. Then he turned to swim back, but the stream had got hold of him. Bravely he struggled, and lifted the child breast-high out of the water in his powerful efforts to stem the current. In vain. Each moment he was carried inch by inch down until he was on the brink of the fall, which, though not high, was a large body of water and fell with a heavy roar. He raised himself high out of the stream with the vigour of his last struggle, and then fell back into the abyss.

Little did Dick think, when the flood of horses swept past him, that his own good steed was there, rejoicing in his recovered liberty. But Crusoe knew it. Ay, the wind had borne down the information to his acute nose before the living storm burst upon the camp; and when Charlie rushed past, with the long tough halter trailing at his heels, Crusoe sprang to his side, seized the end of the halter with his teeth, and galloped off along with him. It was a long gallop and a tough one, but Crusoe held on, for it was a settled principle in his mind never to give in. At first the check upon Charlie’s speed was imperceptible, but by degrees the weight of the gigantic dog began to tell, and after a time they fell a little to the rear; then by good fortune the troop passed through a mass of underwood, and the line getting entangled brought their mad career forcibly to a close; the mustangs passed on, and the two friends were left to keep each other company in the dark. How long they would have remained thus is uncertain, for neither of them had sagacity enough to undo a complicated entanglement. Fortunately, however, in his energetic tugs at the line, Crusoe’s sharp teeth partially severed it, and a sudden start on the part of Charlie caused it to part. Before he could escape, Crusoe again seized the end of it, and led him slowly but steadily back to the Indian camp, never halting or turning aside until he had placed the line in Dick Varley’s hand.

Now, Crusoe,” said Dick, sitting down on the buffalo’s shoulder and patting his favourite on the head, “we're all right at last. You and I shall have a jolly time o't, pup, from this time for’ard.” Dick paused for breath, and Crusoe wagged his tail and looked as if to say—pshaw! “as if!” We tell you what it is, reader, it’s of no use at all to go on writing “as if,’ when we tell you what Crusoe said. If there is any language in eyes whatever—if there is language in a tail, in a cocked ear, in a mobile eyebrow, in the point of a canine nose,—if there is language in any terrestrial thing at all, apart from that which flows from the tongue, then Crusoe spoke! Do we not speak at this moment to you? and if so, then tell me wherein lies the difference between a written letter and a given sign? Yes, Crusoe spoke. He said to Dick as plain as dog could say it, slowly and emphatically, “ That’s my opinion precisely, Dick. You're the dearest, most beloved, jolliest fellow that ever walked on two legs, you are; and whatever’s your opinion is mine, no matter how absurd it may be.

He who once gains such love carries the dog's life in his hand. But let him who reads note well, and remember that there is only one coin that can purchase such love, and that is kindness. The coin, too, must be genuine. Kindness merely expressed will not do, it must be felt.

you see something new, or at least you see it in a different way. I’ve heard people say this land haunts you, and I’ve begun to believe it.” “Well, it must be a pretty well-kept secret, when you think how few people live here.” “Look over there. What’s that?” Just as Opal asked, they heard a whistle. “Prairie dogs, small ground-dwelling mammals. They live in colonies—people call them prairie-dog towns. That whistle was the lookout telling the others that danger is near and to hide back in their burrows. If we had time to sit here and not move, they’d pop out of their holes again. They eat grasses and seeds, so they make their area pretty barren. You try running a horse through a prairie-dog town and, sure enough, he’ll step in a hole and break a leg. You got to be careful about things like that.” “I hope I can come back here sometime,” Opal said, all the while gazing at the place the prairie dog had disappeared from. Ruby could hear Opal’s unspoken wish for soon. If only horses weren’t so expensive to both buy and feed. If Opal had a horse, she would have a friend indeed.

Not an option. I'm prairie dogging. Not to mention, how big of a tool would I look like if I walked in squeezing my cheeks together and just asked to use their toilet.

Despite the diversity of the constructions that other animals create—the pendulous baskets of oriole nests, the intricate dens of prairie dogs, or the decorated nests of bowerbirds—humans construct the broadest array of dwellings on Earth. Our words for “dwelling” point to this diversity: Palace, hovel, hogan, ranch house, croft. Tipi, chalet, duplex, kraal. Igloo, bungalow, billet, cabin.

Later traded to Jacques Caboche, another settler, it was in 1850 lost in a game of chess or poker to a newcomer named Hans Zimmerman; being used by him as a beer-stein until one day, under the spell of its contents, he suffered it to roll from his front stoop to the prairie path before his home—where, falling into the burrow of a prairie-dog, it passed beyond his power of discovery or recovery upon his awaking.

Wyoming got an Algonquian name from Pennsylvania meaning “large prairie,” but the adoption came only after a long fight. Decades before the settling of the present state of Wyoming, its name achieved popular acclaim after an 1809 poem, “Gertrude of Wyoming,” by Thomas Campbell. The poem recalled the Iroquois defeat of a group of Tory settlers and the ensuing death of 350 of them during the chaos of the American Revolution. By the time Congress created the territory of Wyoming in 1868, ten communities in Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kansas, and Nebraska had already claimed the name. The name had grown in popularity and was proposed for the new Western territory, even though it had no historical relationship to the area, to the native people who lived there, or to the languages spoken there. One anti-Wyoming group of congressmen favored the name Cheyenne, since that name referred to the native people living there, but Congress rejected Cheyenne for fear that Europeans might confuse it with the French word chienne, meaning “female dog.” No one in the seemly Victorian era wanted a state whose name meant “bitch” (G. R. Stewart 1945).

dogs. Too big, too expensive. So Slibe had a prairie-dog shooter. Very likely a .223, but a

Any man living his dream is freer than any man that doesn’t even know what he dreams about.” - Owner, Prairie Dog Town

She could recite poems and stories and knew facts I thought she had made up. She knew that prairie dogs kiss, that ghost crabs growl using teeth in their stomach. She knew that koala fingerprints are so close to ours they could contaminate a crime scene.

them entertained and supplied with a surfeit of horseflesh. But none to really worry about. Their source of food and sustenance, the buffalo, roamed the plains in record numbers and still ranged into every corner of Comancheria. The tribe’s low birth rates virtually guaranteed that their nomadic life following buffalo herds was infinitely sustainable. Their world was thus suspended in what seemed to be a perfect equilibrium, a balance of earth and wind and sun and sky that would endure forever. An empire under the bright summer moon. For those who witnessed the change at a very intimate and personal level, including Cynthia Ann and her husband, the speed with which that ideal world was dismantled must have seemed scarcely believable. She herself, the daughter of pioneers who were hammering violently at the age-old Comanche barrier that had defeated all other comers, now adopted into a culture that was beginning to die, was the emblem of the change. Somehow she and her husband, Peta Nocona, survived the cataclysm. As nomads, they moved constantly. One imagines her on one of these migrations, on horseback, moving slowly across the open grassy plain with hundreds of others, warriors in the vanguard, toward a wide, hazy horizon that would have looked to white men like unalloyed emptiness. There were the long trains of heavily packed mules and horses and the ubiquitous Comanche dogs. There were horses dragging travois that carried the huge tent poles and piled buffalo hides and scored the earth as they went along—perfectly parallel lines drawn on the prairie, merging and vanishing into the pale-blue Texas sky. All trailed by the enormous horse remuda, the source of their wealth. It must have been something to behold. Cynthia Ann lived a hard life. Women did all of the brutally hard work, including most of the work that went into moving camp. They did it from dawn till dark, led brief difficult lives, and did not complain about it; they did everything except hunt and fight. Her camp locations show just how far she roamed. Pah-hah-yuco’s camps were found in 1843 north of the Red River and south of modern-day Lawton, Oklahoma, on Cache Creek (the encampment was on a creek bank on the open prairie and stretched for half a mile).25 In 1844 he was camped on the Salt Plains of present-day north-central Oklahoma, on the Salt Fork of the Arkansas River,26 well north of the Washita, where Williams found him in 1846. In 1847 his band was spotted a hundred miles north of Austin, in rolling, lightly timbered prairie, camped in a village of one hundred fifty lodges,27 and again that same year in a village in the limestone hills and mesas west of Austin. She was identified as being with the Tennawish band in 1847, who often camped with the Penateka (with whom Pah-hah-yuco was often

There was a squirrel Ben Franklin in bifocal glasses flying a little kite; a prairie dog Abraham Lincoln with a top hat, a beard, and a teensy Gettysburg Address; and a weasel Franklin Delano Roosevelt with a cigarette holder and a wheelchair.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all-now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog-there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottoms of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt-doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he no real idea how long a lease he has on his future. It is to try to meet the challenge of such questions that we have prepared these broadcasts. It has been a difficult task and a delicate one. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice-and those thoughts we aren’t interested in-people don’t speak their beliefs easily or publicly.

If I’d had you before me at Richmond, I’d have put the ball in yer eye, God help you, I killed twenty like you when I was younger,” his voice piped over the flats. “Let the sun drop you in the badlands and let you not die before the shit of prairie dogs is in yer mouth and the buzzard’s claw is on yer belly. May yer pizzle fry in Hell and your eggs wither to peas, may the marrow boil in yer bones and yer eyes melt in their holes for what you done here, God damn you, God damn you …

ON THE PRAIRIES, it’s said that you can watch your dog run away for ten days.

team of 20 squirrels and at least that many prairie dogs

There’s something about the creeping, overly cautious canine’s approach to game that makes birds jittery¬—and they won’t hold. Whereas, the dashing, bold approach—then the sudden, stanch stop at just the right instant and distance ¬— tends to overawe game and make it lie. Birds get no chance to “think it over.” The dog is on them almost before they know it. Then, if a stanch dog doesn’t budge—neither does the game. And that’s the secret of the bold dog’s success. A secret that holds true regardless of the game — from woodcock to pheasants, from grouse to prairie chicken, and from quail to Hungarian partridge.

A number of small mammals are now known to harbour the plague bacillus, and besides prairie dogs, these include ground squirrels, marmots, chipmunks, gerbils and rabbits.

Unless Frank wants to turn into a mole,” Leo suggested. “Or a prairie dog. Those things are awesome.

A keystone, that’s called, and without it everything falls, like a tower of blocks or a house of cards. It’s the same with keystone species— beavers, wolves, prairie dogs, bees, desert tortoises, sea otters— they are nature’s glue, holding habitats together.

You preserve nothing without encountering some disadvantages. If we keep this [prairie] dog town, horses will break their legs and rattlers will come back. But in the large picture, things balance out, as they did two thousand years ago. The trick is to preserve the balance and pay whatever price it costs.

Suddenly, he heard a voice that he loved. – Here, Prince! Here, boy! It was Kim, the only human whose name he had ever bothered to keep. Prince could see him in the distance, Kim’s silhouette unmistakable for any other. And Prince’s soul was filled with joy. He ran to Kim as he always did: with abandon, bounding over the prairie. This time, though, he ran having caught every nuance in Kim’s voice, understanding him fully. In his final moment on earth, Prince loved and knew that he was loved in return.

Frederick Law Olmsted had found the same situation—houses at which there was “no other water-closet than the back of a bush or the broad prairies”—on his journey through the Hill Country in 1857. He had been shocked then, because the America he knew had advanced beyond such primitive conditions. Now it was 1937; four more generations had been living in the Hill Country—with no significant advance in the conditions of their life. Many of the people of Lyndon Johnson’s congressional district were still living in the same type of dwelling in which the area’s people had been living in 1857: in rude “dog-run” shelters one board thick, through which the wind howled in the winter. They were still squatting behind a bush to defecate. Because of their poverty, they were still utterly bereft not only of tractors and feed grinders, but of modern medical assistance—and were farming by methods centuries out of date.

their heads popping up prairie-dog style from their cubes.

The Wilders, of course, paid no attention to her exuberance, continuing to live a frugal existence among their pigs and hens, entertained by a self-re-newing circle of farm cats and their preternaturally gifted Airedale terrier, Nero, who would sit politely at the dinner table like a member of the family, eating off his own plate.

Thinking you must have been right, Carrot.” He nodded. “Seems like we must have evolved.” He waved a finger at me. “Only thing that explains Bigfoot, isn’t it?” I stared at him. I did not even know where to begin. “Yep,” he said, taking my silence for agreement. “Bigfoot’s the missing link, all right, so you figure we gotta have a chain in order to have a link missing. I’m gonna update the sign in the prairie dog case.

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all-now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog-there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottoms of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt-doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he no real idea how long a lease he has on his future. It is to try to meet the challenge of such questions that we have prepared these broadcasts. It has been a difficult task and a delicate one. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice-and those thoughts we aren’t interested in-people don’t speak their beliefs easily or publicly

We hardly need to be reminded that we are living in an age of confusion. A lot of us have traded in our beliefs for bitterness and cynicism, or for a heavy package of despair, or even a quivering portion of hysteria. Opinions can be picked up cheap in the marketplace, while such commodities as courage and fortitude and faith are in alarmingly short supply. Around us all-now high like a distant thunderhead, now close upon us with the wet choking intimacy of a London fog-there is an enveloping cloud of fear. There is a physical fear, the kind that drives some of us to flee our homes and burrow into the ground in the bottoms of a Montana valley like prairie dogs to try to escape, if only for a little while, the sound and fury of the A-bombs or the hell bombs or whatever may be coming. There is a mental fear, which provokes others of us to see the images of witches in a neighbor’s yard and stampedes us to burn down his house. And there is a creeping fear of doubt-doubt of what we have been taught, of the validity of so many things we have long since taken for granted to be durable and unchanging. It has become more difficult than ever to distinguish black from white, good from evil, right from wrong. What truths can a human being afford to furnish the cluttered nervous room of his mind with when he no real idea how long a lease he has on his future. It is to try to meet the challenge of such questions that we have prepared these broadcasts. It has been a difficult task and a delicate one. Except for those who think in terms of pious platitudes or dogma or narrow prejudice-and those thoughts we aren’t interested in-people don’t speak their beliefs easily or publicly.

I always think squirrels are going to do Chase-Me correctly, but I get fooled every time. Dad came over and reached down and I wagged. He picked me up in his big, thick gloves and carried me over to the truck. “Well, I should be angry with you that you let Lily escape,” he told Maggie Rose as she opened the door, “but it turns out she was just what we needed. The prairie dogs didn’t understand when they saw people coming to try to herd them, but they recognized a predator when they saw one, and followed their instincts right into their new homes!

Their wagon crawled along over gently rolling humps and swells, generally following the dusty valley floor between and around a maze of overlapping ridges. Thin pine and oak forests covered the lower slopes but never quite reached the red-rock ridgetops. Nor were there many trees down in the dry valleys of prairie grass and sage, where the occasional stunted, wind-rustled corn patch of a mestizo farm huddled against the road, or the mangy dogs of a native village ran out to pester the horses. But even in the afternoon when the road began to climb, winding through gaps in the craggy mountains toward the town of Arteaga, Caleb noted that it was a much better and smoother road than the one from Agua Nueva.