Coyote Crossing

Full moon a glint in The Raven’s eye and it drenches us in light. Sable sky bears a feathery sheen upon it. A moon-suffused cool smolder masks the stars.

Joshua trees raise arms toward the pale night sky. The Raven’s shoulder fits beneath my own. Top down on the Mustang we watch the sky, storm clouds 70 miles east above the Hualapais, above the mouth of the Grand Canyon. A whole world of storm out there, many miles too far away for the sound to carry. A whole world of white-flashing thunderheads and muted lightning out there in Arizona, and here in Nevada just the blessed cool, a mere 90 degrees tonight, and Joshua trees silhouetted by full moon, her right shoulder tucked underneath my left.

How many lives must one endure before a pinnacle such as this? How many aching hopeless turns of wheel? This night sufficient recompense for a dozen of my lives, to sit here motionless content beneath the lurid moon, the certain violence of night flash floods diffused by miles into a spectacle of flashing light, The Raven dozing, head on my shoulder.

To the east is Spirit Mountain, its white bulk lit bright by this Raven Moon. We walked there today in a desiccated canyon, found a boulder worn slick by eons of infrequent and disastrous floods. The Raven tried to climb it and failed, the flakes too thin by half to give her stiff bootsoles purchase. We sat instead in the shade at its base, white sand still warm from an oven of a day. Thousands of designs carved into the desert varnish all around us, and we watched the far mountains as the storm clouds built. The air blurred above us and she pointed it out: a western pipistrelle, out a couple hours early hunting the small dragonflies in the desert willow blooms. We lay against the rock, groaning as it worked the knots out of our lower backs, and then the pipistrelle was back and watching us, yellow fur and black wings, hovering a full fifteen seconds three feet above our faces.

This happens when I’m with you, said The Raven, just as I was thinking the same thing. A dozen visits here before, restlessly exploring, and today she’d pointed out two ancient bighorn carvings I had walked past many times and never seen. Three months now in the desert and this night with her the first time coyotes will sing for me, two hours from now and four miles farther off the pavement, and just before sleep finally takes us.