It Is Not Possible To Disassociate The
Call Of The Burrowing Owl From The Late Slant Light Of The
Mesa.
If the fine vibrations which are the golden-violet glow of
spring twilights were to tremble into sound, it would be just that
mellow double note breaking along the blossom-tops.
While the glow
holds one sees the thistle-down flights and pouncings after prey,
and on into the dark hears their soft pus-ssh! clearing out
of the trail ahead. Maybe the pinpoint shriek of field mouse or
kangaroo rat that pricks the wakeful pauses of the night is
extorted by these mellow-voiced plunderers, though it is just as
like to be the work of the red fox on his twenty-mile
constitutional.
Both the red fox and the coyote are free of the night hours,
and both killers for the pure love of slaughter. The fox is no
great talker, but the coyote goes garrulously through the dark in
twenty keys at once, gossip, warning, and abuse. They are light
treaders, the split-feet, so that the solitary camper sees their
eyes about him in the dark sometimes, and hears the soft intake of
breath when no leaf has stirred and no twig snapped underfoot. The
coyote is your real lord of the mesa, and so he makes sure you are
armed with no long black instrument to spit your teeth into his
vitals at a thousand yards, is both bold and curious. Not so bold,
however, as the badger and not so much of a curmudgeon.
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