Life in the Southwest. We live among the denizens who make sounds city folks, as we once were, don’t hear. A creative nonfiction. Yet it could as easily be part of a scene or setting in a bit of fiction in the right story.

The quail broke from their brushy cover in a flutter of wings—a card shuffling sound, at the four-legged’s approach. Max wanted to pursue them. At each foot fall, they flew 30 more yards in another riffle of the deck. There is always more for him to discover. He pauses, thoroughly sniffing each cluster of scat from this critter or that, despite investigating the same piles from days before. Perhaps he forgot or he is reliving the adventure, secure in his identification of the crapping culprit.