Travel Photography > Desert Southwest > Coyote Buttes

Along a ledge, I can see dozens of desert cottontails.  The way they seem oblivious to my presence is offsetting.  I awake them, sure, but shouldn't they run away?

And that's why, these machines with their mechanical legs - they are bunny harvesters.  You see, I tell myself, it's the future.  And climate change favored a certain vegetation, and with an ecosystem out of whack, this brushy vegetation feeds too many rabbits, and they are everywhere.

The machines are called arks, I tell myself, and in a dystopian future, men cling to their machines, harvesting their last resource, a bounty of bunnies.

I walk along the canyon-top; the more detail I add to my science fiction, the more I enjoy the cold morning.  In the first signs of light, a raven perches on a nearby rock, which hangs over the cliff wall.  He sits there for a moment while the Colorado River is shrouded in cloud.  When the clouds move away, he springs into the air.  Up first, then a steep dive, and then up again, and then his wings go stiff and he glides a mile, maybe two, in a single, effortless movement.

Arks are as much a means of rabbit collection as an arguably unfounded fear of the subsequent rise of cougars, whose numbers rose on account of the rabbits.
Most women are confined to these long, cylindrical buildings to the south, where they spend their days perfecting various rabbit recipes.  But some women ride arks; and they are known south of the rim as gauchettes.

I imagine that on the ridge to my left, the silhouette of a horse-rider appears, and she rides down toward the ark.  As she rides, she unsheaths a club, and when she nears the machine, she whacks a single lick at its legs.  And for reasons unknown to me, she collapses this machine, and it falls down into the Colorado River; its crew now lost.When I reach the car, it is only eight in the morning. 

I had been thinking about driving the eighty-miles to Kanab, just to see if I could get a permit to Coyote Buttes North. 

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