Very slowly, so slowly, I bring the camera up until’ level with the coyote’s head and softly depress the shutter. The flash flashes. Startled, the coyote blows on its front legs then pushes itself round and vanishes into the desert, sending up small puffs of dirt in its wake. I turn the camera back to the dead dog and fire off a dozen or so shots in rapid succession. The light show in the sky is reaching a climax. The sun has melted out of the constraints of its circle and is arbitrarily shooting streaks of orange through the riot of violet and crimson clouds above. Then, as it drops lower, an angle changes. The pale milky film of the dog’s eyes suddenly catches the light and the pupils begin glowing a deep molten red. I take a step backwards. The dog looks demonic. Super-natural. Like some terrifying pagan deity about to be resurrected by the power of the dying sun. Thoroughly spooked, I retreat a couple more steps, unwilling to present my back to the beast.

I do not see the Mexican until I turn. No intuition, female or otherwise, warns me that the real danger lies not in front, cold and stiff in death on the road, but behind, alive and very much human. Except that the man standing by the truck doesn’t look dangerous. He looks scared. He stares directly at me, but how long he’s been standing there, watching, waiting, I have no way of knowing. Certainly long enough to have swiped the shopping from the back of the truck. He holds all eleven of my Wal-Mart bags. Five hooked through the fingers of one hand, six more cutting into the wrist of the other. He steps backwards, feeling with his trainer for the edge of the desert, but all the while staring, almost as if waiting for an order to drop the food, and I think later that had I had the presence of mind to call out, he might have put the bags down, possibly even murmured an apology; but it doesn’t occur to me and when it dawns on him that I am not about to make any attempt to stop him, he turns and scrambles down the scrub of the bank, melting away to nothing as the desert closes protectively around him. As I look after him the irony strikes me. That out here in the middle of this emptiness, not ten feet from the supernatural fantasy I was ready to lose myself in, exists somebody else’s harsh reality.