TWO MEN SIT on a rock halfway up the slope of a desert mountain. Sundown: The air is still, caught in the pause between the heat of day, the cool of evening. Doves call in twilight, testing the tentative peace. Downslope from the men a rattlesnake slides from its dark den, scales hissing over stone; the yellow eyes glow with hunger—death in its glance.

The men are roasting the remains of a small mammal—too small for goat, too large for rabbit—on a bed of mesquite coals. Their horses stumble nearby, hobbled, browsing on thorny acacia, prickly pear, bursage. The feed is scanty here and the horses look ganted and weary; like the men they have come a long way.

One man pokes at the fire with a stick and turns the meat over. “How do you want it, boss?”

The other man, staring at something far in the west, does not immediately reply. His gaze is fixed on the fires of a burning city, where towers of dark glass stand in smoke and dust against the yellow sky of sunset. “What’s that?” he says. “What’d you say?”

Patiently the first man says, “Rare, medium or well done?”

“What was it?”

“Part Airedale, maybe. Part coyote. Maybe a few other things.”

“Oh God, Sam, I don’t care. Any way you like it.”

The one addressed as Sam shrugs his bare shoulders and draws a big knife from his belt. “I’ll have mine rare, boss. This here warrior is hungry.” He lifts the roast dog from the embers with the point of the knife, lays it on the rock, slices off a thin steak, puts the rest back on the fire. Lifting the meat to his jaws he looks again at his companion. “You got to eat, boss. Keep up your strength. You’re going to need it.”

From nearby comes the clash of steel on stone. The second man says, “Those horses need it. Look at them poor devils.”

“I know, boss. We’ll take them down in the canyon after dark. Safer then.” Sam chews on his supper, grunting with pleasure. He is a short, heavy, shirtless fellow; his brown skin, smooth and nearly hairless, shines with an oily gleam; the hair on his head is blue-black, rich and coarse, bound in a club at the nape of the neck. Neither the body nor his face—a round, full, saddle-colored face, wily, wise, humorous—offers much clue to his age. He could be thirty, he could be fifty-five. He could be a shaman, a wizard, a witch doctor, altering his age from time to time to suit the circumstances.

The second man is hard to see, hard to make out. In the twilight of evening he might be a ghost. But he is clearly old, well advanced in his mortality—the sunburned beak of nose projects above a narrow, pointed, cadaverous jaw that bristles, like cactus, with stiff frosty stubble. Under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat the eyes, set deep and wide in cavernous sockets, look out on the world with asymmetric intensity: one eye clear, bright, lifeless, the other old and dark and tired but alive, all the same, with a melancholy passion. The left eye is glass but the other—his shooting eye—is living plasm, wired to the circuits of the mind and soul.