It is time for a walk on the dunes. There may not be many years left. I leave the road and walk out on the dunes, following the delicate footprints of a fox. Past the arrowweed on the salt flats, past the little bosks of mesquite in the foothills of the dunes, up the windward side along the crest where the sand is so firm my feet leave only a faint impression. On the sand are other tracks even more delicate than those of the fox—the imprints of mice, beetles, lizards, birds.

I trail my fox into the lifeless heart of Death Valley, wondering where he might be bound. The morning sun rises higher above the purple Grapevine Mountains on the east, illuminates with a rosy glow the Panamint Mountains on the west. The tracks go high, then descend, then climb still higher on the next and greater dune. In general, with all its wandering, the fox seems to be bearing toward the highest dune of them all, four hundred feet above the valley floor. That fox should be hungry; a fox in the wild lives mostly on the keen edge of starvation. Yet his course is leading him farther and farther from any likely source of food. The fox’s prey live below, among the clumps of vegetation between the dunes; the tracks of rodents and lizards become scarce, then nonexistent, as we climb higher.

Maybe this fox is crazy. Or rabid. Or old and looking for a place to die. Or a sightseer like me. Why the summit of the sands? Yet that is where the trail finally leads me. To the high point of the highest dune. And there, as I can plainly read on the open page of the sand, the fox paused for a while, turning in one place, before plunging over the cornice and down, in great leaps, through the soft, unstable sand of the slip face, disappearing into the brush on the flats below.

What brought that fox up here? I don’t know. A light wind is blowing now and all tracks, including my own, are beginning to soften, blur, fade out in a serried pattern of ripples in the sand. I lie belly down on the cornice of the dune, looking over the edge. Fine grains of sand, backlit by the sun, shining like particles of light, are swirling in the air. I can hear them tinkling and chiming as they fall on the sand below. Like crystals of quartz; like tiny fragments of broken glass. There is no other sound in this desert world.

I roll over on my back and gaze up at the cloudless, perfect, inhuman, unsheltering sky. The inevitable vulture soars there, a thousand feet above me. Black wings against the blue. I think I know that bird. He looks familiar. I think he’s the one that’s been following me, everywhere I go in the desert, for about thirty-five years. Looking after me. I follow the fox. The vulture follows me.