He got up and walked a few steps away and urinated, rubbing the back of his neck with his free hand and listening to the crickets down in the willows. The twilight had deepened into evening; a solution of dense violet light, like an intangible rain, filled the canyon from wall to wall.

Burns went back to the deer, lifted it over his shoulders, picked up his rifle and stumbled down the slope, across the sand and up the other side to the tallest of the nearby piñons. He opened his knife again and cut a stake about two feet long, sharpening each end, then spread apart the doe’s hind legs and braced them with the stake, piercing the shanks with the pointed tips. Now he could have used a piece of rope; since he had none he broke a branch from the limb he had chosen and hung the carcass to the stub. The limb bent slightly under the weight and the doe’s forehooves, swinging a little, grazed the black carpet of needles on the ground.

The cowboy built a small fire next, his mind on supper—he had eaten just enough of the liver to really rouse his appetite. He brushed off a level spot among the rocks, pulled up some dry bunch grass and crushed it into a ball, sprinkled with pine needles and shreds of bark and a handful of broken twigs and added a flaming match. When the tinder caught fire, crackling brightly and sending up a thin gray fuse of smoke, he got up and prowled around for a while gathering fuel—dead juniper, a few skeletal stalks of cane cactus. He broke these into short lengths, set several on the flames and in a few minutes had a comfortable little squaw fire blazing away.

He was thirsty; for the first time in over an hour he discovered himself with nothing immediate and urgent to do, so he went down to the willow thicket and through it to the rock face. He found water dripping from fissures in the rock, filling a natural stone basin on the first ledge. He put one hand on the rock, still faintly warm from the sunlight, and bent down and drank, sparingly, and then went back to his fire and the deer, brushing drops of water out of his whiskers. As he approached, something black and awkward, like a ragged mop, rose out of the piñon tree and paddled slowly away down the canyon, each ponderous stroke of its wings accompanied by a swish of air. Burns cursed himself—tentatively—and hurried forward to examine the interior of the carcass. He was relieved to find no sign of the scavenger anywhere on the meat; he had returned in time to save the deer, not from much actual pillage, of course, but from what he considered a particularly odious kind of defilement.

The fire had burned down to a hot, incandescent heap of charcoal; Burns reached into the abdominal cavity of the deer with both hands and cut away a long tender roll of the loins and laid it on the fiery coals. While the meat seared and crackled, gracing the air with its fragrance, he went back to the carcass, cut out the heart, the lungs and the diaphragm, threw the latter two organs away and set the heart down on the edge of the fire, intending to roast it. He cut a chunk from the half-raw half-burnt sirloin and ate it while considering what to do next.