A few years a go I headed west, where I rode a horse named Bones and worried about mountain lions. If I'd been further north, I'd have been worrying about grizzly bears. If I'd been in the ocean I'd have worried about sharks. I'm a worrier. Aside from that, I had a great time in the west, though, as I have said here before, it might as well have been the surface of the moon so foreign was its landscape, so long were the distances between places, and so huge was its sense of self.
On the way back to the airport, driving a long, long way down a very straight, flat road, I looked off into the western scrubland and saw there in the distance what appeared to be a long line of very large birds trotting southward. I blinked my eyes and looked again. They were still there, not a mirage, huge birds trotting, all right, close enough to see, but far enough away to hardly see at all. If the west had seemed foreign to me before, now it felt truly hallucinatory.
Back home, I looked all over the western birding information and got nothing. I'd thought maybe they were cranes, having never seen one. I knew cranes were large, but they aren't as large as those guys were. Years later, quite by accident, I found out what they were. They were emu, on the run from an emu ranch, running along the horizon, kicking up dust, making life more mysterious than it already was.
