To my wife Linda, She lived in the plateau desert for 20 years, Her love for it was just as enduring. I regret not being able to learn how to play poker.It is a very useful skill in life: it nourishes kindness and strengthens the foundations of society. —Dr. Samuel Johnson Well, my nephew, listen to me and remember my words: in the high desert time is like a treacherous rider, a legendary bandit who will steal your days in the sun, Your woman, and boards the train in the twilight, and casts a smile on you. Pablo remembered his uncle's words, and used his entire fifty-one years to stick to it and experience the true meaning of it.Therefore, in the darkness of night, he sprinted down the ridge of Guipa Mountain.It is more than a hundred kilometers away from the border here. He staggered on the loose rocks all the way, while holding on to the swaying branches of emerald green dwarf pine for balance, and began to descend towards the Slater Valley. When he arrived there, he The silhouette of the mountain will no longer be as clearly seen as being nailed to the sky on the ridge.In sandals made of rubber and straw rope, those big brown feet were leading him through this dry land, heading north as always-these feet shuffled unwaveringly, as if walking on this long journey. Long distance is nothing more than fulfilling one's bounden duty.

On top of the sandals was a pair of muddy, baggy gray trousers, torn and ripped by the brambles along the way.The shirt over the trousers, which may have been gray-green at first, is now faded and has "Muslim Alley, Penal Colony, Texas" embossed on the back.Yesterday, when Pablo climbed near the Santa Clara peak, a helicopter spotted him. Immediately afterwards, the deafening roar of the Mustang four-wheel drive came from the mountain, and he could faintly hear the canyon below him. The Border Patrol tracked down his radio conversations.He's been in hiding all day, and now it's time to make up for lost time.

He was in a hurry, which was justified, because he was almost at the end of the journey.He had a pebble in his mouth and kept stirring it with his tongue to sip the last bits of water out of his mouth.He weighed one hundred and forty pounds, and the backpack made up almost a third of his weight, and the long walks and the load in the backpack made it a little heavier to carry.He adjusted the straps of his backpack, slid down a limestone outcrop, and walked toward the valley, where the winding stream would lead him to a quiet and beautiful water source, where the evening signal lights were flickering.

He wished there were only two lights on, because either one more or one less meant he would have to wait in the dark until he got to the house and finished his work.The woman sometimes has visitors, so I don't want him to be there at such times.This kind of unexpected arrival happened less than two weeks ago, and he rushed over without saying hello.At that time, he was furious with her, and swears at her indiscriminately.But she just waved her hand, set the tortilla and water in front of him, and his anger melted away. A hundred and fifty meters below Pablo and half a kilometer to the east lay a rattlesnake.This is a western diamondback rattlesnake. It is dormant in its own territory, and it seems to be the well-deserved master of the party.In one month, it will be twenty years old; its body is huge, more than two meters long.It lies on a pea tree all day long, any kind of thorny tree or shrub of the genus Mupea of ​​the family Fabaceae, which is native to the hot and dry areas of the New World. It is an important tree species for bees to collect honey and an important feed for livestock, especially Finger gland mesquite.Now, only when the grazing cattle pass by will they open their eyes twice.Now that the sun has completely set and the moon is turning from waning to full, pale moonlight pours down on the North Peak, and the air has become cool enough for night hunting.

Despite an empty stomach, the rattlesnake still weighed sixteen pounds. It slowly stretched its coiled, flat and relaxed body against the soil, turned its recumbent body into a forward position, and began to cross the desert. Swim towards a ranch house.It swam along the route through low pastures, through undergrowth of cacti, and through the loose dust of a trail, meandering and twisting.On the other side of the road, about fifteen meters behind the ranch house, a water tank was slowly leaking outwards, gradually forming a puddle where it could drink. When it was almost crossing the path, the rattlesnake felt the tremor of the ground, and it stopped alertly, its eyes were ruthlessly cold, as always: black, straight, and unblinking.Its letter flashes constantly, transporting particles in the air to the vomeronasal organ on the upper jaw and then into the brain: this is the snake's sense of smell.It raised its head, and part of its body also lifted up, almost curled up into an eye-catching snake circle, and remained motionless.However, the trembling gradually subsided, and after two minutes it slackened and continued to crawl towards the puddle, finally crawling past the bootprints left just a few minutes ago.

Like an old song wafting out of a hand-cranked gramophone, the plateau desert enters the night leisurely.In the night shadows of Mount Guipa, a diamondback is drinking and a nightingale is singing.Within a few seconds, a wild wolf began to howl, and after a while, the responses and choruses of the same kind merged into one place. For a while, it was difficult to distinguish who was howling.Pablo came from the west along the riverbed of Slater Valley, the crunch of the stones under his sandals almost inaudible amidst his heavy panting.As he climbed down the ridge, he had noticed the lights in the ranch house far below and to the right.This light was not unfamiliar, because he had seen it when he was exiled to the north, and he never minded it, because he was sure that the old man who lived there was ignorant of everything that happened under the night.

There is another building half a kilometer northwest of the main house. It is smaller, made of mud bricks, and surrounded by cedars, so that it is impossible to see from a distance how many lights are lit in the west window. lamp.Pablo would continue along the dry creek until he reached the big rock he had used, and he would stand on it and cast his eyes over the edge of the ravine, counting the lights at the window.Please—his prayer floats to the Virgin Mary in the depths of the sky—let there be only two lights there.Then he can ditch his backpack, drink and rest for a few hours before heading south again to his hometown and family in St. Helena.If he was lucky, he could also be picked up by a Border Patrol car and taken to an intersection near Castoron, where he would be home the next evening.Of course they'd question him, but he'd say he'd only come up north looking for work, and nothing else.While Pablo never really thought of it that way, a trip home on American taxpayer money is certainly enjoyable.For him, Anglo-American lax laws and ignorant generosity made things easier.

Again, the nightingale is singing.Again, the wolf was howling.The Diamondback almost finished drinking the water. It felt the movement again, raised its head from the puddle, and kept this position for five seconds, then slowly crawled back to any cover it could find.Something came to the other side of the sink and was making a noise.Since there is no biological organ related to hearing, snakes only perceive some of those sounds, those that cause the slightest vibration in the ground, such as human footsteps.In this way, the western diamondback can never be sure of its surroundings, but can only react in a primitive way to the small slice of reality that its sensors pick up.For diamondback rattlesnakes, and most things that matter in life, when everything that is not essential to survival is stripped away, survival is reduced to food, danger, and species reproduction.

The sound was first the soft impact of old boots on the sand, and then the rustling of dust from the surface of the sink that the snake couldn't hear.A man gurgled water from cupped hands, and the moonlight rippled with the ripples of the water. The Indians finished their water and used worn denim, a heavy cotton cloth.Wiping his mouth on his shirt sleeve, he glanced at the window of the ranch house fifteen meters away.The light from the kitchen spilled only a short distance into the darkness, and through the window, partly covered with honeysuckle vines, he could see an old man sitting at a table, playing cards.

The Indian, who had spent so much time in the desert, was sensitive to its rhythms and the slightest variations.At this point, he sensed something approaching, so he stopped wiping his mouth with his shirt sleeve.He rolled his eyes, saw nothing, and looked across the sink again, maintaining this position for a minute.Then he smiled and put his right upper arm on his chest, palm down, and moved it away in a flicking gesture.The gesture belonged to an ancient, unknown language, used by his ancestors a hundred and fifty years ago, when they roamed the tribal lands of the Comancheria Indians.They have done so before.Long ago, people lived in freedom and glory, and the name Comanche was synonymous with fear and ruthlessness.

He relaxed and ignored what was going on at the sink.Parting the branches of the desert red willow, he walked on a slanted path—leaving the snake and heading towards the Delbro Canyon ten kilometers to the south.He looked up, and almost caught sight of a silhouette in the moon's shadow, a man descending the ridge toward the jagged crevice known as Slater's Creek. The Indian was wondering whether he should circle back to the little mud-brick hut with the light on.After he left, the woman named Sonia was combing her black hair while humming a tune while watching herself in the bathroom mirror.There was only a hint of acrid taste in her mouth, from drinking some sate with the Indians, a drink made from agave. , she felt slightly dizzy.Mirrors are cheap and make people's images look distorted.She thought the rancher might buy her a new one if she asked, but the bias made the reflected image in the mirror so narrow that it made her feel younger than her fifty-four years, Slenderer than actual figure.For this reason, she said nothing and kept the mirror. Indians know that things stay the same, and no matter how much you wish there was some element of difference, that's how it is.In this unforgiving world, people only care about what they have to care about, and these behaviors are accomplished by eating, drinking and interacting with each other.When he wasn't with the woman, what she did was none of his business.So he thought, taking the plastic bag of food she gave him, and walking at night to his shed in Del Bro Canyon, which was made of wood and canvas.Twice he stopped, looked up at the moon, and thanked it for leading him home. It is hard to say whether the diamondback understands the meaning of the moon, and looks up at it with a sense of gratitude.Maybe so, maybe not.But the snake did look like it was looking up at the sky, before it slowly crawled toward where its keen sense of smell led it to—perhaps a rabbit's den, which might have enough food to keep it going for a few more weeks.As he swam past the yellow primroses, the stalks bowed for a moment. A little to the east of Slater's Dale, two lights were dancing by the window.A rucksack had been gently thrown out of a ravine, and it lay on the ground, containing more than $4,500 worth on Main Street America.Pablo followed, grabbing a tree root with one hand and the dirt with the other, pulling himself out of the ravine and onto the ground. He brushed the valley dust off his clothes, adjusted his breathing, and looked around.nothing.The plateau desert is boundless and lonely, the only sound is the scream of a female rabbit in the distance, but the distance is too far, Pablo can't hear it at all. Winchell Dia was sitting in the kitchen of the rancher house when he heard the scream.He had heard such calls before, and was neither surprised nor alert.In this desert, nature is ruthless: screams in the night, and the bones are trampled after a month or two.Death in the undergrowth. Under the table, a dog raised its head. She was older than Winchell in terms of dog age.Her head froze, a low growl rumbled in her throat.This dog came with the ranch when it was built, and at one point she'd jump up and push open the screen door, she considered this square inch her own, and she rushed to whatever happened in the domain Go out and find out.But now, wracked by arthritis and drowsy from fourteen years of constant alertness, she just put her head on her paws and went back to sleep. Winchell said, "It's all right, honey. Let it go. Something caught a hare, that's all." He straightened his shoulders, shuffled the cards, and glanced out into the night, where something was getting closer to him.He may have known, or had a feeling, because old gamers have had the wisdom to sniff out evil before it gets there. Maybe that's why he reached for the .38 automatic Cot that hung in the holster under his left arm, and touched it.Maybe that's why he's donning the fine gray suit and custom-made boots, and why he's previously made sure the ten-year-old Cadillac in the garage is pumped up.The day is over, the night is still here, and there's always something wrong here.Winchell Dia was always on the alert, for some vague reason - something to do with the faintest vibrations at the bottom of his consciousness. A crooked thought had slipped into his head, as it would occasionally, and if Jarrell hadn't taken off her clothes and danced naked at the gaming tables in Kurt Norway, he wouldn't have had enough reason to slap her in the ass Kick it up to Ranch Drive, kick it back to Las Vegas or whatever.Besides, she might still be here with him, and he wouldn't be so alone.And she doesn't send him those disgusting letters asking for money, or make long, stinky phone calls late at night filled with vague threats, telling him that if he doesn't send that she What will happen to her about the so-called separation alimony.Winchell Dia didn't know what alimony was, and it wasn't in Texas law. He shuffled the cards, looked at the vast night outside, and started humming a song with a little nervousness, which was written for him by a Vegas musician: Sitting at the table, wearing my best, blue suspenders tugging at my shoulders...