The opposite of solitude

The sight of an uninvited guest in the wilderness of the pasture in the farthest southeast corner of our ranch was a surprise, one that quickly turned into an affront as I put a mental pencil to how far away he was from the paved road that had brought him to the ranchería of our backyard in early April. Being on our property was no accident. He meant to be there.

As we approached the young bald man in hunting camouflage, a man who did not turn to look at us bearing down on him, I felt a little panic that he might be armed or that he meant to harm us. My head was full of news of skinhead militiamen in Arizona helping stem the tide of undocumented immigrants. Genaro, his voice high with surprise, said, “Es un Americano,” a comment to acknowledge that the travelers we run into in the brush are routinely Mexican nationals.

I asked the fellow if he knew he was trespassing and he didn't answer my question but said instead that his friend had probably wounded a hog and had gone after it on our property. I didn't much care about his sorry story. It's not even hunting season. I was looking at fence staples that had come loose where they jumped the fence by standing on the spot where staples hold wire to the cedar post. It's the well-built fence my cousin Hugo made many, many years ago, miles and miles of fence.

I asked the trespasser to leave our property, and he said he would, though he made no effort to leave. Another fellow on a four-wheeler showed up on the other side of our boundary fence and gave a good show of giving the younger trespasser what-for for the transgression of going over a boundary fence. The fellow on the four-wheeler also apologized and said it would never happen again and said that he sub-leased from a guy who sub-leased from a guy who sub-leased from my cousins who are absentee landowners. Genaro said he had heard them firing their weapons repeatedly the day before.

I repeated my wish to have the interloper off our property and continued driving along the sendero, irritated that in my rear view mirror the fellow hadn't yet left the property to join his pal on the four-wheeler. So I stopped until Mr. Four Wheeler showed up alongside us. It was then I saw the second armed interloper walk from the brush, step on our fence, and return to the property next door. Again, there were assurances that it would never happen again.

Genaro and I made our way home through the pear flats, catching our breath when two magnificent whitetails stunned us in a high vault across our path in leaps of grace and velocity. The sight of them was lovely and it calmed us a bit as we made our way back to the pie del rancho.

There's this lovely archway of foliage over the road on the earthen dam of the pond near our house, a cool, welcoming shady place that signals the spot at which you exit the brushlands for the tamer civility of the ranch compound. It's the spot at which you exhale from your lungs the last of the adventure you've just had in the monte.

That's where we came across the six-foot rattler, which Genaro dispatched from this life with a stick. A stick. I watched through the windshield of the truck. He said a friend's mother had cancer and needed the snake for medicine. At the barn, he detached what was left of the viper's head and put the long, heavy, still crawling coil in his car.

I headed to the cooled respite of my home, thinking I should have locked the ranch road gate. I was on the phone with the game warden to ask what was in season and what the yahoos next door might have been hunting. He asked if I wanted them arrested for trespass and did he want me to have him come over to take a look. I was on the phone with him when the yahoos pulled up, petted my dog, and came into my yard to apologize once again, their Jack Russell terrier eyeing the scenario from their truck.

The day had been everything but the one I had carved out to spend in solitude.