We take the horses on range out from El Potrero: we need to keep in riding condition and so do they even if there are no cows to check on up there until the “Fall” (the English sense of what is a season doesn’t work well here.) There are a few Saguaro in sparing bloom, and on the arm of one that still had a single blossom is the first open red fruit offered to most every sort of diurnal, crepuscular, and nocturnal wildlife by these cactaceous restauranteurs, these Saguaros on a thousand hills. It is eerily quiet among the giants and among all the countless Whitethorns that appear dead from the drought: no cicadas sing.