A pickup traveling northbound on U.S. 491--formerly 666--just north of Tohatchi, New Mexico, and just inside the borders of the Navajo reservation, topped a nondescript knoll at 11:22 a.m. The teenage Navajo girl seated on a spare tire in the pickup bed was just drawing the last slurpy ounce of weak Pepsi from a half-gallon paper cup. When that cup held only nebulous chunks of caramel-stained ice, she lobbed it over the tailgate. It struck the double-solid yellow line, ruptured, and sprayed ice into both lanes, where tiny puddles formed immediately around each cube.

     Ten feet east of the highway right-of-way, a prairie dog, Cynomys ludovicianus, went into motion.

     It had an atypical gait, this prairie dog, more the elastic stride of its bigger rodent cousin the hare than the lumpy motion of its Cynomys fellows. It would not make easy prey for the red-tailed hawk who made these her hunting grounds.

     The creature ducked the lowest strand of barbed wire on the fence bordering the roadway, then sped up onto the asphalt. It stopped just short of the white line, standing stalk-straight and looking first south, then north, then south again. An observer of the scene (and there were none) would have had to conclude that this prairie dog was watching for cars. As it stood there, peering into the distances left and right, it held its forelimbs not hooked before its chest, but firmly against the sides of its body--a soldier at attention.

     The highway was empty, and Cynomys darted out into the lane, stopping at the nearest perimeter of the little ice delta. It gathered one, two, then three chunks of ice, cramming them in until its cheeks bulged, then sprang back along the indistinct trail, a straight line from the road's edge, beneath the fence, and to the burrow. Even with the cargo, the animal moved like a greyhound among prairie dogs.

     Nor was the burrow into which it vanished typical of your average crop-spoiling, plague-bearing rodent. It began as an angled funnel of earth like all the others, narrowing into a well-polished earth tube, but the similarity ended with that tube.

     Where it opened up again, the den was six inches wide by two feet long, a rodentian Great Hall. Its floor was absolutely level and flaunted a mosaic of color from the nearly two hundred bottle caps that tiled the hall, each cap gleaming in the light of two beer-bottle skylights embedded upside-down in the roof.

     Onto this floor, tiled with bottle caps and grouted with gray-green clay, Cynomys spat his ice. Then he gripped the largest piece with the claws of both hands, pressed it to his chest, and moved it in ever-larger circles until his belly was a spiraling field of wet fur and his face wore the look of unmitigated prairie dog pleasure. Next he rubbed it against his cheeks, the top of his head, his haunches, and soon he was rolling on the steel-tile flooring with all three cubes, grabbing them back when they slid away from him, biting off and savoring their corners, appreciating ice as no New Mexico prairie dog should, until finally he was a soggy, solitary island in a puddle of dirty water.

     He lay still, taking slow, deep breaths, soaking up the cold from the floor beneath. He was Yori, master workman of the ice, though for twenty years now he had touched it only in winter. And winters here were short.

     In a summer as hot and dry as this, he was happy to learn there was still ice in the world, that Onno hadn't stolen all of it. (Onno, the child guardian of oceans, and Doi-san, his randy Japanese terrier, took sport in roping entire mountains of ice at the poles and dragging them toward the equator to melt. The dragging was Doi-san's role, Doi-san with his harness of kelp cordage and whale gut. The god-dog, Yori called him, the most obvious of palindromes. And while the god-dog pulled, his master struck and stomped at the iceberg, dislodging tons at a time to make his waters rise.)

     The floor was warming now, and Yori the banished one, Yori the prairie dog, scampered to the surface again, wet fur giving still more polish to the clay slip that lined his tunnel.

     Back up to the roadside he went, hoping for just a few more frozen survivors to feed the memory that must sustain him until November's cold. From the white line it didn't look promising, but he performed the routine traffic check and moved out into the highway to be sure.

     Wet puddles dotted both lanes, but (thank the stars!) a few of them still floated tiny chips of ice, which Yori began to gather. Some of them melted to nothing on his tongue; others had enough substance to make it to the den.

***

     Half a mile north, Jerry Lesky was bored. Jerry Lesky was only a few blinks from sleep. Jerry Lesky had already driven this boxy delivery truck from Albuquerque to Farmington to Shiprock today, and now, three-quarters relieved of his Vaquero Kettle Chip cargo, he was slouching toward Gallup for his last few stops and a beer.

     Ahead, there was something in the road, just up on that rise there. Prairie dog--had to be--and right in the middle of this lane. He could take it with the left side or right, and he started to come alert as he reached a decision. He would take it with the left tires, because that puts the truck on the far right, just in case somebody else tops out from the other direction. He was glad for duals on the back; the wider swath made these rodent safaris that much easier.

     The stupid thing was looking for something, maybe picking something up. Jerry was bearing down on it now, and it hadn't even heard him. Hadn't even looked up. It was kindness, Jerry decided, to dispatch it this way, with no panic and no pain.

     Fifty feet. Twenty. He expected it to wake up anytime now, to give him a moving target, but it only skittered a few inches along the pavement, crouching, gathering, stupid.

     Ten feet--lined up just right--and then thump thump. He'd actually felt that one! Amazing that such a scrawny little carcass could actually move this stiff suspension! He hadn't heard it, though. That was the strange thing, because usually the splat-crunch announced a solid hit. He checked the rearview.

     Just before the round of the knoll hid that stretch of road, Jerry Lesky saw his victim. It wasn't disemboweled, wasn't just a puddle of hair and bone. It was standing tall right there in the lane, one arm high in the air. It was hard to say for sure, but Jerry would have sworn that prairie dog was giving him the finger.