In the Gran Desierto, horses are the first to go. Scattered dead across the flats, they have already turned to bone. A windmill shimmers in the distance, a pozo, a well. The horses must have straggled here on a last hope of water, and failed. The ranch around the pozo looks like a shipwreck on a plain, also failed. It will probably come back, someday. Weather will turn for this region and it will rain again, tinajas filling, arroyos running. The windmill will spit out fresh, cool water.
Devin stoops and unearths a horse's skull, his finger hooking its eye-orbit to lift it out. He wipes out dust, peers into the brain case.
"This one ain't going to make it," he says, and tosses it back in.
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