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you there,” Lee said.
    “He won the argument,” the old man said, “but he lost his immortal soul. So he tells me this and he asks me, What is the yucca good for? How could I answer a question like that? I know how the yucca feels about it but I couldn’t put it into words any more than a yucca can. I couldn’t say it holds the soil down—there ain’t no soil here. I couldn’t say it casts a welcome shade—it won’t shade a rabbit. Well, he saw he was pushing me into a corner and he made his big play. The yucca is not good for anything, he says. It drinks your water and it eats the minerals in your ground but it doesn’t do you one—one nickel’s worth of good. What should I do about it? I asked him. Kill them, he said; kill every—every horny one of the ugly things. And don’t stop there, he said; look at those cottonwood trees along the wash, sucking your river dry. What can I do about that? I asked. Ring them, he said. They’re bleeding you like vampires—cut them down. Think of the awful waste. Don’t you believe in conservation? he asked.”
    “He was threading you like a needle,” Lee said. “What did you say to that?”
    “I said yes sir, I believe in conservation, and he said, Then do something about it or someday we’ll revoke your grazing permit, make you eat cottonseed cake and TV dinners.”
    “Like everybody else,” Lee said. “Looks like he was making cutlets out of you.”
    “He sure was,” the old man said.
    We rode on quietly for a few long moments. “What did you do, Grandfather?” I asked.
    “I’m ashamed to say I lost my temper. But I made him bleed in the irrigation ditch so none of the valuablefluid was wasted and I planted the body by the bunkhouse door, where you might have noticed those hollyhocks growing so straight and vigorous. The ones with the big pink flowers. The next day a young fella from the National Fish and Wildlife Service came out to see me, wanted to show me a new type of gun—a cyanide gun for exterminating coyotes, foxes, mountain lions and other meat-eating predatory species of animals.”
    “How did the cyanide gun work, John?”
    Grandfather dropped the stub of his burning cigar on a passing anthill. “It worked very well.”
    “You can’t stop progress.”
    “No, they got around me. Now they just fly over the country in an airplane and drop tallow balls everywhere. The wild animals like them. Maybe children do too, I don’t know.”
    “Tallow balls?” I asked.
    “Meatballs,” Lee explained, “loaded with Ten-Eighty.”
    “If you don’t know what that is,” Grandfather said, “you’ll probably get a chance to taste some someday. It’s a wonderful new kind of poison that works through a whole chain of animals. It kills the first animal that eats it, kills the animal that eats the first animal, kills the animal that eats
him
, and so on down the line. Of course the poison gets diluted as the victims pass it along so I suppose we’ll end up eventually with buzzards too fat to fly and maggots too bloated to crawl.”
    “That’s progress,” Lee said. “You can’t deny that.”
    “That’s what I’m afraid of,” Grandfather said. “Progress. I say, Let’s turn back the clock. Why does progress have to progress over me and the coyotes?”
    “Well, you’ve heard of the Juggernaut. When missiles get bigger, missile testing ranges have to get longer.”
    The old man frowned; he didn’t want to talk about that. Changing the subject, he said:
    “Close your jaw and open your eyes and look atthat mountain.” He raised an arm and pointed toward the granite of the high peak, now glowing with light from the rising sun.
    “Why do they call it Thieves’ Mountain?” I asked, staring up at the transmutation of bare gray rock into gold.
    “It belongs to the Government,” Grandfather said.
    “Yes, the Government stole it from the cattlemen,” Lee said. “And the cattlemen stole it from the Indians. And the Indians stole it from