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the—from the eagles? From the lion? And before that—?”
    “—Before that?”
    “Look,” Grandfather said proudly, “see how the light comes down the mountain now. Rolling toward us like a wave.”
    Old man, proud of his mountain. I looked where he pointed. Swiftly and smoothly the sunlight was spreading downward from the peak to the crest of the lesser mountains north and south, down over the belt of pine to the juniper and pinyon stands of the foothills. Bands of light extended across the green sky, passing above us from the east, expanding from the fiery core that swelled below the rim of the world. Turning in the saddle I looked for the sun and in a moment the first arc of it appeared, then more until the entire fireball rose, dazzling and incredible, more beautiful than thought, above the Guadalupe range eighty miles away.
    “Yes,” continued Lee, “like a wave. But whose light? whose mountain? whose land? Who owns the land? Answer me that, old horse. The man with title to it? The man who works it? The man who stole it last?”
    The sun blazed on our backs as we rode toward the mountain, Grandfather’s mountain, and the shadows we cast stretched out before us, grotesquely exaggerated, miles long, folding over rock and shrub and prickly pear and crescent sands, clear to the foot of the hills. Flocks of sage sparrows swirled like dark confetti ahead of us, chirping mildly, and off to the left in theshadows of the brush a covey of Gambel’s quail ran off obliquely from the path of our advance, making their piteous little cries.
    “I am the land,” Grandfather said. “I’ve been eating this dust for seventy years. Who owns who? They’ll have to plow me under. My God, I forgot my cigars.”
    “Brains full of sand,” Lee grumbled, cheerfully. “Arrogant as a bull. Head screwed on backwards.”
    “Every man has his faults,
politico.”
    We came to a fence, the west boundary of the old man’s deeded property. Beyond this line began the hills and the mountains which my grandfather and his father had used as summer range for ninety years but which belonged, in the legal sense of the word, to the Federal Government. Grandfather held the land now on lease within the complicated provisions of the Taylor Grazing Act. The land on the other side of the fence did not, however, reveal in any way its legal status: it was rocky and dry and sunny and almost though not quite worthless—it looked perfectly real and natural. You could never have guessed, looking at it, that it belonged to the United States of America and was colored a uniform green on maps.
    There was also a gate, which my grandfather had built and maintained, and which it was my turn to open. I opened the gate, led my horse through, and closed the gate after the old man and the young man rode through. A great number of dead tumbleweeds lay banked against the fence; also a few immaculately white, sand-scoured cattle bones, the little that remained of the victims of a remote and almost forgotten blizzard.
    We rode on, the hills much closer now. The individual junipers that grew on the northern slopes of the hills looked bigger but no clearer, no more distinct, than they had looked from five miles away. The air in that country, except when the wind blew, was of a startling clarity, filled with nothing but light, oxygen,and the promise of lightning. Good for breathing and seeing.
    Directly ahead of us a canyon came down and parted the hills and spread a delta of sand and rocks over the plain. Near the mouth of this canyon stood a corral and a windmill and a tank full of water, where a small herd of cattle with wet muzzles waited, observing our approach. Each animal wore on its left flank the brand of the Box V, and all of them, including the little calves, watched us intently, like deer. No horse was up there. We stopped.
    “Before we do anything else,” Grandfather suggested, “before they shy and mess up the trail, let’s cut sign clear around that