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you want to do, Tam, try and find a way past? The damn snake’s right on the trail.”
    “Hell, let’s go back. I got blisters, Bob’s sunburned and who knows how many snakes we’ll run into? Could be hundreds in here. Not all of them rattle. People have killed so many of the ones who rattle that it’s the silent guys who reproduce. One of these days they’ll all be nonrattlers. Plus it’s too hot. This is the kind of place you tackle in November, not June.”
    They left and did not come back in November or ever. But Bob had thought many times that someday he was going to make it in to the dinosaur tracks, maybe on a mountain bike, and certainly in cold weather when the rattlesnakes were hibernating. Now, remembering the aborted trip, he thought maybe he would try again on one of his trips between Denver and the panhandle. On a cool day.

    North of Clayton he found a yellow-dirt road that carried him around hairpin bends, over humpback bridges and through mud ruts deep enough to scrape the bottom of the car. It was midafternoon when he came out at Teemu, not far from Black Mesa, in the Oklahoma panhandle, piñon-juniper-mesa country with cholla, hackberry, scrub oak all through the rocks. He stopped at a general store for a bottle of water and a ham sandwich, got pinned by the garrulous proprietor, a baggy man whiskered with white bristles recently arrived from California, who explained his ambitious retirement plan to make the place into another Santa Fe.
    “See, my grandparents left here in the thirties. Dust bowl days. I thought I’d come back and see what they left behind. It’s a beautiful place. Great potential. Got electricity too, more than you can say for California. We got craft people here, carvers and painters, we got Indians, we got people with sheds full a antiques, we got a small tourist trade that just needs working up. It’s mostly a Christian tourist trade, there’s the Cowboy Bible Camp that packs them in all summer. Over in Kenton they got the Easter Pageant, brings in the thousands. We even got a vineyard now, Butch Podzemny’s ranch out east has went over to vines. With a little luck Oklahoma panhandle could put Napa Valley in the dumpster. Pretty good climate for vines, high, dry, plenty sun, clean air, light stony soil. The new county agent thinks we got a chance to make a real nice regional varietal. The old agent couldn’t see past cows.”
    Bob thought the man was trying to puff the place up to himself, to smother his regret at leaving California for the bull’s-eye of the dust bowl.
    “I figure if we can interest Oklahoma Today, get them to come out and do an article on us, we’d improve business about fifty percent. But we’re kind of forgotten out here. Right now I try to keep everything loose, keep a little of everything on hand so I can see what people want. I got calendars, a few groceries, lunch counter. I got the gas pump, only gas pump for thirty miles either direction. Next year is the big year. I got a friend talked into remodeling the old hotel, open a nice restaurant. Butch’ll have the first wine ready to sell then. If he makes a go of it there would be a hundred others love to get out of the damn cow business and into something nice like vines. The boom is coming. Teemu will be the next Santa Fe.”
    It took Bob twelve seconds to drive through the bedraggled boomtown of the future, past three storefront churches, seven collapsed or empty buildings, the old school boarded up and wreathed in two-strand Wave Spread wire, past a decayed rock building with no roof and a dangling sign that read KELLY’S HOTEL —which he guessed was the home of the future “nice restaurant.” Bemused by curious rock formations that resembled dinosaur excreta standing on end, he thought of the storekeeper’s apparent ignorance that it had taken Santa Fe centuries to build up from its start as a trading town for Mexican hides and Indian silverwork. Several times he had gone with Uncle