Every year at Halloween, Dulcinea dresses up for our cameras, and this year her pumpkin-themed photo shoot took place in the Bear Canyon Arroyo, near our new home. The arroyo is a wilderness cutting through the center of the city, and the coyotes, the foxes, and the mountain lions use the broad riverbed to make their way down the mountain. The roadrunners live there all the time.

The roadrunners usually move too swiftly for me to photograph, but at times they enjoy perching on a rock just outside my gate, their wild eyes scanning for lizards and insects.

These crazy birds are great favorites of mine, and I have to confess I was greedily delighted when my parents gave me a pair of woven Navajo roadrunner cushions for my new house, which they’d bought in Chimayo back in the 60’s.

So far, I haven’t felt inspired to write any stories about roadrunners. (Why should I, when Looney Tunes did it so well?) Instead, my literary obsessions have landed on an even more elusive creature: the wily fox, subject of a future post.