THE VOICE OF THE DESERT 



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the population. Just where I hve, ten or twelve miles from 

 Tucson, you might call the mesh "medium coarse." Jack 

 rabbits as well as cottontails often come almost to my door 

 and are pretty certain to spring up whenever one walks 

 a few hundred yards toward the mountains. There are 

 ground squirrel burrows all about, pack rats here and 

 there and an occasional rock squirrel — a pepper-and-salt- 

 colored creature about the size of an eastern gray squirrel 

 but with a bushy tail which he always carries behind him 

 instead of in orthodox squirrel fashion. Infrequently I 

 hear at night the yipping of a coyote and on at least one 

 occasion I have had to get porcupine quills out of the nose 

 of a neighbor's dog. But all the larger, more spectacular 

 mammals have been screened out, probably within the 

 last decade. Double the distance from town and you may 

 see deer crossing the road. Go twenty-five miles away to a 

 forest ranger's cabin and the ring-tailed cats as well as the 

 foxes sneak up for table scraps. There are even more sur- 

 prising animals in the rugged area of recent volcanic 

 mountains just west of town. But they have to be looked 

 for. 



Though I have never seen a mountain lion in the wild, 

 they are quite common in some of the more mountain- 

 ous regions of Arizona and one was shot not long ago 

 thirty or forty miles away from here. Bobcats roam 'wild, 

 if very wary, even closer at hand. A week or two ago I sat 

 for a few hours in a photographer's blind beside a small 

 man-made water hole about fifteen miles from town. First 

 came a buck and a doe who stood on guard while their 

 fawn took a long drink, then the curious little spotted 

 skunk and, finally, two of the wild pigs or peccaries locally 

 known as javelinas. At such a moment one feels that even 



