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Around and around the hawk circled, dizzying me as I walked with my eyes on the sky. Bardo called it a locust hawk, because it swooped down every so often to catch and swallow prairie grasshoppers. It occurred to me that if the hawk could eat grasshoppers, we probably could, too, and might keep starving at bay a little longer if it came to that.
If the hawk was watching us as I was watching it, what it saw were our ragged columns crossing the dry bed of what had been the Washita River, three pairs of pipers, four pairs of half-naked holy people, and the three of us—Horace the gaucho, Levi, and me at the rear, where we could talk freely, letting the wind carry the words away behind us. We talked of the meaning of the diamond bug, the strangeness of the house and of the graveyard on th
