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descendants of the people who settled this valley under that original grant, they’re still here. They ranch and they farm, and they have about as much interest in newcomers as they have in mosquitoes. They’re transplanted Mexicans who never bothered to concern themselves with the English language or any legal niceties past what gave them their stake. Anyway, as you can imagine, they weren’t real happy about land that they considered theirs being fenced in and clear-cut. So they put up a fight. There were shootouts, fires set, fences cut, beatings, the whole bit. Baylor even hired a private army.
    It wasn’t too long after that Snippy was found and the cattle mutilations started, with a bunch of folks saying it was aliens. Not the folks who were fighting with Baylor, though. See, they couldn’t help but notice that the aliens seemed to mainly target his opponents. It drove a lot of them out of business, too. When you’re a small outfit, it doesn’t take the loss of too many five-thousand-dollar steers to put you under. And supposedly Brother Joe has evidence of helicopters taking off and landing at the Baylor Ranch. The fact that it would be a half century and running now, and that John Baylor’s long dead and his children would have to be the ones carrying on the cattle killings, that doesn’t even slow Brother Joe down. He’s the kind who believes in tradition.
    For my part, I don’t know which sounds more far-fetched, Black Op cattle killings or aliens. Brother Joe believes in both as far as I can tell. Only last night he was on about the lights over the mountains, which he says are aliens. He says he saw one trail that ran the whole San Juan range, which’d be the whole west side of the valley, thenstopped in front of Mount Blanca, and shot around the Sangre de Cristo range on the east side. All in the time it took him to smoke a cigarette. Then he started in about underground government bases and some secret tribe of wandering Jews. Which is about when I turned the radio off.
    When I lived in New Mexico with you and your mother I used to drive up here a lot. Some of those trips were because I needed to get out of the house, but some were just because I needed a sunset. I read a lot about the valley before I moved here, too. One of the things about clearing power lines is that you spend a lot of time sitting in a bucket truck waiting for the work to start, and I’ve always spent that time reading. One thing I read is that if you ask a Navajo Indian about the valley, they’ll tell you it’s sacred. They’ll tell you that Blanca Peak is the Dawn Mountain, and that it’s strapped to the ground with lightning. Which, if you see it at sunrise, you’ll understand.

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    outlaws
    C O-159 is about as straight a piece of road as you can find, carving through the flat bottom of the San Luis Valley like it’s been dragged into the landscape with a machete. It’s the kind of highway that makes it hard not to speed, and when the gray sky’s about ten feet off the ground and the sun’s streaking bolts of yellow light through pinhole gaps in the firmament and raindrops are just beginning to pock your windshield, it makes it nearly impossible not to drink while you’re doing it.
    Not that Junior’s trying real hard not to do either, running a hundred miles an hour north toward Denver with a beer between his legs, his elbow hanging out the window, empty cans and Marlboro boxes rustling around on the floorboards like there’s a rat digging through them. The way he’s feeling, he knows that if he weren’t on a schedule, he’d end up driving loops through the valley, running himself dry of gas and beer, smoking until his lungs burned. That he’dprobably find himself shivering awake into a San Luis Valley sunrise with his cowboy boots hanging out the window, the car pulled off to the side of some dirt road.
    He’s even thought to himself about buying some little patch of scrubland down here and building himself a