Their numbers seem to have doubled in the last few months.
Small ones emerge from behind a peak or rise from a ravine in groups of three or four.
As the weather allows more frequent hikes, I get a sense of the seasons' cycle quickening, heating up. The dirt pathways have been torn up by the rains, and the steepest routes are riddled with foot-deep channels. The face of the meadow to the north that rises to the crown of the mesa is a vibrant green now, but it will go brown by summer's end. Few things in life are so certain. I often have many square miles all to myself on these walks, but despite a setting perfect for meditative silence, a mechanism in me cranks up at about the midway point of each trip.