Here, however, the mesquite was mysteriously dead: brown and leafless and twisted, the narrow limbs peeling leprous rotten gray bark. Stranger yet, there was a broad path broken through the dead mesquite forest, a series of curved arcs like the stamping of a gigantic horseshoe. The dead forest was scarred with ragged, overlapping capital C s, some of them half a kilometer across. It looked as if somebody had tried to set a robot bulldozer on the pasture, to knock the dead wood down, but the dozer had suffered some weird variety of major software malf.