VACATION

High up and far away swirled some black
buzzards. He counted fifteen. The breeze carried
a faint smell of carrion. “Something large and
recently dead,” he sniffed the wind the way he
had seen one of the graduate students of the
group, and another member of the expedition,
sniff—a quiet, shallow inhalation.
He looked down. Ants were running
around everywhere.
In an open circlet surrounded by sage, he
found a hill of evenly textured small gravel and
chert with a crater and a hole in the middle—an
ant colony’s main access to their nest. Chris had
talked about the gravel hills, how the ants dug
deep and brought up small stone flakes chipped
by Northern Paiutes when they made stone