I started off one morning, as I did many mornings, in search of horny toads—One purpose, no destination.  Despite the name, horny toads are not toads (as members of the reptile family) nor are they horny (only mating once a year); however, they do freeze at the slightest hint of movement and make easy prey for a b-b gun packing eight year old in cowboy boots and shorts.
 
Rain falls, on average, twenty days out of the year.  The land is dry and sun-cracked.  Dirt-clods crunch under weight of boots.  The air smells of sage.  Characteristic yucca, prairie sage, and prickly pear cactus texture the extensive flatness.  If a tumbleweed picked up enough wind-momentum it could blow across four states.  Life is a paradox in Wyoming:  depression runs as deep as the pre-Cambrian rock beneath the landscape, but the natives never leave.
 
My family’s land butts against the convergence of two great plateaus separated by a gradual one hundred foot slope, tapering off to a crested butte, and then to another slope of comparable length.  The lower plateau extends west for sixty miles until it slams into the Wind River Mountains, a minor range of the Rockies.  The higher plateau extends east ending, it seems, somewhere in Iowa.  Land as lonely as sky leaves ample time for an only child to quench the insatiable sauntering of the mind.  But my business waits on the crested butte.
 
Horny toads, the color of sand, blend into their surroundings almost as well as bats in a cave.  Wind-sculpted sandstone abstractions line the butte and provide perfect hiding places for those horny little devils.  One’s only hope of movement—slight ambulation of earth.  It’s best to find a comfortable spot, fix the eyes on the horizon, and sense the world peripherally.
 
I saw my first toad of the day as I sat on top of a sandstone monolith I named rattlesnake alley.  Rattlesnake alley faces westward and I would often find a diamondback warming its scales there in the afternoon sun.  Toad skirted across the face of a different rock ten feet away—an Arapaho scout scanning the pass.  I jumped to my feet and raised the gun.  He sensed my movement and froze.  I could have descended, walked up to him, but I did not want to waste the opportunity.  My father recently constructed a shooting range on our land and I wanted to show him how hard I had practiced.  But this was a living target, my first kill.

A grasshopper crackled in the sage.  Sweat beads formed on my cheek.  I pulled the trigger—missed.  B-B ricocheted off rock, bounced back, stung my neck hard.  I jumped down off my pedestal and squashed that toad (WHACK) with the butt of my gun.  whack.  Porous sandstone absorbed his crimson blood like a sponge.  I touched him with my fingers and wiped blood under my eyes, then I wept and wept—until the blood ran clean.