I think the coyotes were my fault. I knew I shouldn't hide dead animals in my garbage, and after my first year, I quit, instead become adept at hurling lighter weight fauna and dragging the heavier ones. (I am stronger than I've ever been, living on a mountain, where walking uphill no longer feels unusual, or often even noticeable). So the coyotes were my fault, because I must have been feeding them.

There is so much death on a farm. I have killed so many things in my eight years here. I want to account for those deaths. I want to post the weekly bills of death on my hands. I want to paint a large canvas of the body of each mouse I've dropped from the trap and flung over the paddock fence for hens to eat. I want a reckoning. But first I want to finish the narrative that kills my sheep.

Desert longing is a trope— the improbability of desert life, the extremities, the vast silence.

Lovely Leicester Longwool lambs graze on our Virginia farm