I make my living sitting very still in places most people never see after dark.

I shoot catalogs and magazine spreads, owls

slotted between saguaroes, bobcats ghosting awash, ringtails sneaking into old mine

adits. It's unglamorous if you don't like waiting. I do like waiting. I like charts and

wind checks and setting up a scene the way a bow hunter sets a stand.

You read the ground, you look for sign, you stack quiet advantages, you try to become background,

and then animals step back into their routines like you were never there. This happened in late

October, on Bureau of Land Management terrain along the east side of Kofa National Wildlife

Refuge, a long spit of country between quartzite and Yuma. I'd pulled a small assignment to

chase desert predators with night vision, coyotes in particular, because the publication wanted

images of how they move when heat is down and traffic thins. The plan was three nights out.

I slept in the Jeep with the seats down and worked out of a pop-up ground blind. I set 20 yards off

a two-track that died in a dry arroyo. It was a good pinch point. Mouse tracks scribbled in the sand,

quail dust baths, scat with mesquite beans and hair. I bait nothing.

I sit where prey and water make predators logical. The first afternoon, I drove the miles of washboard

until the cell bars fell away, and the chatter of the interstate faded. I chose a slightly raised bench

for camp to keep flash floods out of the picture,

tuned my satellite messenger to send a check-in once at dusk and once at dawn, and started walking sign.

Coyotes were around. You can tell from the way a line of pads move straight through gravel,

from the scat on a rock, they like to

post their roots, and from the night music if you get lucky. I found something else too, a big dog

print with a long center pad, wide splay, almost too clean. It wasn't unusual enough to bother

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