Dog Days

It is the day. The sun is forcing her way through my hat, through the sun cream beneath and deep into the tissue of my skin. Here, in the high mountains, she is closer, somehow more intense and aggressive than just a relatively short distance below.

Crickets, grasshoppers, ants, bees and butterflies are everywhere. The air is filled with the sounds of insects, or a sudden swift gust of approaching air, as hot as a hairdryer and vanished as swiftly as a lungful blown across the hillside, raising dust and drying all before it.