A Tombstone of Sand

I am the heir of the river Blue, daughter of a noble bloodline. My family has inhabited these lands before the days of fire, when the river existed three kilometers to the north. Lava flowed down the river bottom, but we escaped. Time, and water, and wind gnawed at the surrounding mountains, and my ancestors watched generation after generation as those mountains washed by. A grain of sand at a time. Peace reigned for Millenia.

When you are as refined a race as mine, one million means little. In fact, I largely resemble my first pioneering ancestor to bushwack into this remote canyon.

Life was good, until that fateful day ash rained down from the mountain high and sterilized all.

My cousins died en masse. My ancestors, slowly, generation after generation, worked their way back up the watershed. The sand washed by, the river walked, and what was once our river bottom of Andesite later became our streamside. Evolving into our hillside, until it became the current mesa in the distance. Glaciers visited the high country and blessed our river on their way out.

Must all good things come to an end? The first signs of trouble were when the invasive species of the genus Homo showed their face. At first, all was well, but very soon after they built a little pueblo and started cutting trees all the country round. They farmed the bottom lands and the mountains floated by a little faster, nothing we couldn’t deal with. They paid homage to us on their stoneware and pecked our images in rocks. A small drought came; I guess Homo sapiens need more water than an Amphibian, as they left to never return.

Soon after a different line of Sapiens arrived, but they were less harmful, they did not cut trees, but merely picked up fallen wood. They would visit us every summer and were light to the touch. Life was still good, rivers were perennial. Unfortunately, their blood was the next thing to wash down our river when a new Sapien arrived on the scene, fair of skin and hair. A culture bound to conquest. First, it was the domestic sheep, the Bighorns died first, the mountains came tumbling down. They then came for the Beavers, my symbiotic landlord. Later, it was the cattle, monsoonal Landslide. Anglos do not know it, but a saw is ultimately a plow. They cut the ancients, and skimmed the arboreal cream for a century.

The obscene Bos Taurus stomped generations of my ancestors, streamside. Cow shit in the water. My lovely friend Elk would never do that. But can you believe it, they killed all of the Elk. Shortly after they killed the Grizzly, then the Wolf, then the Jaguar. Mass murder in the name of progress…Must I go on?

My great great Grandmother only had to worry about Blue Herons, Racoons and Gila Trout. The few of us that remain carve our living out of mudded stock tanks, battle the invasive Bull frog in our rivers, get eaten up as adolescents by crawfish, or simply dry up.

And someday my last descendant will lay pickled in a university basement with the label “Rana chiricahuensis-Chiricahua Leopard Frog” attached. That is, if they outlast us.

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