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There is a restlessness about.

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Photo by Robin Boies

The first snow on Elle and Dee Mountain means deer starting to move, playing Russian Roulete on the highway with the 2500 plus vehicles that pass by each day. Snow means the most spoiled of our predominetly black cows will be trailing down from the mountains looking for the psychological comfort of a haystack.

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Photo by Robin Boies

The chilled night air is a warning. One that I heed by withdrawing the sugar water I put out for my yard warriors. I will miss going out in the evenings and placing my hands around the red feeder cups so they can sit on my fingers to feed. (I have a witness!) Our face to face encounters are over until next summer,
they must be on their way.

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Photo by Robin Boies


I

Miniature warriors circling
Hovering diving dipping
Vertical beak-to-beak ascent
Sparring in mid-flight
Fleeting dominion

Wingless hover
Horizontal duel
Momentary truce
Rudder trimmed
Landing gear tucked
Room for two


II

Hostage to crimson blossom
Life’s sweet nectar
Unleashed pleasure flickering
Fanned tail flight

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The opinions expressed in the Western Folklife Center's Deep West online journals are those of the online journal participants and not the Western Folklife Center. The Western Folklife Center does not moderate these journals and as such does not guarantee the veracity, reliability or completeness of any information provided in the journals or in any hyperlink appearing within them.

About Robin Boies

Robin Boies
Robin Boies is the product of a northern Texas cattleman and a city-bred girl from Boulder, Colorado. As a child Boies remembers Sunday's marked by church school and the weekly sermon, followed by an afternoon of Pitch or Twenty-one with red, white, and blue poker chips stacked neatly in front of her. When it came to culture it was sublime opera in the house and Hank Williams in the green Chevy pick-up truck. Boies found herself in Steptoe Valley north of Ely, Nevada, at age seventeen. For the past 28 years Boies has lived 45 miles north of Wells, Nevada, at the Vineyard Unit of Boies Ranches with her husband Steve. There they raised three children, Teema, Nathan, and Samuel. Teema enters Gonzaga University this fall to pursue a graduate degree. Nathan is back in college when not at the ranch after a service engagement in the 101st Airborne, and Samuel graduated from high school last year and has been in New Zealand since September 2005. While tending to the needs of the ranch Boise works to understand and tell the stories of contemporary ranching culture through writing and videography.
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