It was the colour that got my attention. A shiny reddish brown on a creek bank of greys and chalky whites.

We had just finished the fourth run of the desert standard lek count route. A count thwarted by a g*d*m*f golden eagle sitting on the rim by the largest of the five leks. As a result, grouse numbers on that lek weren't half what I expected them to be, and not one of the remaining 28 cocks was brave (or stupid) enough to actually strut. They were all bent over in their territories, doing their best to look like rocks or clumps of sage.

So, what to do? Run the route again another day, when I am definitely running out of suitable mornings and have many more leks to check? Or just assume the peak of male attendance is over, and use last week's count as the maximum for this year?

Yes, I decided not to spend another morning re-running the route. Two of the four remaining grounds had their highest counts on this Tuesday, but they are both small (23 and 11 cocks). The other two leks are larger, and were well below last week's numbers (68 vs 82). It appears the peak is over, at least for this part of the desert.

But after the route was run, I gave the heeler sisters a quick game of hide-and-seek on the drive home, picking a spot by a desert stream so I could hide in a side draw as they went racing down the road.

They found me quickly, of course. Whether by my scent or my big feet sticking out of the sage, I do not know. But it was quick.

There was actually water flowing in this part of the ephemeral stream, a rarity in recent years, so we wandered down to give the sisters a drink and check out the creek. That was when I spotted the shiny reddish-brown stone, almost hidden under two of last year's cow pies.

Another scraper. This a triangular piece, with two sharpened edges. (If you haven't figured it out yet, any artifact that isn't an arrowhead, lance point, knife, auger, needle or fishhook is called a scraper. But the different shapes of these tools makes me think that either 1) there was a lot of variation between craftsmen, or 2) they just sharpened and used whatever handy fragment that came along, or 3) different shapes were used for different jobs, or different animals.)

I would say this triangular one was good for either a rightie or a leftie, but most likely a rightie. It feels like it was made for fingers smaller than mine.

So I hoofed it back to the truck for the camera, and got a photo of the stone in situ. And the heelers and I wandered upstream a little, finding nothing more than a chip or two. But returning back to the original site, I also spotted this amongst the new green grass.

A broken arrowhead, missing the tip and the base. Again, it was the colour that got my attention, an opalescent white. But now I have to wonder how this came to be there. Was it from the same person as the scraper (they were about a meter and a half apart)? Or were they independant of each other, lost years, generations or centuries apart? Did it get broken on impact, or was the rest of it recycled into another point, and this is just the waste left over?

More unanswerable questions. But rather than being frustrating, these questions that cannot be known have tended to become satisfying. Somehow comforting.

I don't know why.