I'm maybe twenty minutes from the rendezvous point when the phone rings. Which took a while to answer, since the bracket on the dash broke last week and the phone is just kinda hanging there, suspended by the power cord.

It's my partner in today's planned task.

She's not going to make it. She's forty-some miles north of me, headed south. Or she was...

She's turning back. Because of the rain.

I'm not in sunshine either, but I can see it from here. And I can also see the huge storm front the weather people warned us about to day. Moving southeast fast.

It's possible to run these transects with one person. Just slower, and less fun. I continue on. A quick stop to see if the owls are using the old barn again,

(They were.) and I head east to the transect.

It is easy to see the difference between the ungrazed cage and the outside world, now.

But there is no time to dawdle. I quickly take my photos of the exclosure and start reading bushes. Heading on an imaginary line towards Bradley Peak, which I cannot see because of the impending storm clouds, I pick a shrub, then use the second hand on my watch to randomly select a quadrant of that shrub. Grabbing a main branch on that quadrant of the bush, I check the first ten stems I come across, and see how many have been browsed, or eaten, in the past winter.

It's not very many. The winter was light, not a lot of pronghorn migrated this far south last winter.

Without data forms, I'm recording my numbers on a folded scrap of paper in my pocket. The transect goes quickly, some of the shrubs still marked with our years-old thin aluminum tags.

The storm is quicker.

By bush #8 out of 50, the blizzard has struck. I retire to the truck, resolved to give it a half hour to blow itself out.

It doesn't.

The storm continues unabated. It's miserable out there. And, more importantly, kinda hard to see tiny, unbrowsed branches when they're covered with snow.

The storm wins.

I have one decision left: do I take the short route home, which is twenty miles of greasy, slimy dirt roads and 25 miles of newly slickened interstate shared with hundreds of semis, orrrr, head north across the marshlands to the mine road, and 50 miles of two-lane highway back to town?

Marshes are cool, in snow...

North it is.