The moon was high, and the sky dark when I left home.

To be expected when you're supposed to be 70 miles away by sunrise.

By the time the moon set,

I was wending my way through the construction in the gas patch.

Headed to three strutting grounds on the other side of the gas field.

Well, actually, they're strutting grounds between gas fields. At the edge of one, and the beginning opf another. Sort of an interstitial remnant of sagebrush, grouse, elk and feral horses between two expanses of roads, tanks and wellheads.

IU caught the first lek of 14 grouse strutting away under the pink clouds of dawn.

After my three counts

I headed into the sage, away from the bladed roads of the gas field, for lek number two.

Empty.

I don't know why. But then I turned on further north, through the rocky badlands,

to lek number three.

Here I found 15 male grouse strutting away, ignoring the rain clouds and drizzle rolling in from the northwest.

But their enthusiasm waned as the rain increased. Time to go.

This is a land of clay soils. Not a good place to be when it rains. I race three miles west, and I'm in the gas field again. Headed south, away from the storm front, to the safety of the interstate.

Twenty miles of interstate later, I'm turning off the safe asphalt back into the clay roads of another, large gas field. Passing a rare sheep herder and his flock, preparing to pass under the interstate and begin their 40+mile trek to summer range in the high mountains.

Me, I'm headed back north into his desert winter range, racing the storm.

Passing his pony, trailing itself after the herder and flock.