In the high desert of Sky Valley, New Mexico, a drought that had lasted seven years broke one night in late October. I was out on the mesa road past midnight, chasing a story about a missing boy, when I saw them: cattle, hundreds of them, streaming out of the arroyo where no cattle had grazed in decades. The rancher who still lived out there, old man Corrigan, told me they were ghosts — every head a beast that had died in the die-off of '94. But they left tracks. And their eyes, he said, were not the eyes of dead things. That night, I stood on the hood of my truck and watched them move silently through the sage, and I learned that some droughts end in ways that make you wish they hadn't.