We had walked about three hundred yards from the trucks when I heard, “Lexi’s on point!” My breath formed a small cloud as I exhaled. The temperature that morning was a brisk twenty-eight degrees. I could not believe that I was in Arizona hunting desert quail. Funny thing is that it didn’t look like we were in the desert, per se. The elevation was much higher than I’d expected and the scenery was not very desert-like, or at least not as I’d imagined it would be. That thought quickly faded. I was making my way through, under, and around all kinds of strange cactus plants in various shades of green that I had never seen before. Cacti in the mountains? Each one had a different sort of sharpness about them. I quickly learned that it was unavoidable to somehow encounter something that would cut, poke, stick, scrape, slice, and/or embed itself into me.

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