At one point, labouring on a fence-building project with two cowboys from Cibecue, he listens to one of the men reciting lists of place-names to himself as he strings and then tightens barbed wire between posts. When Basso asks him why he is doing so, the cowboy answers, ‘I like to. I ride that way in my mind.’ In both Lewis and Arizona, language is used not only to navigate but also to charm the land. Words act as compass; place-speech serves literally to en-chant the land – to sing it back into being, and to sing one’s being back into it.
