Once, when one of my higher-ups had been out on a job, he’d run across a den of wild foxes. He spent several days watching them, counting their numbers, excited that the nearby mine hadn’t driven away all the sparse desert fauna. But he made the mistake of telling his co-workers, and the next weekend one of the other employees—a red-faced, blundering man originally from some exurb in Florida—drove his truck out to the area, tracked down the foxes, shot them all, skinned them, and took the pelts as trophies. It often seems as if there is an unbridgeable gap between the minds of those enmeshed
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