While hiking in the desert this past weekend, a small hitch hiker  attached itself to my friend's backpack and wasn't discovered until we were in the car and on our way back to town. He was quite friendly, and would swivel his head from side to side, to look at each of us with great curiosity. I was struck by the realization that there was indeed a kind of intelligence in those eyes. After snapping a few images like this one for posterity, we gave our hitch hiker a lift back into a desert area, and placed him in a palo verde tree where he would blend in perfectly with the color of the tree...and bade him Godspeed.