Maybe it was the colour of the sky today or the angle of the light or something like that, but I bought to mind a back-road - nowhere I could name - someplace south west of Winslow in Arizona. The sun cut in sharp through the glass screen, magnifying heat despite the driver’s window being hard down and a breeze tugging at my sleeve as it lay along the sill. I squinted ahead for a thirty-mile stretch of slick two-lane blacktop, far-off starburst reflections bouncing back off some vehicle like a plainsman’s signal mirror.

Presently I could make out the outline of a bus, moving at half my speed. In ten minutes I had pulled up close enough to make out the two red stoplights and black warning message of a yellow school bus. I eased my foot off the gas and tucked in behind, half-a-mile distant. Through the rear window strung out along the back seat, a row of heads, not turning, but looking forward. hair black and shiny clean in the sunshine.

I followed for ten minutes or so, content to let time drift to a standstill on the blazing flat; five buzzards traced wide circles above, when the lights on the bus began to flash. Halting centre lane, the stop sign swung down, commanding me to do the same. I switched my foot to the brake and the tyres left diamond tracks on the red earth of the soft verge. For a moment, all was stillness. Then a trio of miniature twisters raced across the tarmac and whirled through the dusty mesquite like a gang of malevolent spirits bent on mischief.

At last, appearing from around the front of the bus came three children; two brothers and an elder sister. They stood for a while; adjusting back-packs, fixing trailing laces, making sign and waving farewells to those still aboard. Not until the bus pulled away did they begin to walk; walk unhurried along a tyre-rutted track leading to a loose collection of low buildings up a whisper of a slope that passed for a hill out there in the desert wilderness. At first I hadn’t seen the ranch homestead and would have missed it altogether if I hadn’t been minding their progress.

Three little native American kids going home on a slow daydream afternoon, their lives and future as distanced from my own as the miles from that place to my own front door.