The Marmot Tax

The high meadows have their own customs service and it wears fur. The marmots here have concluded, correctly, that tourists are a renewable resource, and the officer assigned to our stop conducted its inspection directly against the lens: whiskers, teeth, a snout the size of the foreground, while I propped myself on the grass behind it holding the biscuit that constituted my declaration.

The photograph is the marmot's entirely. I am the blurry secondary subject, cap askew, grinning at a rodent with the deference one shows armed officials. Yan says they remember cars. I believe her. This one processed us with the routine of a professional and the appetite of an amateur.

Levy paid, we were waved through by a tail. Somewhere in a burrow under that meadow is a warehouse of confiscated biscuits and, I assume, meticulous records. The steppe teaches you to respect every institution that survives winter.