Even in the dead of night it smells green beside the silt pond at Rio Grande Village. Well, _dusty_ green perhaps, but redolent with reeds and shrubs, trees and grass, with the very jungle breath of the floodplain. On the other side of the river a lone cock crows and close at hand there’s a rustling of leaves, a crackling of reeds, the lap-lap of some animal drinking. Leopard frogs croak on in unconcerned bass and baritone burps, sounding like someone’s stomach talking. But all at once something has a frog for dinner and the unwilling meal keeps pumping out shrieks, faster and faster and louder and shriller, to the last breath. Then silence. The frog chorus grumbles on. In the morning you find the flat-footed tracks, long-fingered as a human hand, of that nocturnal hunter. The raccoon is an omnivore, an opportunist with a taste for whatever it can find: amphibians, shellfish, mesquite beans, acorns, cactus fruits, rodents, garbage. The little masked bandit can in fact make himself a campground pest. His dependence on water keeps him a prisoner of the floodplain, but the river, the springs, the sloughs, and the ponds provide abundance in a narrow green world unrolled like a ribbon across the desert. Sometimes this greenbelt, as it is called, is no wider than a bush; in places it may measure three-quarters of a kilometer (half a mile). And it keeps changing, widening with floods, narrowing in droughts, altering course with the river itself. Just such a change of channels apparently created the bench of bottomland where Rio Grande Village lies today. People have been camping here for thousands of years, as shown by the many deep mortar holes where meal was ground in the limestone ledges near the pumping station. Certainly the place had much to recommend it: wood and water, abundant game, rich soils, an agreeable winter climate, and beautiful views of river and mountains. After the white man came to stay in the early 1900s most of the native flora changed. Farmers cleared the bottomland to plant cotton and grains, cut down the lanceleaf cottonwoods for roofbeams, dredged ponds and ditches, and enclosed springs. Nowadays, the plants you see are often exotics brought in from outside to create shade and lawns. Such are the eastern cottonwoods with their heart-shaped leaves, the evergreen live oaks and smooth sycamores, the sweet-smelling honey locust and eucalyptus trees, and that fine green carpet of Bermuda grass. Like the farmers’ field crops, these interlopers cannot flourish without irrigation and sometimes even that is not enough. Dozens of eastern cottonwoods have died in recent years.