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MIDNIGHT AT THE OASIS. On a ridgeline that looms above the scratch pad of gravel and sand where I am trying, without success, to sleep, the sentinels stand motionless, dozens of them, backlit by a fiery moon.

The giants on the hill are saguaro (sah-WAH-row) cacti, mocking the men they so strongly resemble, yet twice as long-lived, eight times as tall, never bending to life's fickle winds.

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This is the Sonoran Desert, northeast of Tucson, Arizona — saguaros on the hillside, a traveller in thrall, the dry heat rising through a crystal sky to warm the ice-white stars.

It has been a long, long day. I began in a midtown Toronto apartment, flew five hours to Phoenix, drove two hours to a trailhead in the Coronado National Forest, climbed 300 vertical metres on a rock-strewn mountain path in the molten desert afternoon, then dropped into this waterless lake bed filled with prickly pear and brittle, yellow grass.

The landscape of saguaro and sand that enfolds me tonight is unlike any other on the continent, unique and unmistakable. To see these spiky green Goliaths — these natural desert skyscrapers — for the first or even the tenth time, is breathtaking. To lie beneath them in neon moonlight is a dream.

The air is perfume, the silence profound. Except for one wisecracking wilderness guide named Tommy Di Maggio, two enormous hairy dogs and five long-horned, long-faced Alpine pack goats with Ho Chi Minh goatees, I am utterly alone.

The goats are our Sherpas, and the dogs are protecting the goats.

"From what?" I ask Di Maggio, who is a licensed goatpacker, a gourmet chef, a raconteur and a name-dropper from Tucson, via Colorado, Texas, Wyoming and Greenwich Village.

"Mountain lions," he replies. "But, really, there's nothing to worry about."

On that note, I try to fall asleep, wrapped in a quilted blue sleeping bag, writhing on a Therm-a-Rest air mattress that is filled with anything but air.

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Up on the hill, the saguaros seem to shrug their shoulders and say, "Hey, it wasn't us!"

THE PRICKLY LOOKOUTS on the ridge above my campsite were already giants when Arizona became a state on Valentine's Day in 1912. The oldest of them sprouted when this territory was still part of the Spanish empire. They endure the Sonoran inferno for more than two centuries, and they don't even begin to put out an arm or two — to store the water that enables them to survive long periods of drought — until at least the age of 50.

They can rise to the height of a five-storey building and send a dozen limbs reaching for the stars. Their roots are rather shallow; their fruit, it is said, is divine. They require the services of long-nosed, long-tongued bats to spread their pollen and of desert shrubs to shade their early growth. They bloom — always beginning on their southeast nodule — in white satin brilliance in May and June, even in the driest, leanest years.

Di Maggio, who is the son of a proud line of New York City freight haulers, wise guys and bookmakers (but not Yankee outfielders; the great Joltin' Joe was unrelated), has been leading tourists into this verdant Velcro wilderness for more than a decade. Most of these "Dances With Goats" excursions last for two or three days and include full-course meals prepared on a camp stove and cocktails that, after several hours on goat-back, have definitely been shaken, not stirred.

Our supper tonight begins with crackers and goat cheese that can't possibly be fresh-squeezed, since the five beasts with us are all neutered males. Then come Italian sausage and peppers, a nice salad and too many cookies for dessert.

My guide fills the evening with tales of his years as a restaurateur in Aspen, where he cooked for such glitterati as Steve Martin, John Belushi, Hunter S. Thompson and the Eagles, back in the sky-high seventies.

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When that string ran out, he found himself on a fishing trip in Wyoming, where he chanced upon a how-to book called The Pack Goat by a fellow named John Mionczynski, and was instantly smitten.

Mionczynski's motto was: "Too many people. Not enough goats."

Now that's Di Maggio's credo too. Sometimes, he hauls as many as 10 of the animals in his long, white trailer, under a permit from the USDA Forest Service, which doesn't seem to be unduly troubled by their munching on the mesquite trees or their deposits of hundreds of little brown pellets along the stony trail.

The goats do not eat the hard, glossy outer shell of the saguaro cactus; nothing could, and nothing does. But the saguaro's juicy red fruit has nourished the Tohono O'odham people for centuries, and woodpeckers, owls, lizards and wrens nest in cavities chiselled from the trunks and stalks.

Di Maggio often goatpacks groups of children out here to meander among the saguaros. On those hikes, he enjoys stooping down to a fresh pile of goat pellets, then holding up a handful of chocolate-covered raisins that he's been hiding in his pocket and popping them into his mouth.

"They're delicious, kids!" he announces, which tells you a lot about the kind of desert companion Tommy Di Maggio is.

It would be rather witty of me to say that I've been to the desert on a goat with no name. But, in fact, the shaggy stevedores Di Maggio has brought with him tonight are called Ranger, Sandy, Jubilee, Ringo and Cheis, which rhymes with "fleece." This is said to be the correct name of the famous Cochise, the 19th-century Chiricahua Apache warrior whose murderous depredations (or gallant resistance, depending on who is writing the history) took place just a few leagues from here.

As we settle back into our sleeping bags for what should be a peaceable night, Di Maggio tells me that most of his clients are female and that they come to the desert not for the nonpareil landscape or the excellent dinners or the incendiary moonlight or the infinite stars but just to be with the dogs and the goats.

"It's all about the animal interaction," he says.

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"HOW GREAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES of solitude!" wrote American traveller Estwick Evans in 1818. (He had just walked from New Hampshire to Michigan in the dead of winter dressed in buffalo skins.) "There is something in the very name of wilderness, which charms the ear and soothes the spirit of man."

Now it is one o'clock in the morning, and I am straining to discern whether the trilling in the wilderness behind me is a wren or a rattlesnake.

Whatever it is, the goats are provoked into a mad stampede that takes them directly over my sleeping bag, followed by the mammoth hounds, one of which (I think it is Jim, the larger of the sibling beasts) throws a Bobby Baun hip check that leaves me even flatter than I was before.

"Baaaa!" I bellow, bleating for a little relief.

"That's sheep talk," Di Maggio huffs from his adjoining patch of dirt, as the thundering herd comes around for another pass. "Try making the ‘go away goat' sound instead. Like this." And he produces a noise that is something on the order of "pfft pfft pfft pfft."

"Pfft pfft pfft pfft," I sputter. All five goats stand a few paces away, staring at me, then urinate like Kakabeka Falls. This droppeth like the gentle rain from heaven, picks up some grit on the ricochet and bounces into my hair.

I turn to the goat whisperer.

"I'll tie your ass up all night long!" he threatens his hoofed workers. Hearing this, they paw the ground and fold like beach chairs.

"With goats, you gotta be firm," he explains.

Time moves on, the moon arches across the sky, and the saguaros grow another millionth of a millimetre. I lie awake and listen to the goats digesting their dinner, Di Maggio snoring and the dogs barking at passing airplanes.

Finally, at four o'clock, just as the horizon is beginning to glow with the first rumours of another desert day, I drift away. The air is wonderfully crisp, the sleeping bag is warm, and the goats are finally asleep. It has been a memorable soiree.

When I awaken, for good, at twenty past five, Jubilee is eating my backpack.

Allen Abel is a writer and broadcaster based in Toronto.

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