The Undiscovered Country!

Our book today is The Undiscovered Country, yet another splendid production of the late great soul of Cape Cod, John Hay. As I've written before, these end-of-summer days always remind me of the Cape for some reason, even though I've known that blessed little hook of land in all weathers and all seasons. End-of-summer in New England is the practicum of beauty under siege: heat and humidity still rule the days, but the wind that whispers the trees at night is no longer quite so lazy or aimless, and the reliefs it brings feel increasingly watchful in their mercies. In late August the days are still hot and the sky is still a burnished blue, but if you pause near the edge of a pond or listen to the bird-chatter in a hedge-row, you can hear shorter, sharper notes being sounded: a less forgiving season is approaching. Maybe that's why this stretch of days at the end of August and the beginning of September always call the shores and clapboard houses and salt marshes to mind: because the many beauties of the Cape are all so intense that they feel fleeting. You want each hazy afternoon, each foggy morning, each protracted, glorious sunset to last forever, and you know they won't. There's a quietly penetrating melancholy that suffuses every Cape Cod moment for those with the disposition to feel it.

Hay had that disposition, in abundance. All his books are rife (sometimes - in fact often - over-ripe) with it. For his entire adult life, he was a passionate observer of the Cape in all its moods and especially all its wildlife. And he was able to access an ecstatic wonder over all of it, which he conveys in his frequent Thoreauvian arias, like this one on a favorite subject, fish:

They have mastered the universe of water that covers the major part of the planet. I have met only a few of their twenty thousand species, but each of these has illuminated the place I found them in. They pout, wiggle, and dart. They hang in glassy eyes of water, or in a downstream current. We see them, in their scaly reflections of water and sunlight, shining past our capacity to see. There are silver-sided minnows sailing straight over the brilliant sands; marsh killifish making quick dashes across the bottom of salt-marsh ditches, to disappear in puffs of mud; and in the seas beyond, the mackerel with rippled patterns on their beautiful fusiform bodies, slipping and flashing through the waters.

He's self-deprecating always in his prose (less so in real life, to put it mildly), and he's immensely respectful of the personalities of all the wildlife he encounters. "Being constantly aggravated little creatures," he tells us about that homicidal minuscule speck, the shrew, "they will, I suspect, attack almost anything. I was once faced by a shrew that, as I walked by, slipped out of leaf cover to hold its ground, twittering angrily, and I was the one to withdraw."

All Hay's books are beautifully written, but it's at summer's end that I notice how often he himself seems to feel the melancholy I'm describing. His prose becomes sadder and a bit more brittle when he contemplates the turn of the season, especially this turn of the season:

Beyond the sands, the granite-gray surfaces of the waves line out, whipped by the wind, while the leaden stream of the outgoing creek reflects the last golden light. Gulls lift and dip down into its waters. While the land begins to hunker down and accommodate to the arctic, the offshore waters protect their passions, keep sending in their signs. I found a fishlike cluster of creamy eggs as I walked down the beach, a little glistening ball I could not identify, left by the tide. Life floats in to prove my ignorance, if that ever needed any proof. But out reaching is never finished. These flat lands are like broad wings, stretching toward the cold sky, beyond the grain of the immediate, worlds without end. What should I do, if there were any choice, but fly?

The Undiscovered Country was written in 1981 when the author was in the middle of a fairly frightening health scare. The worst didn't happen, and Hay went on to write half a dozen more wonderful books. But none is quite so beautifully elegiac as this one, and it's this one I nowadays take down from the shelf when bully August finally begins to weaken and September with its change of season is finally sniffing the night air. In all likelihood I won't get to the Cape this season, but Hay's books make it easy to go there at any time.

 

Gone for the Day!

Our book today is Gone for the Day, a collection of the columns Ned Smith did for the Pennsylvania Game News magazine from 1966 to 1969. As near as I can tell, the magazine included the book as a subscription gift one year and it became so popular they reprinted it several times - but still only for their subscribers. If this is true, those were lucky subscribers, and the original readers of these columns must have been luckier still, since there's nothing quite like the low-simmer enjoyable sense of possession that comes from finding a really good regular column and following it religiously (I guess the closest equivalent these days would be finding a really good blog and subscribing to it, but as with all things on the Internet, it just doesn't feel the same). The vagaries of magazine budget and space being what they are - and passion being, as always, unpredictable - you never know where you're likely to find such a column, and the ones that manage to stay very good for years at a stretch are rare. One thinks of Stephen Jay Gould's "This View of Life" column in Natural History, or Katherine Powers' A Reading Life that was lately and shamefully cut from the Boston Globe (and picked up, in a move so thick with ironies you can barely count them, by the Barnes & Noble Review). How I would have loved to be one of those readers catching Ned Smiths' "Gone for the Day" columns as they were originally appearing, always under their neat little banner (enviably double-talented, he did all his own illustrations):



Smith was a lifelong walker in woods and fields (and, thankfully for the rest of us, a "lifelong writer-downer"), tracking through wooded hills and mountains of Pennsylvania for most of his life, in all seasons and weathers, carrying a battered notebook and a camera and noting the comings and goings, the tracks and passages of the multitude of living creatures he encounters - or just misses encountering:

February 7: A rabbit that hangs out on the edge of a neighborhood woods left an easily read account of last night's activities inscribed in the snow. Near the fencerow he had bitten off a number of greenbriar vines and eaten large portions of each. The mark of where he had been sitting, and the vines bobbing as he nibbled, left an arc of gashes in the snow. The tendrils and formidable thorns had been neatly nipped off, and lay scattered about on the snow.

That quiet gift for detailed observation runs through this entire book - Gone for the Day easily accomplishes what all the best books of nature-writing do: it puts the reader right there in the woods (or swamps, or arctic wastes, or what have you) with our guide, seeing what he sees:

February 6 [the following year]: Red squirrels are natural-born clowns, and when they don't know they are being observed they are absolutely hilarious. This afternoon I watched the antics of three of them from a blind at the feeder. Where they came from, I don't know, but they exploded onto the scene like a troupe of vaudeville acrobats. It was impossible to be sure who was chasing whom as they streaked over fallen logs, up and down trees, and over the snow in blurry, intertwining circles. Occasionally they tangled, squealing and churring in real or simulated anger, then they broke apart, only to resume the dizzy chase.

(There's even a winning quality of innocence, as that last quote makes abundantly clear: as should be obvious to any less cheery observer, those squirrels weren't happily clowning around with each other right there on the doorstep of the breeding season - they were ruthlessly trying to bite each other's balls of and then rip each other's throats out)

Smith has that wonderful facility for disappearing, melting into the scenery so thoroughly that time and again he catches animals just being themselves, totally unaware that they're being watched. The animals almost always sense him eventually and then do their own disappearing acts, but before they do, we get many marvellous glimpses from the Pennsylvania woods and meadows and stream banks:

March 14 - A muskrat feeding on the roots of some unidentified weeds from the breast of our dam proved to be a surprisingly fastidious diner. Each time he dug up a root he carried it to the water three feet beneath him, where he carefully washed and ate it. Climbing back up the steep earthen breast he then dug up another and repeated the entire process. Not before he had laboriously washed and eaten half a dozen roots did he notice me sitting on the far bank observing his table manners. Without an upward glance he plunged off the bank and into the water like an overgrown frog.

And the book tries for more than such camera-glimpses - and it very often succeeds. Like most people who consciously make roaming around in nature a part of their days, Smith quickly came to appreciate and gently preach the restorative powers of spending time with animals in their world. Even after fifty years, Gone for the Day still breathes that restorative power - it's the next best thing to going out wandering yourself. It might prove a bit tough to find a copy, but I urge you to try: this is a nature book to keep and re-read for the rest of your life.

On the Wings of a Bird!

Our book today is H.R.Sass' modest 1929 hit On the Wings of a Bird, which was reprinted a handful of times back in the days before paperbacks, when almost all a book's sales were generated the old-fashioned way, through word of mouth. This book started out as one essay and grew through that demand, mainly because Sass is so poetically winning about what he calls the 'enchanted kingdoms' that all those who walk in the wild world manage to find. His are in the Carolinas, mostly, in the cypress-shaded lagoons and hot-wind beaches with their seal-shadowed sand bars, although such enchanted kingdoms can exist virtually anywhere, as we saw with dear old Nauset Marsh.  "You cannot trace upon any map the frontiers of your enchanted kingdom," he tells us. "It is remote and yet near at hand; you were far from it five seconds ago - oh, ten thousand miles away - yet now, in the twinkling of an eye, you are in its very heart." Aided by minimalist, winsome sketches by Herman Palmer, he guides us.

As Sass readily admits, this is mostly a book about birds. They certainly haunt these pages right from the start:

Sitting on the piazza on cool evenings in late September, I hear the voices of the feathered hosts that I cannot see. In hundreds and thousands and, it may be, in hundreds of thousands, they are streaming over my head, up in the black infinity between earth and stars. The whole air is full of them; now here, now there, now elsewhere, there various voices call to me out of the darkness. Some of the sounds I know well - the guttural "quok" of the black-crowned night heron, the high-pitched "skeow" of the green heron, the metallic chirp of the ricebird that travels in company with the larger wayfarers in the gloom. Others are sounds that I have never heard at any other time - that probably I shall never hear except on these autumnal nights when the far-called armes of the migrating birds are fleeing southward before the intangible, irresistible might of approaching winter.

But this is no monograph: plenty of other creatures wander in and out of these pages - deer in the woods, foxes, rabbits, and the two apex predators that were once ubiquitous all along the low-lying Carolina coastland, alligators and sharks. Alligators feature in our author's memories most fondly:

I like alligators. I like to see them and hear them; the bellowing of a big bull dragon, by the way, is one of the most impressive sounds in the American woods, an eloquent reminder of those colorful early days when a man could scarcely sleep near one of the great swamps because of the unearthly chorus of the wild beasts.

Because Sass was an avid surf-fisherman, sharks aren't quite as welcome in his recollections:

When there are sharks about, the surf-fisherman, if he has any sense, is constrained to stick to the shallows. In the easy chair at home he will laugh to scorn the tales that are told of sharks that attacked anglers, but in the surf slues, with a tall black fin showing above the foam-flecked water, he is apt to regard those tales more seriously.

And whether he's talking about menaces or marvels, Sass strikes one note entirely in common with all other good nature-writers - because he loves the places where he has wandered, because he wants them to be there for future generations, he cares most about stewardship. He cites it as the central theme of his book:

The utmost that can be hoped for is that it may help in some small measure to bring nearer the day when man shall cease to be a destroyer and shall become instead the friend and protector of his lesser kinsmen - the guardian and preserver of that marvellous life of earth and air over which, in the course of long ages, he has achieved almost absolute power. If it can give even the slightest aid to that good cause, its faults may be forgiven.

Whatever faults On the Wings of a Bird may have can certainly be forgiven - this is a gently spellbinding book, long out of print. It's doubtful Sass would have liked the many changes to his beloved Carolina coast since he put down his pen. Reading and smiling over this book, I just have to hope he'd somehow find enchantment there even so.

Ring of Bright Water!

Our book today is Gavin Maxwell's immortal 1960 nature classic, Ring of Bright Water, the story of his life in the West Highlands of Scotland in a picturesque little house he calls Camusfearna in the book - and more than just the story of that life: of course, as millions of readers have discovered to their delight over years, it's the story of the friendships Maxwell forms with first one remarkable otter, Mijdil, and then a second, Edal. So memorable is the impression the book leaves of these two remarkable animals that the returning reader is surprised to find that Mij doesn't even appear until 80 pages have passed - you remember it as his book from first to last, but Maxwell actually sets the stage for many pages before his acquires his friend in Iraq and brings him half-way around the world to the cold lakes and waterfalls of Scotland. We get many beautiful descriptions of the majestic bleakness of that part of the world - a bleakness that's ultimately impossible to capture in words, although Maxwell comes closer to doing it than any other author I've ever read. Even when he's in haste to tell an unconnected story, his descriptions are wonderful:

It was a cloudy night with a freshening wind and a big moon that swam muzzily through black rags of vapour. By eleven o'clock it was blowing strong to gale from the south, and on the windward side of the islands there was a heavy sea beginning to pile up.

But the real story here is Mij the otter, who takes immediately to domestic life and displays an abundantly energetic affection for Maxwell from the start. The reader is given scene after scene of Mij wandering the lakeside and hills, fishing and exploring, and coming back faithfully each night to the warmth of the fireside. The gentle nature of his curiosity about everything around him certainly clashes with my own face-to-muzzle experience with otters, but the passion of Maxwell's account is irresistible, and as in the best books of this kind, he gradually learns to un-learn his previous, inevitably parochial conceptions of what love is. When Mij disappears for a day, Maxwell is frantic with worry, and it moves him to self-examination (as he puts it, writers are duty-bound to a certain visceral honesty):

I knew by that time that Mij meant more to me than most human beings of my acquaintance, that I should miss his physical presence more than theirs, and I was not ashamed of it. In the penultimate analysis, perhaps, I knew that Mij trusted me more utterly than did any of my own kind, and so supplied a need that we are slow to admit.

And when Mij finally leaves the book forever (after only a year with his human friend), the sense of desolation that fills the pages before the arrival of Edal is suffocating:

I missed Mij desperately, so much that it was a year before I could bring myself to go to Camusfearna again. I mourned for my fallen sparrow; he had filled that landscape so completely, had made so much his own every yard of the ring of bright water I loved, that it seemed, after he had gone from it, hollow and insufficient; for the first time all the familiar things in which I had taken joy appeared as a stage backcloth against which no player moved.

But these quotes, though often foremost in my mind, are in a way misleading: Ring of Bright Water isn't a sad book - it has sadness in it, yes, but no reader will frown when they remember it. It's full of joy and communication and nature gloriously described, and the two pudgy, opinionated, stubby-legged creatures who star in its pages give no end of delight, which Maxwell has captured perfectly throughout. This author's career has long been a puzzle to me - it's absolutely strewn with some of the most poorly-chosen writing projects imaginable. This book is his only real masterpiece, despite the fact that he had talent enough for six or seven books this good. But at least we have this gem of an account - like Maxwell in this book, we must, I suppose, be grateful for whatever pure marvels come our way, for however long.

Fly Away Free!

Our book today is a slim little natural history title called Fly Away Free from 1981 by Joan Hewett, with some absolutely remarkable black-and-white photos by Richard Hewett. It's the story of a California veterinarian named Joel who loves to surf and who one day while out on the water finds a lone young pelican just idling there on the surface. Joel suspects something might be wrong, and his suspicions are confirmed when the bird makes no attempt to fly away from him.

Joel suspects the bird might be injured or disoriented somehow, so he brings it back to his animal hospital, names it Rusty (because his wings don't seem to work and so might be rusty), and sets in motion a quick but fascinating story of the animal world intersecting with the human world.

Rusty submits to the care Joel gives him - the feeding tube, the crate, the baths under a hose - with complete meekness. Reading the book, you can't avoid the impression - mistaken though it might well be - that Rusty knows he needs help and gratefully accepts it. Joel is certainly happy to offer it, although once Rusty starts to feel better and begins bossing around everybody at the animal hospital, the feeling is perhaps not shared equally by all. The hospital's cat, for instance, might not like being snapped at, and the hospital staff might not enjoy being squawked at (Hewett says the squawking wasn't very loud, pointing out that pelicans have very small voices).

In a few days Rusty is strong enough to go surfing with Joel, tethered to him by a leash. He clearly enjoys it as much as Joel does, and he grows very much stronger. He grows ready, as Joel knows despite not completely wanting to admit it. And eventually the day comes when they go to the beach without the tether and Joel releases Rusty into the free air. The vet stands on the beach watching while the bird flies away, and neither he nor anybody will ever know how Rusty himself thought of this weird, not entirely unenjoyable interlude in the human world.

The moral of the story? Sometimes the weird-looking bossy smelly ungainly creatures we find out in the world are only with us for a short time, regaining their strength, before they disappear back into the world again.

And sometimes they stay, perhaps because the world doesn't want them back.

The Lure of the Pond!

Our book today is Wallace Kirkland's lovely 1969 meditation The Lure of the Pond, which is sparsely but beautifully illustrated by Eugene Karlin and tells the story - in a string of twenty self-contained, poetic chapters - of Kirkland's various encounters with a pond in Wisconsin;

A narrow, winding road led up through a forest of naked trees disrobed by frost, and out upon a clearing. The land sloped gently downward to an abandoned cabin under a large poplar tree. Beyond it was a pond, winter-locked in ice. The brilliant midday sunlight of early March sparkled on a fresh fall of snow. In the distance was a wide expanse of marsh in which were whitened trunks of trees long dead. The left bank of the pond was once a cultivated field. Sumac and wild blackberry bushes now covered it. Along the right side was a tangled growth of willow and swamp maple trees.

An opening paragraph like that one instills a feeling of sweet peace in the reader - not only because the scene described is itself peaceful, but because we can hear the author's quiet authority, and it's reassuring. Kirkland was a photographer for Life magazine for 25 years, and The Lure of the Pond is suffused with visual imagery. But there's also a tempered wisdom here that comes from sitting quietly and watching the life of a pond forget you're there and resume going about its business. We've explored something of the mystery and joy of ponds before here, and Kirkland's book joins a small shelf-collection of other such titles that are the next best thing to being there.

Of course, given his job, Kirkland has been everywhere, not just to the tangled bank of his own little pond. This book is also alive with the richness of those many travels:

Another morning on the path in the abandoned field I came upon a painted turtle laying eggs. I was reminded of a night on Key Marquesas, beyond Key West, where I had seen a giant hawksbill turtle laying hers. The moon was full, the sea a sheet of yellow glass. She came in on the rising tide, her enormous head breaking the surface a few yards out from shore, and the pent-up air in her lungs was expelled in one tremendous gasp. I crouched and watched her lumber up across the white sand. The moonlight shining on her sea-encrusted shell enveloped her in a phosphorescent aura. She was like an apparition from from another world.

It's late winter here in New England, which means, in the 21st century, that high summer is only about three weeks away (the seasons of Spring and Autumn having been officially abolished during the 'strip-mine our national parks' years of George W. Bush) - the three ponds to which I make regular pilgrimages will all soon be open for business again, bustling with the uncanny microcosm of all life that ponds always present to the patient observer. Kirkland's book elegantly captures that microcosm, even if he does begrudge us his own photos. Karlin's minimalistic line-drawings are plenty compensation enough.

World of the Great White Heron!

Our book today is Marjory Bartlett Sanger's lovely, poetic 1967 classic World of the Great White Heron, which is very aptly subtitled "A Saga of the Florida Keys." The story she starts out telling, a relatively straightforward natural history of the most arresting resident of the Florida Keys, Ardea occidentalis, the great white heron, quickly broadens to a natural - and human - history of the Keys themselves, with the herons serving as a graceful, eternal counterpoint to all the tumultuous changes going on around them. The book is beautifully illustrated in black-and-white drawings by John Henry Dick, whose A Gathering of Shorebirds will get its own post here as soon as I can find my copy. Together, these two creators produce a book of a type that's rarer and rarer in these days of Wiki-harvested info and digital photography; I worry that passionate, entirely personal works of natural history like this one are slowly becoming extinct. Even David Carroll confessed a few too many times in his last book that he was feeling a bit old ...

Still, this book is here, and although it's not in print, copies can certainly be found - and oh! are they worth finding! The main joy of this book isn't necessarily its celebration of the great white heron itself (although anybody who's experienced the joyful shock of watching one leap into the air and languidly unfurl those enormous wings will be glad enough of that celebration) but of all the wildlife of the Keys - and forty years ago, just like now, there was a lot of wildlife to celebrate. These little islands stretch from Key Largo to Key West, and the biosphere of which they're a part, protected on the ocean-side by coral reefs and the tangled currents of the Sargasso Sea, wanders on south to the Marquesas and the Dry Tortugas. Tourists often comment on the crystal-clear water of the open stretches, but as Sanger accurately relates (and as can be found gorgeously described in many of the novels of Tom McGuane), the real gems of these islands are often hidden deep in the back-channels and mangrove thickets where Ardea makes its home.

The bird was named by John James Audobon when he visited the Keys in 1832 (he also referred to it as "the Angel of the Swamp"), and he also noticed the profusion of life in this part of the New World: alligators, crocodiles, egrets, deer, raccoons, turtles of all sizes, innumerable kinds of birds and noisy amphibians, sharks, busy crabs, and insistent insects. Sanger is as adept at capturing this world in words as her illustrator is at capturing it in pen-and-ink:

The world of the largest white heron on earth is the world of the crowding mangroves where the bird binds its platform nest and lays its blue-green "olivine" eggs. Now and then two or three pairs of herons will nest on the same island; less often a dozen may nest together. In its unchanneled wilderness Ardea movies in the kind of semi-isolation that has always typified this country of swamp and shoal, and made life there so unpredictable and perilous

This can be a very changeable place, a serene green paradise one day and a churning chaos the next, and its history reflects this - the Keys look idyllic, and like most places that look idyllic, their history is hip-deep in the tragic miseries humans bring with them everywhere they go:

The placid, tranquil-appearing world that Ardea surveyed this April morning had actually known a turbulent past. The dazzling light once bleached piles of human bones; the sea-green bay, banded in blue, maize, and purple, had also been banded with blood. Coral reefs at one time pierced the keel of galleons, and where the terns cry there had been human cries. Audubon's "lovely islets that border the southeast shores" were also called "The Martyrs."

The main difference in the Keys between Sanger's time and the present is the state of the coral reefs that are the protector and life-blood of the whole region. When Sanger wrote her book, they were a bursting, thriving underwater wilderness of infinite color and variety. Today, they're endangered like all reefs are, but warming currents and rising sea-levels. You can't help but wonder, reading this book, how much longer descriptions like this one will apply at all:

The reef that caused so much anguish was built by flowerlike corals. Anthozoa, or "flower animals," are living organisms resembling the sea anemones to which they are related, breathing, feeding, multiplying, and secreting a hard lime substance. It is of this substance that the reef is formed. Receiving nourishment from the current-borne plankton, the corals bud or branch out like calcium trees, and their surfaces are studded with starry patterns. In a vast variety of shapes and colors, they create forests of stone beneath the warm waters.

I spent some time nosing around the Keys many, many years ago, in a dented little sailboat with the company of five beagles (one of whom was my best friend, another of whom had been born blind, and the rest of whom could find trouble just about anywhere), and although what I should remember was the rampant heat and suffocating humidity, it's not - I recall instead the peril and profusion of wandering in a kind of paradise, the fun of wading in those clear waters with my antic dogs, even the beauty of racing for shelter from the rather respectable hurricane that struck a glancing blow while I was there. Even the light seemed different, and there are no words for how gorgeous the night-time was.

Sanger quotes the master:

William Beebe said: "Until we have found our way to some other planet the bottom of the sea will have to remain the loveliest and strangest place we can imagine." Lovely and anxious, striving and strange, it is all a part of the white heron's domain.

Lovely and strange - that does indeed sum up the Florida Keys for me - and it's not a bad description of this wonderful book, either.

The Order of Wolves!

Our book today is Richard Fiennes' wonderfully informative 1976 volume The Order of Wolves, a kind of follow-up to his equally-authoritative 1968 book The Natural History of Dogs, which I read with keen interest while surrounded by sleeping dogs. Even though I currently only have two dogs, it's still easy to feel surrounded when one of them is an, um, rubenesque basset hound, and so it was that I read The Order of Wolves also surrounded by sleeping dogs.

Fiennes covers every aspect of wolves in the world, from the emergence of their most distant ancestor the creodonts, somewhere around 60 million years ago (the creodonts also gave rise to a whole slew of other furry critters, from raccoons and bears to ... echh ... cats) to their establishment in roughly the form we know them today, around 30 million years ago, from their hunting methods to the methods used to hunt them, from their interactions with other members of their species (Fiennes stops short of calling this a culture, but then, most people do) to the vast literature of their interaction with mankind. He admits that few other animals have such a rich history of false impressions (when it comes to humans) than the wolf, and his book calmly and methodically sets out to correct that.

The task necessarily requires a certain amount of big-picture thinking, and Fiennes tries to make this as painless as possible:

At the border of any habitat favourable to a particular life form, there is always a 'tension zone' where different habitats merge. These form the outer limits, where the 'ecotypes' change, but there is inevitably some overlap where the species from the one habitat compete with those from the other... In such areas, species tend to change their ways of life to compete with the demands of the shifting habitat boundaries. Wolves are so resilient, and can survive on such a wide variety of foods, that when their way of life has been threatened they adapt themselves to altered conditions with an unusual degree of success. At the end of the Ice Age wolves survived in forested and mountainous areas in the face of persecution by man. The forests replaced the tundra with such great rapidity - a matter of a few hundred years - that no other large predator emerged to challenge his dominance.

The slight but appreciable tone of advocacy you might detect in that passage runs through the whole of this book. In Fiennes view, wolves have always been far more sinned against than sinning when it comes to their dealings with man. This may not seem so revelatory a stance in 2011, but forty years ago Barry Lopez's Of Wolves and Men and Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf had barely begun the work of changing the public's mind. Fiction is always stronger, and well into the 1980s the wolf was still being portrayed in novels as a harbinger of destruction. If even ten percent of the millions of people who read Anne Rice's rip-snorting The Vampire Lestat (in which young, headstrong, and still-living Lestat fights off a ravening wolf-pack in one of the book's arresting opening scenes), you can see the size of the job conservationists had in front of them.

At many points throughout his book, Fiennes takes pains to point out that the wolf is not what its press releases would have wary hikers believe:

What we have learned for certain is what the wolf is not: he is not a voracious, ravening predator, who roams the plains and snowscapes in great packs, licking blood-stained lips, tearing down every living thing he can get hold of, and devouring innocent travellers.

Quite coincidentally, Fiennes' book is yet another of those oversized heavily illustrated hardcovers I seem to be mentioning quite often so far this year. There are fascinating black-and-white and color photos on every page - shots of wolves moving through the snowy forests and tundra that are their new favorite hunting-grounds, shots of wolves playing (something they crucially do not only in puppyhood but all through their lives - I've seen adult wolves in the wild play dog-stupid games for an hour at a stretch), and shots of all the wide array of facial and body posture expressions that underscore the main characteristic wolves share in common with humans: they are inveterate and consummate communicators with each other - it's one of the key secrets of their success as a species, and it couldn't be achieved without considerable intelligence:

The brain of the wolf is small by human standards, but nevertheless, if it is compared to the brains of herbivorous animals, it will be seen that the cerebral hemispheres are prolonged at the back so as to cover most of the cerebellum. Wolves are undoubtedly extremely intelligent, and this is probably correlated with the large cerebrum.

The Order of Wolves tries its best to take us inside the world of its subject - not an easy thing to do when that subject orients itself to the world utilizing enormously different primary senses from those of humans. We are so familiar with the fact of these animals' existence that we tend to forget the gap between their senses and our own (the same thing is true in spades about dogs, the full range of whose senses would flat-out astonish even most of the humans who live with them every day). Wolves share with dogs a millennia-old propensity to encourage that forgetting - they require comparatively very little conditioning to become entirely friendly with humans, and that friendliness is always based on accommodation. No cat has ever accommodated a human owner in the history of the world, so it's easier for cats to retain an aura of the mysterious. Dogs - and wolves - are every bit as strange and different from the humans who for good or ill define their existence, but since they're happy to fawn and goof around, the strangeness isn't stressed.

Fiennes revels in it; to him, the magnificent other-ness of wolves is their quintessential charm. Even when he's describing the mechanics of their hunting techniques, he's an obviously avid fan:

Prey animals are followed against the wind, not because the scent carries better but because they are heard better. This may, at first, surprise us from our knowledge of our own hunting dogs, one group of which hunts by sight (in the greyhound group), the other hunting by scent like foxhounds. Yet, fancy a dog lying by the fireside apparently asleep. Suddenly he stirs and cocks his ears. The family has head nothing, but the faithful dog has heard the sounds of his master's car. More, he has distinguished that one care from all the other traffic on the road. So with wolves ...

Despite passages like this one, the ultimate message you take from The Order of Wolves is how different they are from their dog cousins. These are the dogs who didn't come in from the cold, who refused to be changed by human fire and will. Fiennes knows his subject backwards and forwards, and he's too much the scientist to indulge in more than the occasional touch of poetic insight. But nevertheless, he clearly shares the same opinion that so many wolf-experts can't help but have: that in trading their wildness for security, does somehow debased their common heritage with wolves.

No matter where you stand on such an opinion, it seems pretty clear that some are more debased than others ...

The World of the Porcupine!

Our book today is from 1966 – it’s David Costello’s The World of the Porcupine, part of Lippincott’s great old line of “Living World Books” covering nearly a dozen iconic and intriguing North American animals (should you be trolling online, Leonard Lee Rue’s volumes on the beaver and raccoon are particularly good as well, as is The World of the Great Horned Owl by Ronald Austing and John Holt). The subject of this particular volume, Erethizon dorsatum, had been an object of study for Costello for many years before he wrote his book – and object of study and sympathy.

Those of you who’ve never encountered a porcupine in the wild or in person might wonder why this critter would need a writer’s sympathy. After all, the porcupine is not a skunk (to the best of my knowledge, there is not “Living World Book” on the poor misunderstood skunk) – its quills might make it a figure of some concern to owners of over-curious dogs or cattle (using pliers to pluck thirty quills out of a howling beagle’s nose is not, trust me, a pleasant experience), but that concern is never the reflexive disgust many urban Americans feel for, say, the skunk or the bat. And porcupines aren’t endangered or especially popular in the black market meat trade. So why the need for sympathy?

Costello clearly feels it, just as clearly as he feels affection for his prickly charges. His descriptions throughout the book are delightfully personal and immediate, as when he discusses a fact about porcupines well known to anybody who’s ever been around them – the fact that they never shut up:

At times, even its voice leads to its undoing. Like a mumbling old man it sometimes announces its presence around camps at night and in the woods during the mating season. The porcupine does have a voice, and it has many variations and meanings. I have heard them murmuring beyond the shadow of my campfire from Yellowstone National Park south to Arizona and west to Oregon. Some of their sounds have been almost inaudible grunts. Others have been a pitiful whining, which by no means meant that the animal was in distress.

I have never heard a porcupine give the coo-coo-coo sound or the weak high yipping bark that others have described. But I have cuddled their babies in my hands and heard them murmur and grunt like an overfed puppy dog.

(That bit about cuddling is not exaggeration: I once knew someone in the Midwest who had, in addition to three house dogs, a 20-pound porcupine as a pet. The sedate creature would waddle from room to room, mumbling like it had lost its car keys, matter-of-factly hauling itself up onto its owner’s lap for a nap – in every way an adorable, completely adapted house pet)(I of course spent much more of my time with the aforementioned dogs – for what it’s worth, once they actually started talking to me instead of slurping my face, they had only one unanimous topic in mind: would I please, please help them to kill and eat that porcupine?)

So again one might wonder: why the need for sympathy? Why the special pleading tone throughout Costello’s book?

The reason stems from another well-known quality of the American porcupine (the larger and more aggressive African variety is an entirely different kettle of fish), a quality Costello is at some pains to declare a myth. He himself uses delightfully euphemistic phrases like “experts in the art of relaxation,” but his book is too accurate to avoid the imputations that legions of hunters, trappers, gamesmen, and amateur observers have put upon this species. It makes Costello defensive:

In spite of the porcupine’s quills and its deliberate actions, it is not the animal moron so often described in the hunting magazines and forestry literature. In fact, it is a rather sensitive creature which responds to patience, kindness, and firmness when handled by people.

Costello points out that captive porcupines have been observed solving intricate lock-and-key puzzles as fast or faster than cats or monkeys solved the same puzzles. He talks at length about their extensive vocal repertoire. He testifies to the agile wits of the creatures he’s owned himself. But time and again in his accounts, other people – people who don’t know each other, people with no reason to lie, will make nearly identical-sounding comments that almost always feature phrases like “dull, witless, and generally unaware of its surroundings …”

The World of the Porcupine will certainly have you rooting for these lovable butterballs who just happen to be covered in 30,000 razor-sharp and easily-detachable quills. You may even end up believing Costello about their misunderestimated cognitive abilities. Me, I’m not convinced. I observed that porcupine in the Midwest in close proximity with three dogs for several days, and I have to say: they came off looking like a trio of Rhodes scholars by comparison. I’m the biggest fan of Canis familiaris there is, but even I have to admit: any animal that can make three dopey farm-hounds look smart probably deserves its reputation for being the dimmest bulb in the chandelier.

Still, should you encounter it (or any of its shelf-mates) at a dusty flea market some day, don’t miss the book. It’s great fun, regardless of contested intelligence quotients.

The Grizzly Bear!

Our book today is Thomas McNamee's 1982 natural history masterpiece, The Grizzly Bear, the best, most poetic, most memorable book ever written about one of the world's most famous oversized Pleistocene holdovers. This is higher praise than it sounds, since the grizzly bear has inspired quite a few really good pieces of writing in the last hundred and fifty years. These animals have been hunted mercilessly, trapped, tormented, eradicated from over 90 percent of their old North American ranges, but they've also always held a particular fascination for human beings, and the reason is twofold. First and most obvious, grizzlies are spectacularly dangerous animals - the true size and heft of an adult male has to be seen up in person to be believed, and although the females are smaller, their legendary ferocity in defense of their cubs has been the well-known (and in once case, even, in the last artistic activity of the man's life, well-photographed) cause of many bear attacks. And second, grizzlies are oddly, very noticeably like human beings in many ways. As McNamee points out in his book, these bears are highly individualistic - they do things their own way, figure out problems with disarming speed, and are seldom too busy to stop and amuse themselves once in a while.

If you happen to do any back-country hiking in norther and western Canada, it's probably the first of these two things that'll be on your mind. It's a land-equivalent to the experience of swimming in the ocean with the possibility of sharks: there's something incredibly unnerving about knowing there's a larger-than-negligible chance you could run into a smart, irritable animal powerful enough to kill or maim you without even really trying. If you're hiking with a group of true and valiant dogs (basset hounds need not apply), you probably don't have to worry about the killing or maiming (even a full-grown grizzly is unlikely to attack a well-coordinated dog pack), but if you're without such company (McNamee has a hilarious, withering section about a whining young hiking couple coming witlessly close to encountering some bears) and you meet a bear in the wild, you're about as helpless as you can be. It can put a damper on even the prettiest walk.

McNamee knows his animal well. His book follows a fictional, slightly idealized trio of bears - a mother and her two cubs - for a year of seasons and problems and challenges. By taking his readers this way through the cubs' experience of learning how to be a bear (including "the three fundamental rules of grizzly bear cubhood: follow mother, obey mother, have, within those constraints, as good a time as possible"), he's hit on the perfect means to teach his readers the same things. The best parts of his book are the many places where he shows us just how much there is to learn:

A well-educated and experienced grizzly bear's knowledge of his home range is astoundingly comprehensive and precise. Our mother bear remembers not only where she found good things to eat last year but also where, six years ago, in a summer of drought, a low moist spot in an otherwise sere expanse of sun-parched timothy still held a pocket of lush bluegrass.She remembers which slopes and ridgetops are the first to be blown free of snow in spring. She remembers, even before their aerial parts appear, where the richest starchy roots and tubers may be dug. She knows the buried whereabouts of pocket gopher populations. She remember where, each fall, the squirrels have harvested and hidden their hoards of pine nuts. She knows the locations of all the avalanche chutes in her range, where the frequent snowslides have limited the vegetation to that which can withstand all that cascading snow - the grasses, supple-stemmed shrubs, and forbs (soft-stemmed plants that die down to the ground in winter, most of which are familiar as wildflowers) - and she remembers which of those avalanche chutes, facing south, are first to catch the sun and therefore first to green up. Even now, as they learn to grasp the blades of sedge in their back molars and roll their heads to snap it off, the cubs are storing up essential memories.

And that mention of squirrel pine nut hoards comes back later to demonstrate another of McNamee's strengths - his droll sense of humor. You very much want that in a natural history writer, but you don't often get it:

the bear is superbly adept at gobbling them [the hoards] up: she smashes the cones with her teeth or paws, spreads the debris out on the ground, and delicately licks up only the nuts. The few pine cone scales that find their way in with the nuts, she spits out the side of her mouth. With singularly ursine fair-mindedness, she will often also smash and eat the squirrels themselves.

I can't recommend coming anywhere near a wild grizzly (even the dog-company option runs the unfortunate risk of costing you a dog or two), but I recommend The Grizzly Bear whole-heartedly. It should be on every bookshelf of truly great works of natural history.

Following the Water

Our book today is Following the Water by David Carroll, the latest of his thin, beautiful meditations on life and nature ... and turtles.

I've praised Carroll's work here before, and Following the Water is another miniaturist masterpiece. Carroll's work-approach hasn't changed in the last thirty years: put on some waders, fill a camera, pack a sturdy journal, and go out into the streams and wetlands where the turtles are.

He encounters all kinds of creatures, of course, not just turtles (this latest book has a mesmerizing little encounter with a deer, for instance - just two living creatures accidentally happening upon each other in the landscape, regarding each other with neither fear nor violence), and he mostly does this by slipping out of frenzied human time and into the more fluid, less restrictive time of the natural world. Following the Water is full of descriptions of what that shift feels like, and the good things it can do for your soul (I know that state intimately, having spent a great deal of time in it thanks to a lifelong close association with dogs - but far too few people I know in today's harried society seem ever to have felt it).



Not that Carroll is always meandering in his latest book - since he spends a great deal of time out of doors, he can describe with perfect accuracy one inevitable hazard, sudden rain:

Running, that is, hurrying in my turtlelike imitation of running,up the last fifty yards of the gentle incline of the old logging road, I just beat a heavy downpour to my car. My history of turtle-nesting time is marked by dodging thunderstorms, twice being overtaken by swift and violent ones, and being pinned to the earth by them. I had heard this one coming for a few minutes, that roar like a sudden wind, an almost trainlike sound in the trees, though all around me was breathlessly still. Though not far off, the sound came from the south, and I thought the east-west drift of the rain would have it pass by me. But then, seeing the near landscape go silver with heavy rain, I made my move just in time.

This is a sadder book than Carroll's previous ones - the wild places he so loves are, after all, extremely delicate ecosystems, and mankind is always encroaching. Time and again, Carroll hits a note of impending doom:

I have long witnessed the invasion that takes the heart from the landscape, and it has taken much of the heart from me. Increasingly in my later years of following the water, following the turtles, I have had to turn away. Sometimes I stay away for an extended time, and there are places to which I cannot return at all.

Luckily for all of us, no matter how clearly he sees this darkening future, his heart is too much a part of those delicate wild places to abandon them, or to abandon the gorgeous chronicle he's built of them over the decades. "But where wildness lingers" he writes "and turtles hold within it, that original searching, that early unquestioned need to be there, draws me back."

I'm sure I'm not alone in hoping he keeps getting drawn back. These books are among the finest and most sensitively intelligent examples of natural history-writing currently being written in English. If his beloved turtles can hold on long enough to give Carroll fuel for a few more books, maybe those books themselves will help to make the doom a little less looming. Certainly few animals have ever had such a perfect champion.