Nature Writing

[Sancho]

Maggots get a bad rap. I mean, what would we do without them? They are necessary little critters.

Birders seem to lean a tad OCD, eh? But in a good way. I’m going to look for that movie, Tailor.

Speaking of birds, here’s an artful couple of sentences from the the book I’m presently reading (Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury) Jim and Will are two adventurous boys out on a lark in the middle of the night. They are sneaking over to spy on a traveling carnival.

Jim skimmed like a dark owl after a mouse. Will loped like a weaponless hunter after the owl. They sailed their shadows over October lawns.

It’s a simple but effective simile that gets at both boy’s personalities well and describes the action perfectly.

IMHO owls have got to be some of the coolest creatures on the planet. And we’ve got a bunch of them here in Western Washington, from the Great Gray Owl with its huge noggin and 5 foot wingspan to the Saw Whet Owl that’ll fit in a tea cup. The other night around dusk I heard a couple of Barred Owls calling back and forth to each other. (Hoo-Hoo-HaHoo, Hoo-Hoo-HaHooo.) They have a distinctive Hoot; they’re known as the “Who-cooks-for-you Owl. (Who cooks for you, Who cooks the food.) Anyway I hear these two hooting back and forth and I call the wife out to listen. She digs owls too. So we’re standing there, listening to them, when one of them swoops down our driveway and perches about ten feet above us on the limb of a fir tree. And then gives us a stare-down for about a minute. Freaking awesome. We couldn’t stop talking about it all night. The wife even had to call her mother to tell her about it.

[Danik 2016]

Now that's a cute story, Sancho. The owl probably wanted to make you feel that you were intruding on owl territory.

[Sancho]

Hah. Probably so, Danik, or he was just curious, but not at all threatened by us. When he launched off the tree limb he flew through a very dense forest of fir and cedar trees, also impressive. I mean there’s no straight path through the trees. He was pitching and yawing and banking through the forest with incredible speed and precision. (I say “he”, but I don’t know. Might have been a lady owl.) meanwhile our cat was keeping a low profile.

[bounty]

I just finished a river runs through it by Norman maclean, and thought the ending was worth sharing here:



"then he asked 'after you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? only then will you understand what happened and why. it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'

"now, nearly all those I love and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them...

"in the arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the big blackfoot river and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

"eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. the river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. on some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

"I am haunted by waters."

[Sancho]

Nice.

I read his book about The Mann Gulch Fire, which was a fast-moving fire near Helena, Montana back in the 40s: Young Men And Fire. It was a bad (deadly) fire but a good read. Along those same lines, last year I read The Big Burn by Timothy Egan, which is about a huge fire in the northwest in 1910. I can also recommend this book.

[Danik 2016]

I just finished a river runs through it by Norman maclean, and thought the ending was worth sharing here:



"then he asked 'after you have finished your true stories sometime, why don't you make up a story and the people to go with it? only then will you understand what happened and why. it is those we live with and love and should know who elude us.'

"now, nearly all those I love and did not understand when I was young are dead, but I still reach out to them...

"in the arctic half-light of the canyon, all existence fades to a being with my soul and memories and the sounds of the big blackfoot river and a four-count rhythm and the hope that a fish will rise.

"eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. the river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. on some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.

"I am haunted by waters."

Don't know the author but what a beautiful poetical ending, bounty!

[bounty]

i have two editions of the book, which is actually pretty short, and each edition has a few different subsequent short stories that make up the rest of the book. mayyyyyyybe i'll read some more...

[Sancho]

Here’s one from Ridgeline by Michael Punke. Crazy Horse, one of the main characters and also a real historical figure, has been tracking a small herd of buffalo in the Powder River Valley. He watches wolves working together to separate young or weak buffalo from the herd and then he notices a fox close by:

Suddenly Crazy Horse saw the fox’s quarry. Fifty feet from the fox, a female running bird ran into open ground. Her coloring was unmistakable, streaks of rusty brown like war paint on a white body, and she propelled herself with sporadic, furious bursts on long, skinny legs. Crazy Horse knew that the running bird nested on the ground, and he suspected that the fox would prefer the contents of the nest—it must be nearby—to a bird that might take flight at any moment.

Then he noticed that the bird held one wing in an unnatural position, dragging it clumsily behind her as she ran. The fox seemed to realize the opportunity. It ducked low and began to pursue, hugging the ground and moving serpentine through the brush.

For a distance of almost a hundred yards the running bird attempted to flee, dragging her broken wing as she scurried through the brush, the fox closer and closer until it was only a few yards away, closing in for the kill—when abruptly the bird took flight.

The fox actually took a step back as if startled, resting on its haunches as it watched the running bird fly away. Crazy Horse tracked the bird as it flew a wide circle, ultimately returning almost exactly to her starting point, no doubt nearby to where her nest lay.

Far away now, the fox took a look around and then set off in a new direction, leaving the running bird and her nest behind.

Crazy Horse smiled.

Have you guys ever seen a bird feign injury? Also I don’t want to ruin the story but I think Crazy Horse is having an epiphany about how he should fight the army.

[Danik 2016]

Wonderfull!

[bounty]

i have never seen that, but I have heard of it before.

[Sancho]

Okay one more from Demon Copperhead then I’ll move on. Towards the end of the book Demon has hiked up a trail to spot where a number of significant events happened. He’s in a reflective mood and his senses seem to be heightened. In his words:

I sat and watched little jenny wrens hopping along the water’s edge pecking up bugs, ticking their heads side to side like wind-up toys. I heard a tom turkey up in the woods doing that bad-boy gobble thing the hens cannot resist. I saw a hoot owl. It was hiding, all the same colors as tree bark, but outed by a mob of loud crows that had their grudge against it. Probably something to do with eating their babies.

[Danik 2016]

Nature writing to be sure. A predatory world, probably not so different from the human one.

[Sancho]

Exactly, Danik. I think that’s the point. Life can be brutal for the young in nature as well as in an enlightened society.

[Danik 2016]

I can only agree, with small children being shot by mistake.

[Sancho]

This is from Black Cherry Blues, by John Lee Burke. I thought this was an artful paragraph. It could’ve gone in the sports thread, but I already put one there today, so I’m putting it here. Dave is fly fishing for rainbows in a cold Montana stream. It made me want to go back and reread Norman McClean A River Runs Through It.

I false-cast in a figure eight above my head, laid out the line upstream on the riffle, and watched the fly swirl through the eddies and around the boulders toward me. I picked it up, false-cast again, drying it in the air with a whistling sound inches from my ear, and dropped it just beyond a barkless, sun-bleached cottonwood that beavers had toppled into the stream. The riffle made a lip of dirty foam around the end of the log, and just as my leader swung around it and coursed across the top of a deep pool, I saw a rainbow rise from the bottom like an iridescent bubble released from the pebble-and-silt bed and snap my renegade down in a spray of silvery light.