This is a rewrite of a post published here on WIZ that I’m including in my book Crossfire Canyon. I’m posting the rewrite today in response to finding a bounty-killed coyote on this morning’s walk. April 8, 2009. As I walked out of a nearby canyon last week along a trail where I had previously [...]
Winter’s eve. She smelled the season on him. Summer, he came in redolent of horses and wild mint; winter, copper and ice. Metallic and snow-clean, he cooled the house. Behind him, now, feathers of snow bounced against black window glass. The household breath smelled of pies and bread. Shadows browned the cabin walls and firelight [...]
My cat’s named “Chairman Maoâ€:* She’s dropped the “i†somehow. She’s dropped the thing, But, Marx bless Ming,** Still has a frightful Yao.*** __________________________________ The image above is a 2012 scan of a 1999 oil on oilcloth reproduction of a 1942 photograph of a late Victorian cameo of an early Victorian watercolour portrait of Chairman [...]
This segment is from a longer piece, Plato’s Alcove, which won an honorable mention in Torrey House Press’s 2011 Creative Non-Fiction Contest. You can read the entire entry here. Plato’s Alcove is about my first trip to the desert back in 1982. In the desert one day I met Coyote, the Trickster-God. We greeted each [...]
On May 14 of 2008, Dirk Kempthorne, the Secretary of Interior, followed the urgings of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Director Dale Hall and placed the polar bear species (Ursus maritimus) on the endangered species list. Hunting bans were implemented to prevent the importing of hunted polar bear hides. Before this, a powerful controversy had [...]
Light’s rise sparks bright blooms: birdsong, fields of it, vining– spring’s first green flourish. These mornings, I step outside my back door to hear the hush of winter thrown off by a clamor of birdsong–the crackle of starlings, jazzy riffs of purple house finches, a lonely two-syllable call from a flycatcher, screeches and churrings of [...]
In Virginia during the sixties and seventies, with a little concentrated looking, I could consort with eastern mud turtles, spotted turtles, elegant eastern painted turtles, snapping turtles, eastern box turtles, and even, I believe, although we lived rather east of its range as depicted in Petersen’s Eastern Reptiles and Amphibians, the occasional Terrapina ornata, the [...]
Although Turtle is a trickster of the highest order, it is true also that Turtle may be tricked. When this happens—when the trickster’s trickster is tricked—you may be sure the world has tipped out of balance. Every year along the southeastern and gulf state coastlands of the U.S., females of several sea turtle species such [...]
Beside serving as the foundation of the world, Turtle surfaces in folk literature as the trickster’s trickster. It may surprise some to learn that Turtle has the smarts necessary to get the best of flimflammers like Jackal and even Anansi, the trickster spider, but then surprise is part of the strategy.
This is the first installment of a five-part post. Always it’s the same: the woods are leaf-fatted, midsummer. Low-growing Mayapple and ginseng creep among roots of massive white oaks whose limbs form their own green-clouded groves. Ferns half my height unroll from fiddleheads. Fiddleheads, with their scrolled fronds, put me in mind of unborn things—pale, [...]