Bison Quotes

We've searched our database for all the quotes and captions related to Bison. Here they are! All 100 of them:

I would love to have a battle of wits with you, Bison, but I doubt it would be a fair fight.' 'Shut your face.' 'Exactly my point.
Derek Landy (Death Bringer (Skulduggery Pleasant, #6))
Let me tell you about love, that silly word you believe is about whether you like somebody or whether somebody likes you or whether you can put up with somebody in order to get something or someplace you want or you believe it has to do with how your body responds to another body like robins or bison or maybe you believe love is how forces or nature or luck is benign to you in particular not maiming or killing you but if so doing it for your own good. Love is none of that. There is nothing in nature like it. Not in robins or bison or in the banging tails of your hunting dogs and not in blossoms or suckling foal. Love is divine only and difficult always. If you think it is easy you are a fool. If you think it is natural you are blind. It is a learned application without reason or motive except that it is God. You do not deserve love regardless of the suffering you have endured. You do not deserve love because somebody did you wrong. You do not deserve love just because you want it. You can only earn - by practice and careful contemplations - the right to express it and you have to learn how to accept it. Which is to say you have to earn God. You have to practice God. You have to think God-carefully. And if you are a good and diligent student you may secure the right to show love. Love is not a gift. It is a diploma. A diploma conferring certain privileges: the privilege of expressing love and the privilege of receiving it. How do you know you have graduated? You don't. What you do know is that you are human and therefore educable, and therefore capable of learning how to learn, and therefore interesting to God, who is interested only in Himself which is to say He is interested only in love. Do you understand me? God is not interested in you. He is interested in love and the bliss it brings to those who understand and share the interest. Couples that enter the sacrament of marriage and are not prepared to go the distance or are not willing to get right with the real love of God cannot thrive. They may cleave together like robins or gulls or anything else that mates for life. But if they eschew this mighty course, at the moment when all are judged for the disposition of their eternal lives, their cleaving won't mean a thing. God bless the pure and holy. Amen.
Toni Morrison (Paradise (Beloved Trilogy, #3))
Life is, in fact, a battle. Evil is insolent and strong; beauty enchanting, but rare; goodness very apt to be weak; folly very apt to be defiant; wickedness to carry the day; imbeciles to be in great places, people of sense in small, and mankind generally unhappy. But the world as it stands is no narrow illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of the night; we wake up to it, forever and ever; and we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it.
Henry James (Theory of Fiction: Henry James (Bison Book))
You're in a bad mood,' Skulduggery said. 'I understand. I do. You're saying things that you don't really mean. It's OK.' 'I'll kill you both.' 'Hurtful things said in the heat of the moment. We're not going to hold it against you, Bison. We're all friends here.' Valkyrie nodded. 'We love you Bison.' 'We do,' Skulduggery agreed. 'You're our favourite Necromancer. You're the cuddly one.' 'Shut up,' Dragonclaw said. 'Both of you just shut up.
Derek Landy (Death Bringer (Skulduggery Pleasant, #6))
We must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its own inferior races. The Tasmanians . . . were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space if fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds)
A world without huge regions of total wilderness would be a cage; a world without lions and tigers and vultures and snakes and elk and bison would be - will be - a human zoo. A high-tech slum.
Edward Abbey (Postcards from Ed: Dispatches and Salvos from an American Iconoclast)
We made this stupid rule and this stupid rule. Boys are not allowed to love each other. Then we painted a bison on the wall.
Andrew Smith (Grasshopper Jungle)
I’ll have the bison burger and the pale ale on tap.” Jonah folds the lodge’s menu and hands it back to Chris. “And Calla will have a steak knife to drag across my jugular.
K.A. Tucker (Wild at Heart (Wild, #2))
I still think of Oregon Trail as a great leveler. If, for example, you were a twelve-year-old girl from Westchester with frizzy hair, a bite plate, and no control over your own life, suddenly you could drown whomever you pleased. Say you have shot four bison, eleven rabbits, and Bambi's mom. Say your wagon weighs 9,783 pounds and this arduous journey has been most arduous. The banker's sick. The carpenter's sick. The butcher, the baker, the algebra-maker. Your fellow pioneers are hanging on by a spool of flax. Your whole life is in flux and all you have is this moment. Are you sure you want to forge the river? Yes. Yes, you are.
Sloane Crosley (I Was Told There'd Be Cake: Essays)
When I consider Life, 'tis all a cheat; Yet, fooled with hope, men favour the deceit; Trust on, and think to-morrow will repay: To-morrow's falser than the former day; Lies worse; and while it says, we shall be blest With some new joys, cuts off what we possesst.
John Dryden (Aureng-Zebe (Bison Book))
And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years.
H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds)
On the back part of the step, toward the right, I saw a small iridescent sphere of almost unbearable brilliance. At first I thought it was revolving; then I realised that this movement was an illusion created by the dizzying world it bounded. The Aleph's diameter was probably little more than an inch, but all space was there, actual and undiminished. Each thing (a mirror's face, let us say) was infinite things, since I distinctly saw it from every angle of the universe. I saw the teeming sea; I saw daybreak and nightfall; I saw the multitudes of America; I saw a silvery cobweb in the center of a black pyramid; I saw a splintered labyrinth (it was London); I saw, close up, unending eyes watching themselves in me as in a mirror; I saw all the mirrors on earth and none of them reflected me; I saw in a backyard of Soler Street the same tiles that thirty years before I'd seen in the entrance of a house in Fray Bentos; I saw bunches of grapes, snow, tobacco, lodes of metal, steam; I saw convex equatorial deserts and each one of their grains of sand; I saw a woman in Inverness whom I shall never forget; I saw her tangled hair, her tall figure, I saw the cancer in her breast; I saw a ring of baked mud in a sidewalk, where before there had been a tree; I saw a summer house in Adrogué and a copy of the first English translation of Pliny -- Philemon Holland's -- and all at the same time saw each letter on each page (as a boy, I used to marvel that the letters in a closed book did not get scrambled and lost overnight); I saw a sunset in Querétaro that seemed to reflect the colour of a rose in Bengal; I saw my empty bedroom; I saw in a closet in Alkmaar a terrestrial globe between two mirrors that multiplied it endlessly; I saw horses with flowing manes on a shore of the Caspian Sea at dawn; I saw the delicate bone structure of a hand; I saw the survivors of a battle sending out picture postcards; I saw in a showcase in Mirzapur a pack of Spanish playing cards; I saw the slanting shadows of ferns on a greenhouse floor; I saw tigers, pistons, bison, tides, and armies; I saw all the ants on the planet; I saw a Persian astrolabe; I saw in the drawer of a writing table (and the handwriting made me tremble) unbelievable, obscene, detailed letters, which Beatriz had written to Carlos Argentino; I saw a monument I worshipped in the Chacarita cemetery; I saw the rotted dust and bones that had once deliciously been Beatriz Viterbo; I saw the circulation of my own dark blood; I saw the coupling of love and the modification of death; I saw the Aleph from every point and angle, and in the Aleph I saw the earth and in the earth the Aleph and in the Aleph the earth; I saw my own face and my own bowels; I saw your face; and I felt dizzy and wept, for my eyes had seen that secret and conjectured object whose name is common to all men but which no man has looked upon -- the unimaginable universe. I felt infinite wonder, infinite pity.
Jorge Luis Borges
Where you go, I go. Besides, there's only one bison, rocks-for-brains.
F.C. Yee (The Rise of Kyoshi (The Kyoshi Novels, #1))
We make our journey in the company of others; the deer, the rabbit, the bison, and the quail walk before us, and the lion, the eagle, the wolf, the vulture, and the hyena walk behind us. All our paths lie together in the hand of god and none is wider than any other or favored above any other. The worm that creeps beneath your foot is making its journey across the hand of god as surely as you are.
Daniel Quinn
Whatever language we speak, before we begin a sentence we have an almost infinite choice of words to use. A, The, They, Whereas, Having, Then, To, Bison, Ignorant, Since, Winnemucca, In, It, As . . . Any word of the immense vocabulary of English may begin an English sentence. As we speak or write the sentence, each word influences the choice of the next ― its syntactical function as noun, verb, adjective, etc., its person and number if a pronoun, its tense and number as a verb, etc. ,etc. And as the sentence goes on, the choices narrow, until the last word may very likely be the only one we can use.
Ursula K. Le Guin (Changing Planes)
For John Dillinger In hope he is still alive Thanksgiving Day, November 28, 1986 In hope he is still alive Thanks for the wild turkey and the Passenger Pigeons, destined to be shit out through wholesome American guts; thanks for a Continent to despoil and poison; thanks for Indians to provide a modicum of challenge and danger; thanks for vast herds of bison to kill and skin, leaving the carcass to rot; thanks for bounties on wolves and coyotes; thanks for the American Dream to vulgarize and falsify until the bare lies shine through; thanks for the KKK; for nigger-killing lawmen feeling their notches; for decent church-going women with their mean, pinched, bitter, evil faces; thanks for Kill a Queer for Christ stickers; thanks for laboratory AIDS; thanks for Prohibition and the War Against Drugs; thanks for a country where nobody is allowed to mind his own business; thanks for a nation of finks—yes, thanks for all the memories all right, lets see your arms; you always were a headache and you always were a bore; thanks for the last and greatest betrayal of the last and greatest of human dreams.
William S. Burroughs
Death in itself is nothing; but we fear. To be we know not what, we know not where.
John Dryden (Aureng-Zebe (Bison Book))
But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
What are counting words?” “They are … names for the marks on your sticks, for one thing, for other things too. They are used to say the number of … anything. They can say how many deer a scout has seen, or how many days away they are. If it is a large herd, such as bison in the fall, then a zelandoni must scout the herd, one who knows the special ways to use counting words.” An undercurrent of anticipation stirred through the woman; she could almost understand what he meant. She felt on the edge of resolving questions whose answers had eluded her.
Jean M. Auel (The Valley of Horses (Earth's Children, #2))
An interesting thing, the bison and the cow. So similar. Two branches of the same tree, though entirely different from one another. And separate as they are, divided as the two species can be, they can live alongside each other just fine. Mingle their herds. They can even breed.” Next to me, Tiberias coughs, almost choking on a piece of food. My cheeks flame hot. Evangeline laughs into her hand. Farley finishes the bottle of wine.
Victoria Aveyard (War Storm (Red Queen, #4))
This was a new recognition that perfection is admirable but a trifle inhuman, and that a stumbling kind of semi-success can be much more warming. Most of all, perhaps, these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
Friend, I am grieved when I find a venator or hunter of your experience and observation, following the current of vulgar error. The animal you describe, is in truth a species of the bos ferus or bos sylvestris, as he has been happily called by the poets, but, though of close affinity it is altogether distinct, from the common Bubulus. Bison is the better word, and I would suggest the necessity of adopting it in the future, when you shall have occasion to allude to the species.
James Fenimore Cooper (The Prairie (Leatherstocking Tales, #5))
Zoom out and what you see is one species--us--struggling to keep all others in their appropriate places, or at least in the places we've decided they ought to stay. In some areas, we want cows but not bison, or mule deer but not coyotes, or cars but not elk. Or sheep but not elk. Or bighorn sheep but not aoudad sheep. Or else we'd like wolves and cows in the *same* place. Or natural gas tankers swimming harmoniously with whales. We are everywhere in the wilderness with white gloves on, directing traffic.
Jon Mooallem (Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America)
Social” justice…but why only “social”…why set your sights so low…you mean just the opinions of the many? Who cares. Here is my vision of the true justice, the justice of nature: the zoos opened, predators unleashed by the dozens, hundreds….four thousand hungry wolves rampaging on streets of these hive cities, elephants and bison stampeding, the buildings smashed to pieces, the cries of the human bug shearing through the streets as the lord of beasts returns.
Bronze Age Pervert (Bronze Age Mindset)
It was as if a vital evolutionary advantage had been bestowed centuries ago on those members of the species who lived in a state of concern about what was to happen next. These ancestors might have failed to savour their experiences appropriately, but they had at least survived and shaped the character of their descendants, while their more focused siblings, at one with the moment and with the place where they stood, had met violent ends on the horns of unforeseen bison.
Alain de Botton (The Art of Travel)
In his dream, George Stetchkin was in the dock at the Central Criminal Court, accused of the murder of nine million innocent brain cells. The usher was showing the jury the alleged murder weapon, an empty Bison Brand wodka bottle. Then the judge glared at him over the rims of his spectacles and sentenced him to the worst hangover of his life.
Tom Holt (Blonde Bombshell)
There is no ready vocabulary to describe the ways in which artists become artists, no recognition that artists must learn to be who they are (even as they cannot help being who they are.) We have a language that reflects how we learn to paint, but not how we learn to paint our paintings. How do you describe the [reader to place words here] that changes when craft swells to art? "Artists come together with the clear knowledge that when all is said and done, they will return to their studio and practice art alone. Period. That simple truth may be the deepest bond we share. The message across time from the painted bison and the carved ivory seal speaks not of the differences between the makers of that art and ourselves, but of the similarities. Today these similarities lay hidden beneath urban complexity -- audience, critics, economics, trivia -- in a self-conscious world. Only in those moments when we are truly working on our own work do we recover the fundamental connection we share with all makers of art. The rest may be necessary, but it's not art. Your job is to draw a line from your art to your life that is straight and clear.
David Bayles (Art and Fear)
my favorite urban flower, the baseball box score
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
As for agility, a biologist at the National Bison Range in Montana once observed a 2,000-pound bull leap up a six-foot embankment from a standing start!13
Michael Punke (Last Stand: George Bird Grinnell, the Battle to Save the Buffalo, and the Birth of the New West)
New york bison, New york bison bully, bully New York bison. Buffalo buffalo, Buffalo buffalo buffalo, buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
Annonymous (Annonymous)
I first suspected something was amiss when I exited the coffee shop on Greenup Street and was knocked down by a herd of bison.
Joshua Palmatier (Temporally Out of Order)
They didn’t hunt the bison for food. The colonizers desired to annihilate another group of humans. Indigenous peoples. They knew that the Indigenous ones relied on bison. So the bison had to go.
Darcie Little Badger (A Snake Falls to Earth: Newbery Honor Award Winner)
language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
There is precisely zero scientific evidence demonstrating wolves, unlike ourselves, have ever driven any species to extinction. Of course, no antiwolf advocate points to the unrestricted slaughter and habitat reduction, not by wolves but by humans, that speeded the demise of those great herds of bison, deer, and elk reported by Lewis and Clark.
Nick Jans (A Wolf Called Romeo)
Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
I order the fragrant bison meatballs in a tart cranberry sauce to start, and then move on to other mouthwatering things- the roasted-vegetable platter sprinkled with just the right amount of herbs and pepper, and the honey-roasted rabbit, which practically falls apart on my tongue.
Sandhya Menon (Hungry Hearts: 13 Tales of Food & Love)
To this day, my spiritual life is found inside the heart of the wild. I do not fear it, I court it. When I am away, I anticipate my return, needing to touch stone, rock, water, the trunks of trees, the sway of grasses, the barbs of a feather, the fur left behind by a shedding bison.
Terry Tempest Williams
...Hiver bouclé comme un bison, Hiver crispé comme la mousse de crin blanc, Hiver aux puits d'arsenic rouge, aux poches d'huile et de bitume, Hiver au goût de skunk et de carabe fumée de bois de hickory, Hiver aux prismes et aux critaux dans les carrefours de diamant noir, Hiver sans thyrses ni flambeaux, Hiver sans roses ni piscines, Hiver ! Hiver! tes pommes de cèdre de vieux fer! tes fruits de pierre! tes insectes de cuivre !
Saint-John Perse (Vents suivi de Chronique)
And before we judge them too harsly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races....Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit?
H.G. Wells (The War of the Worlds)
At issue is not only knowledge of the world but our survival as individuals and as a species. All the basic technologies ever invented by humans to feed and protect themselves depend on a relentless commitment to hard-nosed empiricism: you cannot assume that your arrowheads will pierce the hide of a bison or that your raft will float just because the omens are propitious and you have been given supernatural reassurance that they will. You have to be sure.
Barbara Ehrenreich (Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America)
place. Less than 1 percent of the area is managed for wildlife habitat protection. Where early travelers saw sharp-tailed grouse, bison, bighorn sheep, grizzly bears, numerous beaver and even wolverines, today they see dust, feral horses, and noxious weeds including cheatgrass, halogeton and Russian thistle.
Annie Proulx (Bird Cloud: A Memoir of Place)
I passed out cigars to the men, and we lit them with a twig caught alight in the fire and passed the bottle around. Charley was doing most of the talking, telling a hunting story from the days of elk and bison, neither of which anyone in attendance except Charley had ever seen. He made them epic animals in his story, inhabitants of an old and better world not to come around again. He then told of his lost farmstead at the old mound village of Cowee, before one of the many disastrous treaties had driven him and his family west to Nantayale. At Cowee, he has been noted for his success with apple trees, which over the years he had planted at spots where his outhouses had stood. Apples grew on his trees huge as dreams of apples. That Cowee house was old, from the time when they still buried dead loved ones in the dirt floor.
Charles Frazier (Thirteen Moons)
Baseball's clock ticks inwardly and silently, and a man absorbed in a ball game is caught in a slow, green place of removal and concentration and in a tension that is screwed up slowly and ever more tightly with each pitcher's windup and with the almost imperceptible forward lean and little half-step with which the fielders accompany each pitch. Whatever the pace of the particular baseball game we are watching, whatever its outcome, it holds us in its own continuum and mercifully releases us from our own.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
To reach the farthest chamber of Lascaux, it's likely a man had to snuff out his light, lower himself down a shaft with a rope made of twisted fibers, and then rekindle his lamp in the dark so as to draw the woolly rhinoceros, the half horse, and the raging bison there. A long spear transfixes that bison, and entrails pour from its side. Beneath its front hooves lies the one painted man in all of Lascaux: prone, spindly wounded, disguised behind a bird mask. And below him, until its discovery in 196o, lay a spoon-shaped lamp carved of red sandstone ... Hold it again as it once was held, and the animals will emerge out of darkness as you pass. Nothing stays still. Shadows nestle in the cavities; a flicker of light across pale protruding rock turns a hoof or raises a head. One shape recedes as another emerges, and everything lingers in the imagination.
Jane Brox (Brilliant: The Evolution of Artificial Light)
Some argue that we see a man with the head of a bird and an erect penis, being killed by a bison.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Did you see that bison on the wall there? He’s so big. And so cute.” Angelo grinned. “I thought you might say that. That’s why I got a smaller version.” He took the plush animal from inside his jacket, where he’d been hiding it, and placed it on the table. “This is Ted.” Minka’s eyes glistened with tears as she stared at it. Crap, what had he done wrong? He’d thought she’d love it. But then she grabbed the toy in one hand, threw her arms around Angelo, and squeezed him so hard his ribs creaked. “Thank you,” she said against his chest. “He’s perfect.
Paige Tyler (Her Fierce Warrior (X-Ops, #4))
Big Cedar is Jackson Hole of The Ozarks. The easiest way to tell the difference between a buffalo and a bison is one has wings and tastes great with hot sauce, and the other is a Wyoming hamburger.
Jarod Kintz (The Lewis and Clark of The Ozarks)
But those wild eyes met his, as the bloodshot eyes of the prairie wolves meet the eye of their leader, ere he rushes on at their head in the trail of the bison; but, alas! only to fall into the hidden snare of the Indian.
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: (new illustrated edition))
We can only miss what we once possessed. We can only feel wronged when we realize something has been stolen from us. We can’t miss the million-strong flocks of passenger pigeons that once blackened our skies. We don’t really miss the herds of bison that grazed in meadows where our suburbs stand. And few think of dark forests lit up with the bright green eyes of its mammalian lords. Soon, the glaciers will go with the clear skies and clean waters and all the feelings they once stirred. It’s the greatest heist of mankind, our inheritance being stolen like this. But how can we care or fight back when we don’t even know what has been or is being taken from us?
Ken Ilgunas (Walden on Wheels: On the Open Road from Debt to Freedom)
Since baseball time is measured only in outs, all you have to do is succeed utterly; keep hitting, keep the rally alive, and you have defeated time. You remain forever young. Sitting in the stands, we sense this, if only dimly. The players below us—Mays, DiMaggio, Ruth, Snodgrass—swim and blur in memory, the ball floats over to Terry Turner, and the end of this game may never come.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
Unlike Francis Crawford, whose game with life was a strange and rootless affair played with the intellect, Jerott had a passionate instinct to live. It was a happy circumstance also that his nervous and bronchial systems were roughly as frail as a bison’s.
Dorothy Dunnett (Pawn in Frankincense (The Lymond Chronicles, #4))
A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
a bison has shown up for you, it may indicate opportunities to manifest or move toward manifesting abundance in some area of your life. This has hidden within it several cautionary notes, though. This is not a time to push or force. Follow the easiest path.
Ted Andrews (Animal Speak: The Spiritual & Magical Powers of Creatures Great & Small)
But then there was school and work and the doctor and the dentist and the Internet. There she was not a parent but a mom, a species held in somber, near-spirtual regard while for all practical purposes steadily crushed by the forces of public policy, like the American bison.
Chelsey Johnson (Stray City)
Bagpipe Music' It's no go the merrygoround, it's no go the rickshaw, All we want is a limousine and a ticket for the peepshow. Their knickers are made of crêpe-de-chine, their shoes are made of python, Their halls are lined with tiger rugs and their walls with heads of bison. John MacDonald found a corpse, put it under the sofa, Waited till it came to life and hit it with a poker, Sold its eyes for souvenirs, sold its blood for whiskey, Kept its bones for dumb-bells to use when he was fifty. It's no go the Yogi-Man, it's no go Blavatsky, All we want is a bank balance and a bit of skirt in a taxi. Annie MacDougall went to milk, caught her foot in the heather, Woke to hear a dance record playing of Old Vienna. It's no go your maidenheads, it's no go your culture, All we want is a Dunlop tyre and the devil mend the puncture. The Laird o' Phelps spent Hogmanay declaring he was sober, Counted his feet to prove the fact and found he had one foot over. Mrs Carmichael had her fifth, looked at the job with repulsion, Said to the midwife 'Take it away; I'm through with overproduction'. It's no go the gossip column, it's no go the Ceilidh, All we want is a mother's help and a sugar-stick for the baby. Willie Murray cut his thumb, couldn't count the damage, Took the hide of an Ayrshire cow and used it for a bandage. His brother caught three hundred cran when the seas were lavish, Threw the bleeders back in the sea and went upon the parish. It's no go the Herring Board, it's no go the Bible, All we want is a packet of fags when our hands are idle. It's no go the picture palace, it's no go the stadium, It's no go the country cot with a pot of pink geraniums, It's no go the Government grants, it's no go the elections, Sit on your arse for fifty years and hang your hat on a pension. It's no go my honey love, it's no go my poppet; Work your hands from day to day, the winds will blow the profit. The glass is falling hour by hour, the glass will fall for ever, But if you break the bloody glass you won't hold up the weather.
Louis MacNeice
Sometimes I wonder if there's things we'll never explain. You know, like, you know, what if we did answer all the questions? You know, would we live on, like forever, happy with our triumph over ignorance? Or is ignorance just a common enemy that once destroyed, would leave our species without a reason to carry on? I guess it doesn't matter what the answer is...because even if supreme knowledge did bring about the end of our species, the thought of obtaining it is just what would keep us together. You know? People will always look up at the sky...and just wonder why we're here. WATER BISON POWERS, ACTIVATE!
Michael J. Caboose
This litany of loss […] is the profile of a species going extinct. In a generation or two the memory of wild Africa will be lost as utterly as an American prairie of head high wild flowers swirled by bison, darkened by wild pigeons, bordered by towering forests of chestnuts, as it all was mere moments ago.
Carl Safina (Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel)
He wanted to wrap his arms around her and kiss away her uncertainty. But if he did that she would bolt. So he brushed stray hairs that had fallen out of her ponytail off her face instead. Ignored how soft the strands felt against his fingers. Pretended his pulse wasn't stampeding like a herd of bison on the plain.
Melissa McClone (Home For Christmas (Bar V5 Dude Ranch #1; Copper Mountain Christmas #2))
Offhand, I can think of no other sport in which the world's champions, one of the great teams of its era, would not instantly demolish inferior opposition and reduce a game such as the one we had just seen to cruel ludicrousness. Baseball is harder than that; it requires a full season, hundreds and hundreds of separate games, before quality can emerge, and in that summer span every hometown fan, every doomed admirer of underdogs will have his afternoons of revenge and joy.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Tell me, why this strong young colt, foaled in some peaceful valley of Vermont, far removed from all beasts of prey— why is it that upon the sunniest day, if you but shake a fresh buffalo robe behind him, so that he cannot even see it, but only smells its wild animal muskiness—why will he start, snort, and with bursting eyes paw the ground in phrensies of affright? There is no remembrance in him of any gorings of wild creatures in his green northern home, so that the strange muskiness he smells cannot recall to him anything associated with the experience of former perils; for what knows he, this New England colt, of the black bisons of distant Oregon?
Herman Melville (Moby Dick: or, the White Whale)
Until Columbus, Indians were a keystone species in most of the hemisphere. Annually burning undergrowth, clearing and replanting forests, building canals and raising fields, hunting bison and netting salmon, growing maize, manioc, and the Eastern Agricultural Complex, Native Americans had been managing their environment for thousands of years.
Charles C. Mann (1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus)
Comanches had traded bison meat and robes for generations, but that exchange had largely been limited to local subsistence bartering. Now Comanchería’s bison became an animal of enterprise, slaughtered for its commodified hides and robes for distant industrial markets. It was not long before the herds started to show signs of overexploitation.
Pekka Hämäläinen (The Comanche Empire)
According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Every player in every game is subjected to a cold and ceaseless accounting; no ball is thrown and no base is gained without an instant responding judgment—ball or strike, hit or error, yea or nay—and an ensuing statistic. This encompassing neatness permits the baseball fan, aided by experience and memory, to extract from a box score the same joy, the same hallucinatory reality, that prickles the scalp of a musician when he glances at a page of his score of Don Giovanni and actually hears bassos and sopranos, woodwinds and violins.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
It is hypocritical to exhort the Brazilians to conserve their rainforest after we have already destroyed the grassland ecosystem that occupied half the continent when we found it. A large-scale grassland restoration project would give us some moral authority when we seek conservation abroad. I must admit that I also like the idea because it would mean a better home for pronghorn, currently pushed by agriculture into marginal habitats-The high sagebrush deserts of the West. I would love to return the speedsters to their evolutionary home, the Floor of the Sky. Imagine a huge national reserve where anyone could see what caused Lewis and Clark to write with such enthusiasm in their journals-the sea of grass and flowers dotted with massive herds of bison, accompanied by the dainty speedsters and by great herds of elk. Grizzly bears and wolves would patrol the margins of the herds and coyotes would at last be reduced to their proper place. The song of the meadowlarks would pervade the prairie and near water the spring air would ring with the eerie tremolos of snipe.
John A. Byers (Built for Speed: A Year in the Life of Pronghorn)
People think the park is a display put on by the government to entertain people, rather than understanding that it’s a pristine landscape we’re trying to preserve.
Carolyn Jourdan (Dangerous Beauty: Encounters with Grizzlies and Bison in Yellowstone)
Nine runs to the bad, doomed, insanely hopeful, they pleaded raucously for the impossible.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
, if awful, impression of watching a dotty inventor preparing to jump off the Eiffel Tower with a parachute made of pillowcases.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
The Lutz heck that emerges from his writings and actions drifted like a weather vane: charming when need be, cold-blooded when need be, tigerish or endearing, depending on his goal. Still, it is surprising that Heck the zoologist chose to ignore the accepted theory of hybrid vigor: that interbreeding strengthens a bloodline. He must have known that mongrels enjoy better immune systems and have more tricks up their genetic sleeves, while in a closely knit species, however "perfect," any illness that kills one animal threatens to wipe out all the others, which is why zoos keep careful studbooks of endangered animals such as cheetahs and forest bison and try to mate them advantageously. In any case, in the distant past, long before anyone was recognizably Aryan, our ancestors shared the world with other flavors of hominids, and interbreeding among neighbors often took place, producing hardier, nastier offspring who thrived. All present-day humans descend from that robust, talkative mix, specifically from a genetic bottleneck of only about one hundred individuals. A 2006 study of mitochondrial DNA tracks Ashkenazi Jews (about 92 percent of the world’s Jews in 1931) back to four women, who migrated from the Near East to Italy in the second and third centuries. All of humanity can be traced back to the gene pool of one person, some say to a man, some a woman. It’s hard to imagine our fate being as iffy as that, be we are natural wonders.
Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife)
George Armstrong Custer a massacré les Indiens Lakota. Sheridan a exterminé les bisons, pour faire mourir de faim le peuple des grandes plaines. Un crime organisé, froidement pensé et systématiquement mis en ouvre. Arrosé de whisky frelaté. Ensuite, et depuis, il y a eu la Corée, le Vietnam, Cuba, La Grenade, Haïti, le Guatemala, le Nicaragua, l'Irak, l'Afghanistan".
Sadek Aissat
Grey always talked about how bison represented the past before colonialism and settler movement onto the prairies. That their very existence pissed off the government internally, even if they didn't know it. That the government would prefer Indigenous peoples assimilate into settler society, rather than demonstrating there are other ways to live peacefully and successfully.
Conor Kerr (Prairie Edge)
Unfortunately the hostility that the European displayed toward the native cultures he encountered he carried even further into his relations with the land. The immense open spaces of the American continents, with all their unexploited or thinly utilized resources, were treated as a challenge to unrelenting war, destruction, and conquest. The forests were there to be cut down, the prairie to be plowed up, the marshes to be filled, the wildlife to be killed for empty sport, even if not utilized for food or clothing. In the act of 'conquering nature' our ancestors too often treated the earth as contemptuously and as brutally as they treated its original inhabitants, wiping out great animal species like the bison and the passenger pigeon, mining the soils instead of annually replenishing them, and even, in the present day, invading the last wilderness areas, precious just because they are still wildernesses, homes for wildlife and solitary human souls. Instead we are surrendering them to six-lane highways, gas stations, amusement parks, and the lumber interests, as in the redwood groves, or Yosemite, and Lake Tahoe-though these primeval areas, once desecrated, can never be fully restored or replaced.
Lewis Mumford (The Pentagon of Power (The Myth of the Machine, Vol 2))
One day in the next five hundred billion years, while the probes complete one full circuit of the Milky Way, maybe they’ll stumble upon intelligent life. In forty thousand years or so, when the two probes sail close enough to a planetary system, maybe just maybe one of these plants will be home to some life form which will spy the probe with whatever it has that passes for eyes, stay its telescope, retrieve the derelict fuel-less old probe with whatever it has that passes for curiosity, lower the stylus (supplied) to the record with whatever it has that passes for digits, and set free the dadadadaa of Beethoven’s Fifth. It’ll roll like thunder through a different frontier. Human music will permeate the Milky Way’s outer reaches. There’ll be Chuck Berry and Bach, there’ll be Stravinsky and Blind Willie Johnson, and the didgeridoo, violin, slide guitar and shakuhachi. Whale song will drift through the constellation of Ursa Minor. Perhaps a being on a planet of the star AC +793888 will hear the 1970s recording of sheep bleat, laughter, footsteps, and the soft pluck of a kiss. Perhaps they’ll hear the trundle of a tractor and the voice of a child. When they hear on the phonograph a recording of rapid firecracker drills and bursts, will they know that these sounds denote brainwaves? Will they ever infer that over forty thousand years before in a solar system unknown a woman was rigged to an EEG and her thoughts recorded? Could they know to work backwards from the abstract sounds and translate them once more into brainwaves, and could they know from these brainwaves the kinds of thoughts the woman was having? Could they see into a human’s mind? Could they know she was a young woman in love? Could they tell from this dip and rise in the EEG’s pattern that she was thinking simultaneously of earth and lover as if the two were continuous? Could they see that, though she tried to keep her mental script, to bring to mind Lincoln and the Ice Age and the hieroglyphs of ancient Egypt and whatever grand things have shaped the earth and which she wished to convey to an alien audience, every thought cascaded into the drawn brows and proud nose of her lover, the wonderful articulation of his hands and the way he listened like a bird and how they had touched so often without touching. And then a spike in sound as she thought of that great city Alexandria and of nuclear disarmament and the symphony of the earth’s tides and the squareness of his jaw and the way he spoke with such bright precision so that everything he said was epiphany and discovery and the way he looked at her as though she were the epiphany he kept on having and the thud of her heart and the flooding how heat about her body when she considered what it was he wanted to do to her and the migration of bison across a Utah plain and a geisha’s expressionless face and the knowledge of having found that thing in the world which she ought never to have had the good fortune of finding, of two minds and bodies flung at each other at full dumbfounding force so that her life had skittered sidelong and all her pin-boned plans just gone like that and her self engulfed in a fire of longing and thoughts of sex and destiny, the completeness of love, their astounding earth, his hands, his throat, his bare back.
Samantha Harvey (Orbital)
these exultant yells for the Mets were also yells for ourselves, and came from a wry, half-understood recognition that there is more Met than Yankee in every one of us. I knew for whom that foghorn blew; it blew for me.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
... I was flipping through a National Geographic magazine and I came across an article with this headline: "Women Created Most of the Oldest Known Cave Art Paintings, Suggests a New Analysis of Ancient Handprints. Most Scholars Had Assumed These Ancient Artists Were Predominantly Men, So the Finding Overturns Decades of Archaeological Dogma."... According to the article, Snow "analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. 'There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time,' said Snow... 'People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."' But Snow suggested that women were involved in every aspect of prehistoric life-from the hunt to the hearth to religious ritual. "It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around," he said." Leaving the Cave - pg. 93
Elizabeth Lesser (Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes)
Earlier, when I drove to Gray Horse, I’d been startled by the sight of bison roaming through the prairie with their bowed heads and massive woolly bodies supported seemingly impossibly on narrow legs. In the nineteenth century, bison were extinguished from the prairie, but in recent years they have been reintroduced by conservationists. The media mogul Ted Turner had been raising bison on a forty-thousand-acre ranch between Fairfax and Pawhuska—a ranch that in 2016 was bought by the Osage Nation.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: Adapted for Young Readers: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
Obviously, it wasn’t fast enough. I mean, me, a puny human with a running of 10, versus a massive 4-legged creature literally designed to move quickly. It wasn’t even a contest as I found out the hard, painful way. You have been rammed by an angry bison! ‘Holy crap that hurt’, I had time to think as I flew through the air and my health bar drained by almost a third. Then I landed in the painful caress of Mother Earth and her rocks and plants and I rolled to the side as fast as I could, just in time to avoid being trampled.
R.K. Billiau (Forced Login (PrimeVerse, #1))
The fearful happenings of the second game need not be lingered over, being now as well known as the circumstances surrounding the fall of Troy. Until the gods began their heavy-handed meddling, it was a fine, fast game, with the Dodgers having somewhat the better of it.
Roger Angell (The Summer Game (Bison Book))
A few early farmers conserved the soil - George Washington was one - but they were stray oddities. A few pioneers had naturalistic interests, but any revelation of such interests branded the holder of them as being peculiar or even undemocratic. The mass rule then, as now, was: Conform and be dull.
J. Frank Dobie (The Voice of the Coyote (Bison Book))
A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Also renowned is the beautiful painting ceiling of the cave at Altamira, in Northern Spain. This was the first cave art to be discovered in 1879. The art at Altamira, which has been dated to around 19,000-11,000 years ago, comprises stunning representations of bison, horses, and other large animals, with extraordinary use of colors and shading to indicate depth. The quaint story of its discovery details that the paintings, which are on a low ceiling, were initially missed by the team of archaeologists, but were spotted by one of the team's 8-year-old daughter; she was the only individual small enough to stand erect and still look up at the ceiling.
Kevin N. Laland (Darwin's Unfinished Symphony: How Culture Made the Human Mind)
After the tail ( of a buffalo) was cut off - as a trophy for the conqueror- nothing was left to waste: the meat was dried, the heart smoked, the intestines made into sausages. Oils from the bison's brain were rubbed over the hide, which was then transformed into leather for robes and lodge coverings. And still there was more to reap: horns were turned into spoons, sinews into bowstrings, tallow into fuel for torches....In 1877, there were virtually no more American Buffalo to hunt- a development hastened by the authorities who encouraged settlers to eradicate the beasts, knowing that, in the words os an army officer, "every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
Man, and the other animals whom he has afflicted with his malady or depraved by his dominion, are alone diseased. The Bison, the wild Hog, the Wolf, are perfectly exempt from malady, and invariably die either from external violence or from mature old age. But the domestic Hog, the Sheep, the Cow, the Dog, are subject to an incredible variety of distempers, and, like the corruptors of their nature, have physicians who thrive upon their miseries. The super-eminence of man is, like Satan’s, the super-eminence of pain; and the majority of his species doomed to poverty, disease and crime, have reason to curse the untoward event that, by enabling him to communicate his sensations, raised him above the level of his fellow animals.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
You will learn about A.A. and Al-Anon in the Red Road to Wellbriety but you will also learn about Talking Circles, Helping Spirits, the sweat lodge, the Medicine Wheel, sacred dances, smudging rituals, and praying with the eagle feather.  You will hear men and women of many tribes and traditions illustrating the diversity of how they came to live sober, meaningful lives. The
White Bison (The Red Road to Welbriety: In The Native American Way)
Achild acquires stuffed animals throughout their life, but the core team is usually in place by the time they’re five. Louise got Red Rabbit, a hard, heavy bunny made of maroon burlap, for her first Easter as a gift from Aunt Honey. Buffalo Jones, an enormous white bison with a collar of soft wispy fur, came back with her dad from a monetary policy conference in Oklahoma. Dumbo, a pale blue hard rubber piggy bank with a detachable head shaped like the star of the Disney movie, had been spotted at Goodwill and Louise claimed him as “mine” when she was three. Hedgie Hoggie, a plush hedgehog Christmas ornament, had been a special present from the checkout girl after Louise fell in love with him in the supermarket checkout line and would strike up a conversation with him every time they visited. But Pupkin was their leader.
Grady Hendrix (How to Sell a Haunted House)
Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest. The amount of information that one must obtain and store in order to track the ever-changing relationships of a few dozen individuals is staggering. In a band of fifty individuals, there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships, and countless more complex social combinations. The gossip theory might sound like a joke, but numerous studies support it. Even today the vast majority of human communication – whether in the form of emails, phone calls or newspaper columns – is gossip.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
The next day Phipps wrote about Göring’s open house in his diary. “The whole proceedings were so strange as at times to convey a feeling of unreality,” he wrote, but the episode had provided him a valuable if unsettling insight into the nature of Nazi rule. “The chief impression was that of the most pathetic naïveté of General Göring, who showed us his toys like a big, fat, spoilt child: his primeval woods, his bison and birds, his shooting-box and lake and bathing beach, his blond ‘private secretary,’ his wife’s mausoleum and swans and sarsen stones.… And then I remembered there were other toys, less innocent though winged, and these might some day be launched on their murderous mission in the same childlike spirit and with the same childlike glee.” CHAPTER 43 A Pygmy Speaks Wherever Martha and her father now went they heard rumors and speculation that the collapse of Hitler’s regime might be imminent. With
Erik Larson (In the Garden of Beasts: Love, Terror, and an American Family in Hitler's Berlin)
Miraculously, some animals survived at the zoo and many escaped across the bridge, entering Old Town while the capital burned. People brave enough to stand by their windows, or unlucky enough to be outside, watched a biblical hallucination unfolding as the zoo emptied into Warsaw's streets. Seals waddled along the banks of the Vistula, camels and llamas wandered down alleyways, hooves skidding on cobblestone, ostriches and antelope trotted beside foxes and wolves, anteaters called out hatchee, hatchee as they scuttled over bricks. Locals saw blurs of fur and hide bolting past factories and apartment houses, racing to outlying fields of oats, buckwheat, and flax, scrambling into creeks, hiding in stairwells and sheds. Submerged in their wallows, the hippos, otters, and beavers survived. Somehow the bears, bison, Przywalski horses, camels, zebras, lynxes, peacocks and other birds, monkeys, and reptiles survived, too.
Diane Ackerman (The Zookeeper's Wife: A War Story)
The frenzies of the chase had by this time worked them bubblingly up, like old wine worked anew. Whatever pale fears and forebodings some of them might have felt before; these were not only now kept out of sight through the growing awe of Ahab, but they were broken up, and on all sides routed, as timid prairie hares that scatter before the bounding bison. The hand of Fate had snatched all their souls; and by the stirring perils of the previous day; the rack of the past night's suspense; the fixed, unfearing, blind, reckless way in which their wild craft went plunging towards its flying mark; by all these things, their hearts were bowled along. The wind that made great bellies of their sails, and rushed the vessel on by arms invisible as irresistible; this seemed the symbol of that unseen agency which so enslaved them to the race. They were one man, not thirty. For as the one ship that held them all; though it was put together of all contrasting things — oak, and maple, and pine wood; iron, and pitch, and hemp — yet all these ran into each other in the one concrete hull, which shot on its way, both balanced and directed by the long central keel; even so, all the individualities of the crew, this man's valor, that man's fear; guilt and guiltiness, all varieties were welded into oneness, and were all directed to that fatal goal which Ahab their one lord and keel did point to. The rigging lived. The mast-heads, like the tops of tall palms, were outspreadingly tufted with arms and legs. Clinging to a spar with one hand, some reached forth the other with impatient wavings; others, shading their eyes from the vivid sunlight, sat far out on the rocking yards; all the spars in full bearing of mortals, ready and ripe for their fate. Ah! how they still strove through that infinite blueness to seek out the thing that might destroy them!
Herman Melville (Moby-Dick or, The Whale)
You wouldn’t recognize this land back then. Over thousands of years, the plants and animals worked with wind and fire until the land was covered in a sea of grass that was home to many relatives. The bison gave us everything, from thadó, our meat, to our clothing and thípi hides. His dung fertilized the soil. The prairie dogs opened up tunnels that brought air and water deep into the earth. Grasses that were as tall as a man set long roots that could withstand drought. When my grandfather was a boy, he woke each morning to the song of the meadowlark. The prairie showed us for many generations how to live and work together as one family. “And then the settlers came with their plows and destroyed the prairie in a single lifetime,” my father said. What I remember most, now, is his voice shaking with rage, his tobacco-stained fingers trembling as they held a hand-rolled cigarette, the way he drew smoke deep into his lungs.
Diane Wilson (The Seed Keeper)
John Fire Lame Deer, a Lakota medicine man, wrote gut-wrenchingly about what the bison meant for his people, and what happened when they were destroyed: The buffalo gave us everything we needed. Without it we were nothing. Our tipis were made of his skin. His hide was our bed, our blanket, our winter coat. It was our drum, throbbing through the night, alive, holy. Out of his skin we made our water bags. His flesh strengthened us, became flesh of our flesh. Not the smallest part of it was wasted. His stomach, a red-hot stone dropped in to it, became our soup kettle. His horns were our spoons, the bones our knives, our women’s awls and needles. Out of his sinews we made our bowstrings and thread. His ribs were fashioned into sleds for our children, his hoofs became rattles. His mighty skull, with the pipe leaning against it, was our sacred altar. The name of the greatest of all Sioux was Tatanka Iyotake—Sitting Bull. When you killed off the buffalo you also killed the Indian—the real, natural, “wild” Indian.
Alan Levinovitz (Natural: How Faith in Nature's Goodness Leads to Harmful Fads, Unjust Laws, and Flawed Science)
The Wellbriety path does not compete with A.A. or any other pathway of personal recovery, but instead enriches those pathways by embracing them within the web of Native American tribal histories and cultures.  In these pages, you will meet people who have committed themselves to live their lives on the Red Road.  Here you will meet Native people whose stories embody the living history of Native American recovery.  You will hear the details of their addiction and recovery journeys and feel the life and hope in
White Bison (The Red Road to Welbriety: In The Native American Way)
It had come to me that I was protecting only the dead when I could not even protect the living. That morning we continued on our way, listlessly. In the following days, we fed, we traveled, we went to watering places, we continued with our lives. I sometimes longed to go on my own way as I had in the past. But to where? It was a longing that happened only in my mind. Sometimes, my tired, aching body just wanted to lie down somewhere and stay put. Sometimes, I didn’t dream and but just wished I could be in another place at another time. Awake, I always felt lonely.
Beatrice Culleton Mosionier
When's the last time you called them?" "I haven't. But they needed to rescue us just the other day. From the bison." "They rescued you from -?" Reyna shook her head. " I don't want to know. So when else have they rescued you?" "Well, never, but I'm supposed to do this on my own. They told me where to find Mjölnir, right after they gave me my goats." "Goats? No, again, I don't want to know." She paused. "Wait, actually, I do. You get goats?" "Magic battle goats." "Of course. So you get magic goats, a magic necklace, a magic hammer, a magic shield. You're like the favourite child who gets all the best Christmas gifts. What does Freya have?" "Um, a magic cloak." She waved that off. "Got it already. What else?" "There's the boar, Hildisvini." "Who? What?" "Hildisvini. He's a boar. It's a wild pig -" "I know what a boar is. That's almost as bad as goats. What else?" "Um ... swans, I think?" "Swans? Great. You get killer goats, and I get pretty birds." "Have you ever met a swan? They're vicious. I think I'd rather take my chances with a goat." Her eyes lit up. "Really? Now that would be cool. Everyone would think they were just pretty birds and then they attack. Stealth swans.
K.L. Armstrong (Odin's Ravens (The Blackwell Pages, #2))
On the Larch Scape humans had never managed to extend a sizeable population across entire continents, so much of the megafauna considered to be a distant Pleistocene memory on other Scapes had lingered. The mammoths, giant sloths and woolly rhinoceroses were extinct, but there were hyenas, fanged cats and amphicyonids hunting bison, omnivorous deer, glyptodons, great boars, and wild horses too large for men to ride south of the Laurentian Sea, in what was called Illinois on Malone’s Scape. The island of Manhattan was not an island due to the lower sea level, and it was uninhabited by men, an impenetrable mass of old growth larch trees ruled by creatures thought to be related to the raccoon. The Larch ‘raccoon’ was frequently said to be too intelligent to domesticate; in groups they would destroy shelters and eat the faces of sleeping humans. The atrox cat had been genetically sequenced in cooperation with Austral scientists years ago and determined to be more closely related to the lion than the cougar, and it had enjoyed a range extending north of the Laurentian Sea up to the glaciers until very recently. It was a dark creature with a thick mane in both genders; besides the elements, their prides were the deadliest things to encounter in the far north.
Mark Ferguson (Terra Incognita)
A second theory agrees that our unique language evolved as a means of sharing information about the world. But the most important information that needed to be conveyed was about humans, not about lions and bison. Our language evolved as a way of gossiping. 4. An ivory figurine of a ‘lion-man’ (or ‘lioness-woman’) from the Stadel Cave in Germany (c.32,000 years ago). The body is human, but the head is leonine. This is one of the first indisputable examples of art, and probably of religion, and of the ability of the human mind to imagine things that do not really exist. According to this theory Homo sapiens is primarily a social animal. Social cooperation is our key for survival and reproduction. It is not enough for individual men and women to know the whereabouts of lions and bison. It’s much more important for them to know who in their band hates whom, who is sleeping with whom, who is honest, and who is a cheat. The amount of information that one must obtain and store in order to track the ever-changing relationships of even a few dozen individuals is staggering. (In a band of fifty individuals, there are 1,225 one-on-one relationships, and countless more complex social combinations.) All apes show a keen interest in such social information, but they have trouble gossiping effectively. Neanderthals and archaic Homo sapiens probably also had a hard time talking behind each other’s backs – a much maligned ability which is in fact essential for cooperation in large numbers.
Yuval Noah Harari (Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind)
Every time the cataclysmic concept has come to life, the 'beast' has been stoned, burned at the stake, beaten to a pulp, and buried with a vengeance; but the corpse simply won't stay dead. Each time, it raises the lid of its coffin and says in sepulchral tones: 'You will die before I.' The latest of the challengers is Prof. Frank C. Hibben, who in his book, 'The Lost Americans,' said: 'This was no ordinary extinction of a vague geological period which fizzled to an uncertain end. This death was catastrophic and all inclusive. [...] What caused the death of forty million animals. [...] The 'corpus delicti' in this mystery may be found almost anywhere. [...] Their bones lie bleaching in the sands of Florida and in the gravels of New Jersey. They weather out of the dry terraces of Texas and protrude from the sticky ooze of the tar pits off Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles. [...] The bodies of the victims are everywhere. [...] We find literally thousands together [...] young and old, foal with dam, calf with cow. [...] The muck pits of Alaska are filled with evidence of universal death [...] a picture of quick extinction. [...] Any argument as to the cause [...] must apply to North America, Siberia, and Europe as well.' '[...] Mamooth and bison were torn and twisted as though by a cosmic hand in a godly rage.' '[...] In many places the Alaskan muck blanket is packed with animal bones and debris in trainload lots [...] mammoth, mastodon [...] bison, horses, wolves, bears, and lions. [...] A faunal population [...] in the middle of some cataclysmic catastrophe [...] was suddenly frozen [...] in a grim charade.' Fantastic winds; volcanic burning; inundation and burial in muck; preservation by deep-freeze. 'Any good solution to a consuming mystery must answer all of the facts,' challenges Hibben.
Chan Thomas (The Adam & Eve Story: The History of Cataclysms)
The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistering on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God's air, the Allfather's air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man's work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher's bills at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod's slaughter of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathustra? Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die süsse Milch des Euters. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother's milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan's land. Thy cow's dug was tough, what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! Per deam Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum!
James Joyce (Ulysses)
The air without is impregnated with raindew moisture, life essence celestial, glistening on Dublin stone there under starshiny coelum. God’s air, the Allfather’s air, scintillant circumambient cessile air. Breathe it deep into thee. By heaven, Theodore Purefoy, thou hast done a doughty deed and no botch! Thou art, I vow, the remarkablest progenitor barring none in this chaffering allincluding most farraginous chronicle. Astounding! In her lay a Godframed Godgiven preformed possibility which thou hast fructified with thy modicum of man’s work. Cleave to her! Serve! Toil on, labour like a very bandog and let scholarment and all Malthusiasts go hang. Thou art all their daddies, Theodore. Art drooping under thy load, bemoiled with butcher’s bills at home and ingots (not thine!) in the countinghouse? Head up! For every newbegotten thou shalt gather thy homer of ripe wheat. See, thy fleece is drenched. Dost envy Darby Dullman there with his Joan? A canting jay and a rheumeyed curdog is all their progeny. Pshaw, I tell thee! He is a mule, a dead gasteropod, without vim or stamina, not worth a cracked kreutzer. Copulation without population! No, say I! Herod’s slaughter of the innocents were the truer name. Vegetables, forsooth, and sterile cohabitation! Give her beefsteaks, red, raw, bleeding! She is a hoary pandemonium of ills, enlarged glands, mumps, quinsy, bunions, hayfever, bedsores, ringworm, floating kidney, Derbyshire neck, warts, bilious attacks, gallstones, cold feet, varicose veins. A truce to threnes and trentals and jeremies and all such congenital defunctive music! Twenty years of it, regret them not. With thee it was not as with many that will and would and wait and never—do. Thou sawest thy America, thy lifetask, and didst charge to cover like the transpontine bison. How saith Zarathustra? Deine Kuh Trübsal melkest Du. Nun Trinkst Du die süsse Milch des Euters. See! it displodes for thee in abundance. Drink, man, an udderful! Mother’s milk, Purefoy, the milk of human kin, milk too of those burgeoning stars overhead rutilant in thin rainvapour, punch milk, such as those rioters will quaff in their guzzling den, milk of madness, the honeymilk of Canaan’s land. Thy cow’s dug was tough, what? Ay, but her milk is hot and sweet and fattening. No dollop this but thick rich bonnyclaber. To her, old patriarch! Pap! Per deam Partulam et Pertundam nunc est bibendum!
James Joyce (Ulysses)