First Deer Quotes

Within a few short hours, he nearly had me agreeing to try deer jerky for the first time. Almost. If it weren't for Cam continuously whispering "Bambi" in my ear every couple of minutes, I would've caved.

Tell me again was it love at first sight When I walked by and you caught my eye Didn't you know love could shine this bright? Well, smile because you're the deer in the headlights.

Tell me again was it love at first sight When I walked by and you caught my eye. Didn't you know love could shine this bright? If love was a game, you would never play nice. If love was a beam, you'd be blind in both eyes. Put your sunglasses on 'cause you're a deer in the headlights.

When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, 'Let the children come!' and they ran from the trees toward her. Let your mothers hear you laugh,' she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then 'Let the grown men come,' she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. Let your wives and your children see you dance,' she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. 'Cry,' she told them. 'For the living and the dead. Just cry.' And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart. She did not tell them to clean up their lives or go and sin no more. She did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. She told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine. That if they could not see it, they would not have it. Here,' she said, 'in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard...

Out my window this morning, just before sunrise, a deer stood in a fog so dense and bright that the second one, not too far away, looked like the unfinished shadow of the first. You can color that in. You can call it ‘The History of Memory

Wildlife, we are constantly told, would run loose across our towns and cities were it not for the sport hunters to control their population, as birds would blanket the skies without the culling services of Ducks Unlimited and other groups. Yet here they are breeding wild animals, year after year replenishing the stock, all for the sole purpose of selling and killing them, deer and bears and elephants so many products being readied for the market. Animals such as deer, we are told, have no predators in many areas, and therefore need systematic culling. Yet when attempts are made to reintroduce natural predators such as wolves and coyotes into these very areas, sport hunters themselves are the first to resist it. Weaker animals in the wild, we hear, will only die miserable deaths by starvation and exposure without sport hunters to control their population. Yet it's the bigger, stronger animals they're killing and wounding--the very opposite of natural selection--often with bows and pistols that only compound and prolong the victim's suffering.

And so I began to read,' Sorkar said. 'And at first the complete works were like a jungle, the language was quicksand. Metaphors turned beneath my feet and became biting snakes, similes fled from my grasp like frightened deer, taking all meaning with them. All was alien, and amidst the hanging, entangling creepers of this foreign grammar, all sound became a cacophany. I feared for myself, for my health and sanity, but then I thought of my purpose, of where I was and who I was, of pain and I pressed on.

The climate warmed. Wild grasses, flowers and trees took root in the land behind the huge rock. In time, their growing and dying made deep rich loam on which a magnificent forest grew. Into the forest came bear, deer, brightly colored birds, and the Pawtuxets, a tribe of the Wampanoag, The People of the Dawn.

..that all-seeing eye which reads the heart, could not fail to discriminate between the living and the dead, and the gentle soul of the unfortunate girl was already far removed beyond the errors, or deceptions, of any human ritual.

We live in a world of transgressions and selfishness, and no pictures that represent us otherwise can be true; though happily for human nature, gleamings of that pure spirit in whose likeness man has been fashioned, are to be seen, relieving its deformities, and mitigating, if not excusing its crimes.

In a matter of a moment the amount of sand in the upper part of the hour-glass had dwindled dramatically, the tiny grains were rushing through the opening, each grain more eager to leave then the last, time is just like people, sometimes it’s all it can do to drag itself along, but at others, it runs like a deer and leaps like a young goat, which, when you think about it, is not saying much, since the cheetah is the fastest of all the animals, and yet it has never occurred to anyone to say of another person He runs and jumps like a cheetah, perhaps because that first comparison comes from the magical late middle ages, when gentlemen went deer-hunting and no one had ever seen a cheetah running or even heard of its existence. Languages are conservative, they always carry their archives with them and hate having to be updated.

The first person you fall in love with will be a deer.

At that time I was too young for some of the troubles I was having, and I had not yet learned what to do with them. It no longer can matter what kind of troubles they were, or what finally became of them, though all my tradition, background, and training had taught me unanswerably that no one except a coward ever runs away from anything. What nonsense! They should have taught me the difference between courage and foolhardiness, instead of leaving me to find it out for myself. I learned finally that if I still had the sense I was born with, I would take off like a deer at the first warning of certain dangers.

I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer.

The pattern glitters with cruelty. The blue beads are colored with fish blood, the reds with powdered heart. The beads collect in borders of mercy. The yellows are dyed with the ocher of silence. There is no telling which twin will fall asleep first, allowing the other's colors to dominate, for how long. The design grows, the overlay deepens. The beaders have no other order at the heart of their being. Do you know that the beads are sewn onto the fabric of the earth with endless strands of human muscle, human sinew, human hair? We are as crucial to this making as other animals. No more and no less important than the deer.

Sometimes, when you have spent a long time rejecting the gifts of the Spirit and come to believe in them, you almost feel as if you are being born again. You feel as if you have a whole new Bible. By that latter statement I mean that the Gospels and Acts come alive for you in a way that they never have before. Things that you had relegated to the first century now become a possibility for today's church.

What's so funny?" Istvhan swept more food into the pack. How much did a bear eat? Was she going to kill deer or something? Should he help? "I was just thinking, first you're with Beartongue and now you're chasing after someone with an actual bear's - " "Galen." "Look, I'm just saying you have a type. A weirdly specific type.

Of all wildlife, mule deer fawns are the safest newborns, ’cause during their entire first year, they don’t produce a scent by which a predator might find them.

Know thyself first immortal and loke ay besyly thow werche and wysse To commune profit, and thow shatl not mysse To comen swiftly to that place deere That ful of blysse is and of soules cleere

There’s nothing to be scared of.” Instead of taking Charlie’s pulse – there was really no point – he took one of the old man’s hands in his. He saw Charlie’s wife pulling down a shade in the bedroom, wearing nothing but the slip of Belgian lace he’d bought her for their first anniversary; saw how the ponytail swung over one shoulder when she turned to look at him, her face lit in a smile that was all yes. He saw a Farmall tractor with a striped umbrella raised over the seat. He smelled bacon and heard Frank Sinatra singing ‘Come Fly with Me’ from a cracked Motorola radio sitting on a worktable littered with tools. He saw a hubcap full of rain reflecting a red barn. He tasted blueberries and gutted a deer and fished in some distant lake whose surface was dappled by steady autumn rain. He was sixty, dancing with his wife in the American Legion hall. He was thirty, splitting wood. He was five, wearing shorts and pulling a red wagon. Then the pictures blurred together, the way cards do when they’re shuffled in the hands of an expert, and the wind was blowing big snow down from the mountains, and in here was the silence and Azzie’s solemn watching eyes.

One of the countless symbolic or allegorical images of the sexual act is a deer hunt: A detail from a painting by the 16th-century German artist Cranach. The sexual implication of the deer hunt is underlined by a medieval English folk song called “The Keeper”: The first doe that he shot at he missed, And the second doe he trimmed he kissed, And the third ran away in a young man’s heart, She’s amongst the leaves of the green O.

An eagle soaring above a sheer cliff, where I suppose its nest is, makes another striking show of life, and helps to bring to mind the other people of the so-called solitude—deer in the forest caring for their young; the strong, well-clad, well-fed bears; the lively throng of squirrels; the blessed birds, great and small, stirring and sweetening the groves; and the clouds of happy insects filling the sky with joyous hum as part and parcel of the down-pouring sunshine.

In a way that I haven’t yet figured out how to fully articulate, I believe that children who get to see bald eagles, coyotes, deer, moose, grouse, and other similar sights each morning will have a certain kind of matrix or fabric or foundation of childhood, the nature and quality of which will be increasing rare and valuable as time goes on, and which will be cherished into adulthood, as well as becoming- and this is a leap of faith by me- a source of strength and knowledge to them somehow. That the daily witnessing of the natural wonders is a kind of education of logic and assurance that cannot be duplicated by any other means, or in other place: unique and significant, and, by God, still somehow relevant, even now, in the twenty-first century. For as long as possible, I want my girls to keep believing that beauty, though not quite commonplace and never to pass unobserved or unappreciated, is nonetheless easily witnessed on any day, in any given moment, around any forthcoming bend. And that the wild world has a lovely order and pattern and logic, even in the shouting, disorderly chaos of breaking-apart May and reassembling May. That if there can be a logic an order even in May, then there can be in all seasons and all things.

Old-time ranchers planted cheatgrass because it would green up fast in the spring and provide early forage for grazing cattle,” Oyster says, nodding his head at the world outside. This first patch of cheatgrass was in southern British Columbia, Canada, in 1889. But fire spreads it. Every year, it dries to gunpowder, and now land that used to burn every ten years, it burns every year. And the cheatgrass recovers fast. Cheatgrass loves fire. But the native plants, the sagebrush and desert phlox, they don’t. And every year it burns, there’s more cheatgrass and less anything else. And the deer and antelope that depended on those other plants are gone now. So are the rabbits. So are the hawks and owls that ate the rabbits. The mice starve, so the snakes that ate the mice starve. Today, cheatgrass dominates the inland deserts from Canada to Nevada, covering an area over twice the size of the state of Nebraska and spreading by thousands of acres per year. The big irony is, even cattle hate cheatgrass, Oyster says. So the cows, they eat the rare native bunch grasses. What’s left of them... “When you think about it from a native plant perspective,” Oyster says, “Johnny Appleseed was a fucking biological terrorist.” Johnny Appleseed, he says, might as well be handing out smallpox.

Spring is such a hopeful time on the island, and despite the pall that continues to hover over our nation, I find it impossible to resist. The air is still chilly as a well-digger's ear first thing in the morning, but as the hours pass it hints at the warmth to come in later months. As the days become longer, the rains change. They are less punishing and more promising, bringing out the native grasses and glimpses of green on the trees. Then there are the little families of deer, grazing as if the entire island is a spring buffet, and wild rabbits are hopping everywhere.

This cook, Preacher? He's unbelievable. I had some of his venison chili when I first got to town and it almost made me pass out, it was so good." Hi slips curved in a smile. "You at venison, Marcie?" "I didn't have a relationship with the deer," she explained. "You don't have a relationship with my deer either," he pointed out. "Yeah, but I have a relationship with you--you've seen me in my underwear. And you have a relationship with the deer. If you fed him to me, it would be like you shot and fed me your friend. Or something." Ian just drained his beer and smiled at her enough to show his teeth. "I wouldn't shoot that particular buck," he admitted. "But if I had a freezer, I'd shoot his brother." "There's something off about that," she said, just as Jack placed her wine in front of her. "Wouldn't it be more logical if hunters didn't get involved with their prey? Or their families? Oh, never mind--I can't think about this before eating my meat loaf. Who knows who's in it?" -Ian and Marcie

few countries have undergone more remarkable changes, since the year 1535, when the first colonist of La Plata landed with seventy-two horses. The countless herds of horses, cattle, and sheep, not only have altered the whole aspect of the vegetation, but they have almost banished the guanaco, deer, and ostrich. Numberless other changes must likewise have taken place; the wild pig in some parts probably replaces the peccari; packs of wild dogs may be heard howling on the wooded banks of the less-frequented streams; and the common cat, altered into a large and fierce animal, inhabits rocky hills.

Zhao Gao was contemplating treason but was afraid the other officials would not heed his commands, so he decided to test them first. He brought a deer and presented it to the Second Emperor but called it a horse. The Second Emperor laughed and said, "Is the chancellor perhaps mistaken, calling a deer a horse?" Then the emperor questioned those around him. Some remained silent, while some, hoping to ingratiate with Zhao Gao, said it was a horse, and others said it was a deer. Zhao Gao secretly arranged for all those who said it was a deer to be brought before the law. Thereafter the officials were all terrified of Zhao Gao.

…especially the young ones, come into the canyon for the first time, quiet as deer, some of them, coming to your hand for salt: their dark eyes wide and gleaming with the wonder and the fear we had all felt at seeing for the first time life as our dreams had always imagined it… at seeing so many people with whom they could fall in love. The old enchantment composed of lights, music, people was transfixing them for the first time, and it made their faces even more touching.

On the human imagination events produce the effects of time. Thus he who has travelled far and seen much is apt to fancy that he has lived long; and the history that most abounds in important incidents soonest assumes the aspect of antiquity. In no other way can we account for the venerable air that is already gathering around American annals. When the mind reverts to the earliest days of colonial history, the period seems remote and obscure, the thousand changes that thicken along the links of recollections, throwing back the origin of the nation to a day so distant as seemingly to reach the mists of time; and yet four lives of ordinary duration would suffice to transmit, from mouth to mouth, in the form of tradition, all that civilized man has achieved within the limits of the republic.....Thus, what seems venerable by an accumulation of changes is reduced to familiarity when we come seriously to consider it solely in connection with time.

So she learned ways of conserving bits of seconds. Long before the train ground to a stop at her station, she pushed her way to the door to be one of the first expelled when it slid open. Out of the train, she ran like a deer, circling the crowd to be the first up the stairs leading to the street. Walking to the office, she kept close to the buildings so she could turn corners sharply. She crossed streets kittycorner to save stepping off and on an extra pair of curbs. At the building, she shoved her way into the elevator even though the operator yelled "Car's full!" And all this maneuvering to arrive one minute before, instead of after nine!

They want to control humankind through what they call selective breeding. The Nazis started it, but now the nwo are continuing it. See, the only way to control population is to first get it back down to manageable size. They're culling the herd, same way the game commission does when deer population gets out of control. That's why we've got diseases like cancer and aids. You telling me that we can put a little goddamn skateboard-looking robot on Mars and have it send pictures back, but we can't find a cure for cancer? There's a cure. You can bet on that, boys. There's a goddamn cure. They just won't release it because cancer helps cut down the population.

He had not stopped looking into her eyes, and she showed no signs of faltering. He gave a deep sigh and recited: "O sweet treasures, discovered to my sorrow." She did not understand. "It is a verse by the grandfather of my great-great-grandmother," he explained. "He wrote three eclogues, two elegies, five songs, and forty sonnets. Most of them for a Portuguese lady of very ordinary charms who was never his, first because he was married, and then because she married another man and died before he did." "Was he a priest too?" "A soldier," he said. Something stirred in the heart of Sierva María, for she wanted to hear the verse again. He repeated it, and this time he continued, in an intense, well-articulated voice, until he had recited the last of the forty sonnets by the cavalier of amours and arms Don Garcilaso de la Vega, killed in his prime by a stone hurled in battle.When he had finished, Cayetano took Sierva María's hand and placed it over his heart. She felt the internal clamor of his suffering. "I am always in this state," he said. And without giving his panic an opportunity, he unburdened himself of the dark truth that did not permit him to live. He confessed that every moment was filled with thoughts of her, that everything he ate and drank tasted of her, that she was his life, always and everywhere, as only God had the right and power to be, and that the supreme joy of his heart would be to die with her. He continued to speak without looking at her, with the same fluidity and passion as when he recited poetry, until it seemed to him that Sierva María was sleeping. But she was awake, her eyes, like those of a startled deer, fixed on him. She almost did not dare to ask: "And now?" "And now nothing," he said. "It is enough for me that you know." He could not go on. Weeping in silence, he slipped his arm beneath her head to serve as a pillow, and she curled up at his side. And so they remained, not sleeping, not talking, until the roosters began to crow and he had to hurry to arrive in time for five-o'clock Mass. Before he left, Sierva María gave him the beautiful necklace of Oddúa: eighteen inches of mother-of-pearl and coral beads. Panic had been replaced by the yearning in his heart. Delaura knew no peace, he carried out his tasks in a haphazard way, he floated until the joyous hour when he escaped the hospital to see Sierva María. He would reach the cell gasping for breath, soaked by the perpetual rains, and she would wait for him with so much longing that only his smile allowed her to breathe again. One night she took the initiative with the verses she had learned after hearing them so often. 'When I stand and contemplate my fate and see the path along which you have led me," she recited. And asked with a certain slyness: "What's the rest of it?" "I reach my end, for artless I surrendered to one who is my undoing and my end," he said. She repeated the lines with the same tenderness, and so they continued until the end of the book, omitting verses, corrupting and twisting the sonnets to suit themselves, toying with them with the skill of masters. They fell asleep exhausted. At five the warder brought in breakfast, to the uproarious crowing of the roosters, and they awoke in alarm. Life stopped for them.

In this quiet corner, the best wild flowers grow, and the first peepers are heard in the spring, even before the snow melts. Here, owls call from the treetops in the early morning, and the irreverent crows hold their noisy conventions. Here, the mother deer has her fawn, and the migrating geese come to rest. It is here that the fox is safe from the hunters.

My first encounter with a baguette, torn still warm from its paper sheathing, shattered and sighed on contact. The sound stopped me in my tracks, the way a crackling branch gives deer pause; that’s what good crust does. Once I began to chew, the flavor unfolded, deep with yeast and salt, the warm humidity of the tender crumb almost breathing against my lips.

A Swedish minister having assembled the chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, made a sermon to them, acquainting them with the principal historical facts on which our religion is founded — such as the fall of our first parents by eating an apple, the coming of Christ to repair the mischief, his miracles and suffering, etc. When he had finished an Indian orator stood up to thank him. ‘What you have told us,’ says he, ‘is all very good. It is indeed bad to eat apples. It is better to make them all into cider. We are much obliged by your kindness in coming so far to tell us those things which you have heard from your mothers. In return, I will tell you some of those we have heard from ours. ‘In the beginning, our fathers had only the flesh of animals to subsist on, and if their hunting was unsuccessful they were starving. Two of our young hunters, having killed a deer, made a fire in the woods to boil some parts of it. When they were about to satisfy their hunger, they beheld a beautiful young woman descend from the clouds and seat herself on that hill which you see yonder among the Blue Mountains. ‘They said to each other, “It is a spirit that perhaps has smelt our broiling venison and wishes to eat of it; let us offer some to her.” They presented her with the tongue; she was pleased with the taste of it and said: “Your kindness shall be rewarded; come to this place after thirteen moons, and you will find something that will be of great benefit in nourishing you and your children to the latest generations.” They did so, and to their surprise found plants they had never seen before, but which from that ancient time have been constantly cultivated among us to our great advantage. Where her right hand had touched the ground they found maize; where her left had touched it they found kidney-beans; and where her backside had sat on it they found tobacco.’ The good missionary, disgusted with this idle tale, said: ‘What I delivered to you were sacred truths; but what you tell me is mere fable, fiction, and falsehood.’ The Indian, offended, replied: ‘My brother, it seems your friends have not done you justice in your education; they have not well instructed you in the rules of common civility. You saw that we, who understand and practise those rules, believed all your stories; why do you refuse to believe ours?

The different religions confused me. Which was the right one? I tried to figure it out but had no success. It worried me. The different Gods - Catholic, Jewish, Protestant, Mohammedan - seemed very particular in the way in which they expected me to keep on good terms with them. I couldn't please one without offending the others. One kind soul solved my problem by taking me on my first trip to the planetarium. I contemplated the insignificant flyspeck called Earth, the millions of suns and solar systems, and concluded that whoever was in charge of all this would not throw a fit if I ate ham, or meat on Friday, or did not fast in the daytime during Ramadan. I felt much better after this and was, for a while, keenly interested in astronomy.

The way whitetails got that white ring around their mouth and nose, according to him, it was because they were always sneaking into Browning to drink from the bowls of milk everybody used to leave out, from back when there weren’t any reservation dogs, only reservation cats. That was why the whitetail could come into town like that: no barking. But the cats were too good, they got the mice all so scared that the mice got smart, started living so deep in the walls of the houses that the cats couldn’t get to them, so one day all the cats just left. It was two, maybe three days after that the first dog trotted into town with a stupid grin on its face, looked around for what it could pee on. Denorah hates that she’d believed that, once upon a time. And she wants to cry for not getting to believe it anymore. Yes, the deer drank milk, and that left their mouths ringed white. Fuck it. Run, run.

George Williams, the revered evolutionary biologist, describes the natural world as “grossly immoral.” Having no foresight or compassion, natural selection “can honestly be described as a process for maximizing short-sighted selfishness.” On top of all the miseries inflicted by predators and parasites, the members of a species show no pity to their own kind. Infanticide, siblicide, and rape can be observed in many kinds of animals; infidelity is common even in so-called pair-bonded species; cannibalism can be expected in all species that are not strict vegetarians; death from fighting is more common in most animal species than it is in the most violent American cities. Commenting on how biologists used to describe the killing of starving deer by mountain lions as an act of mercy, Williams wrote: “The simple facts are that both predation and starvation are painful prospects for deer, and that the lion's lot is no more enviable. Perhaps biology would have been able to mature more rapidly in a culture not dominated by Judeo-Christian theology and the Romantic tradition. It might have been well served by the First Holy Truth from [Buddha's] Sermon at Benares: “Birth is painful, old age is painful, sickness is painful, death is painful...”” As soon as we recognize that there is nothing morally commendable about the products of evolution, we can describe human psychology honestly, without the fear that identifying a “natural” trait is the same as condoning it. As Katharine Hepburn says to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen, “Nature, Mr. Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.

The first grade class gathered around the teacher for a game of Guess the Animal. The first picture the teacher held up was a cat. “Okay, boys and girls,” she said brightly, “can anyone tell me what this is?” “I know! I know! It is a cat,” yelled a little boy. “Very good, Eddy. Now who knows what this animal is called?” “That’s a dog,” piped up the same little boy. “Right again. And what about this animal?” she asked, holding up a picture of a deer. Silence fell over the class. After a minute or two the teacher said, “I will give you a hint, children, listen. It is something that your mother calls your father around the house.” “I know! I know!” screamed Eddy. “It is a horny bastard!” A

There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings. The town lay in the midst of a checkerboard of prosperous farms, with fields of grain and hillsides of orchards where, in spring, white clouds of bloom drifted above the green fields. In autumn, oak and maple and birch set up a blaze of color that flamed and flickered across a backdrop of pines. Then foxes barked in the hills and deer silently crossed the fields, half hidden in the mists of the fall mornings. Along the roads, laurel, viburnum, and alder, great ferns and wildflowers delighted the traveler's eye through much of the year. Even in winter the roadsides were places of beauty, where countless birds came to feed on the berries and on the seed heads of the dried weeds rising above the snow. The countryside was, in fact, famous for the abundance and variety of its bird life, and when the flood of migrants was pouring through in spring and fall people traveled from great distances to observe them. Others came to fish the streams, which flowed clear and cold out of the hills and contained shady pools where trout lay. So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their homes, sank their wells, and built their barns. Then a strange blight crept over the area and everything began to change. Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens, the cattle, and sheep sickened and died. Everywhere was a shadow of death. The farmers spoke of much illness among their families. In the town the doctors had become more and more puzzled by new kinds of sickness appearing among their patients. There had been sudden and unexplained deaths, not only among adults but even among children whoe would be stricken suddently while at play and die within a few hours. There was a strange stillness. The birds, for example--where had they gone? Many people spoke of them, puzzled and disturbed. The feeding stations in the backyards were deserted. The few birds seen anywhere were moribund; they trembled violently and could not fly. It was a spring without voices. On the mornings that had once throbbed with the dawn chorus of robins, catbirds, doves, jays, wrens, and scores of other bird voices there was no sound; only silence lay over the fields and woods and marsh. On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs--the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit. The roadsides, once so attractive, were now lined with browned and withered vegetation as though swept by fire. These, too, were silent, deserted by all living things. Even the streams were not lifeless. Anglers no longer visited them, for all the fish had died. In the gutters under the eaves and between the shingles of the roofs, a white granular powder still showed a few patches; some weeks before it had fallen like snow upon the roofs and the lawns, the fields and streams. No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.

once saw a deer get hit by three arrows and keep going. It took him a whole day to die. I followed him. I lost him for a while but then found him again, tracked him farther into the woods than I’d ever been. He was weaker by then, because of the arrows the hunter hit him with. Up close he was hurt worse than I first thought and covered in blood from the battle he’d fought. When he finally fell, I walked up and knelt by him. His hair was matted and warm and slick, and his ribs were rising and falling. Long ears and velvet antlers. He blinked and gazed at me. Dark lashes, his gentle brown eyes. I put my hand on his neck. I stayed there and looked in those eyes until the last of the light went away from them and his ribs were still. Then I got up and went home. I think about that deer. I see him all the time.

the sun struggling to make itself known outside through the dampening gray of the low-hanging clouds. I’ve got a pretty decent view out here, especially first thing in the morning: a nice little copse of winter pine, the farmland beyond, deer tracks dancing across the snow.

When the crops were thriving, Squanto took the men to the open forests where the turkey dwelled. He pointed out the nuts, seeds, and insects that the iridescent birds fed upon. He showed them the leaf nests of the squirrels and the hideouts of the skunks and raccoons. Walking silently along bear trails, he took them to the blueberry patches. He told them that deer moved about at sundown and sunrise. He took them inland to valleys where the deer congregated in winter and were easy to harvest. He walked the Pilgrims freely over the land. To Squanto, as to all Native Americans, the land did not belong to the people, people belonged to the land. He took the children into the meadows to pick wild strawberries. He showed them how to dig up the sweet roots of the wild Jerusalem artichoke. In mid-summer he led them to cranberry bogs and gooseberry patches. Together they gathered chestnuts, hickory nuts, walnuts, and hazelnuts in September. He paddled the boys into the harbor in his dugout canoe to set lobster pots made of reeds and sinew. While they waited to lift their pots, he taught them the creatures of the tidal pools.

THE GHOST OF THE AUTHOR'S MOTHER HAS A CONVERSATION WITH HIS FIANCÉE ABOUT HIGHWAYS ...and down south, honey. When the side of the road began to swell with dead and dying things, that's when us black children knew it was summer. Daddy didn't keep clocks in the house. Ain't no use when the sky round those parts always had some flames runnin' to horizon, lookin' like the sun was always out. back when I was a little girl, I swear, them white folk down south would do anything to stop another dark thing from touching the land, even the nighttime. We ain't have streetlights, or some grandmotherly voice riding through the fields on horseback tellin' us when to come inside. What we had was the stomach of a deer, split open on route 59. What we had was flies resting on the exposed insides of animals with their tongues touching the pavement. What we had was the smell of gunpowder and the promise of more to come, and, child, that'll get you home before the old folks would break out the moonshine and celebrate another day they didn't have to pull the body of someone they loved from the river. I say 'river' because I want you to always be able to look at the trees without crying. When we moved east, I learned how a night sky can cup a black girl in its hands and ask for forgiveness. My daddy sold the pistol he kept in the sock drawer and took me to the park. Those days, I used to ask him what he feared, and he always said "the bottom of a good glass." And then he stopped answering. And then he stopped coming home altogether. Something about the first day of a season, honey. Something always gotta sacrifice its blood. Everything that has its time must be lifted from the earth. My boys don't bother with seasons anymore. My sons went to sleep in the spring once and woke up to a motherless summer. All they know now is that it always be colder than it should be. I wish I could fix this for you. I'm sorry none of my children wear suits anymore. I wish ties didn't remind my boys of shovels, and dirt, and an empty living room. They all used to look so nice in ties. I'm sorry that you may come home one day to the smell of rotting meat, every calendar you own, torn off the walls, burning in a trashcan. And it will be the end of spring. And you will know.

So I drive into town for my first date in two years in a red 1941 Chevrolet four-on-the-floor with a John Deere motor grader hooked behind me. The engine sputters and churns and I wonder if the truck will make it. Chunks of mud spray behind me off the tires. The engine stalls on the main road, sending my dress and bag flying onto the dirty floor. I have to restart twice. At five forty-five, a black thing streaks out in front of me and I feel a thunk. I try to stop but braking’s just not something you can do very quickly with a 10,000-pound piece of machinery behind you. I groan and pull over. I have to go check. Remarkably, the cat stands up, looks around stunned, and shoots back into the woods as quickly as it came. At three minutes to six, after doing twenty in a fifty with horns honking and teenagers hollering at me, I park down the street from Hilly’s house since Hilly’s cul-de-sac doesn’t provide adequate parking for farm equipment. I grab my bag and run inside without even knocking, all out of breath and sweaty and windblown and there they are, the three of them, including my date. Having highballs in the front living room.

You are the sun. The sun doesn't move, this is what it does. You are the Earth. The Earth is here for a start, and then the Earth moves around the sun. And now, we'll have an explanation that simple folks like us can also understand, about immortality. All I ask is that you step with me into the boundlessness, where constancy, quietude and peace, infinite emptiness reign. And just imagine, in this infinite sonorous silence, everywhere is an impenetrable darkness. Here, we only experience general motion, and at first, we don't notice the events that we are witnessing. The brilliant light of the sun always sheds its heat and light on that side of the Earth which is just then turned towards it. And we stand here in its brilliance. This is the moon. The moon revolves around the Earth. What is happening? We suddenly see that the disc of the moon, the disc of the moon, on the Sun's flaming sphere, makes an indentation, and this indentation, the dark shadow, grows bigger... and bigger. And as it covers more and more, slowly only a narrow crescent of the sun remains, a dazzling crescent. And at the next moment, the next moment - say that it's around one in the afternoon - a most dramatic turn of event occurs. At that moment the air suddenly turns cold. Can you feel it? The sky darkens, then goes all dark. The dogs howl, rabbits hunch down, the deer run in panic, run, stampede in fright. And in this awful, incomprehensible dusk, even the birds... the birds too are confused and go to roost. And then... Complete Silence. Everything that lives is still. Are the hills going to march off? Will heaven fall upon us? Will the Earth open under us? We don't know. We don't know, for a total eclipse has come upon us... But... but no need to fear. It's not over. For across the sun's glowing sphere, slowly, the Moon swims away. And the sun once again bursts forth, and to the Earth slowly there comes again light, and warmth again floods the Earth. Deep emotion pierces everyone. They have escaped the weight of darkness

For the first time that day, he thought about the men who abandoned him. His rage grew as he stared at the doe. Abandonment seemed too benign to describe their treachery. Abandonment was a passive act—running away or leaving something behind. If his keepers had done no more than abandon him, he would at this moment be sighting down the barrel of his gun, about to shoot the deer. He would be using his knife to butcher the animal, and sparking his flint against steel to start a fire and cook it. He looked down at himself, wet from head to toe, wounded, reeking from the skunk, the bitter taste of roots still in his mouth. What

5. A polar bear's liver is poisonous – by vitamins. In various cultures, pork or chicken liver is considered a delicacy, due to its taste and nutritious value. The same is true for liver of some wild animals, such as boars or deer. However, eating a polar bear's liver will most likely kill an average human – but not due to its poison. Polar bears have liver that is rich in vitamin A, containing 24,000 – 35,0000 IU (international units) per gram. For humans, a tolerable upper limit is 10,000 IU, while doubling this amount will result in first symptoms of hypervitaminosis (vitamin toxicity). Tripling the amount, which is normal for polar bears (who are immune to such hypervitaminosis), would result in death.

She awoke knowing what she had been dreaming about. She was a deer in the headlights to his grinning face. In those first moments before she was fully awakened she hadn’t had time to hide her true feelings. He’d read them loud and clear. This was the moment that would start the seductive tango. There was one giant problem. Kayn could not dance her way out of a paper bag.

Countless Victorian-era engravings notwithstanding, the Pilgrims did not spend the day sitting around a long table draped with a white linen cloth, clasping each other’s hands in prayer as a few curious Indians looked on. Instead of an English affair, the First Thanksgiving soon became an overwhelmingly Native celebration when Massasoit and a hundred Pokanokets (more than twice the entire English population of Plymouth) arrived at the settlement with five freshly killed deer. Even if all the Pilgrims’ furniture was brought out into the sunshine, most of the celebrants stood, squatted, or sat on the ground as they clustered around outdoor fires, where the deer and birds turned on wooden spits and where pottages—stews into which varieties of meats and vegetables were thrown—simmered invitingly.

Without any shame, the colonies asked for assistance from the same Christian Indians they had persecuted during the first nine months of the war and received a positive response. The praying Indians, whatever their trepidation, saw this as an invaluable opportunity for their men to prove their worth to the English and secure compensation to ease the suffering of kin still held on Deer and Clark’s Islands.

Let us have it plain: my society is comprised of metal-worshipers. They pray to metal, are owned by metal, and metal uses them; it shoots them, it stabs them. I witness its sycophants, grave zombies, moved about humorlessly as its agents. My minions are spiritually rapt as the ages climaxes in gunpowder. One notes that, upon first being handed a rifle -- by Burton or Speke? -- a chieftain blithely shot one of his own lackeys, expressing radiant joy as the man tumbled dead. Do not stop there, happy Klansman, but watch with me early in the morning as I come in from work: across the street here in the clean "burbs" your white policeman goes reverently to his car with a deer rifle coddled in his right arm like a precocious, beautiful child. This man lives with a pistol on his hip all week, but that is not enough, no, he is devout and it is the Christmas season. His own cowardice, affirmed by the use of guns, would not occur to him any more than the cowardice of God. The gun lobby, oh my peaceful friends, you may hate, but first you had better understand that it is a religion, only secondarily connected to the Bill of Rights. The thick-headed, sometimes even close to tearful, gaze you get when chatting with one of its partisans emanates from the view that they're holding a piece of God. There is no persuading them otherwise, even by a genus, because a life without guns implies the end of the known world to them. Any connection they make to our " pioneer past" is also a fraud, a wistful apology. Folks love a gun for what it can do. A murderer always thinks it was an accident, he says, as if a religious episode had passed over him.

There is one in this tribe too often miserable - a child bereaved of both parents. None cares for this child: she is fed sometimes, but oftener forgotten: a hut rarely receives her: the hollow tree and chill cavern are her home. Forsaken, lost, and wandering, she lives more with the wild beast and bird than with her own kind. Hunger and cold are her comrades: sadness hovers over, and solitude besets her round. Unheeded and unvalued, she should die: but she both lives and grows: the green wilderness nurses her, and becomes to her a mother: feeds her on juicy berry, on saccharine root and nut. There is something in the air of this clime which fosters life kindly: there must be something, too, in its dews, which heals with sovereign balm. Its gentle seasons exaggerate no passion, no sense; its temperature tends to harmony; its breezes, you would say, bring down from heaven the germ of pure thought, and purer feeling. Not grotesquely fantastic are the forms of cliff and foliage; not violently vivid the colouring of flower and bird: in all the grandeur of these forests there is repose; in all their freshness there is tenderness. The gentle charm vouchsafed to flower and tree, - bestowed on deer and dove, - has not been denied to the human nursling. All solitary, she has sprung up straight and graceful. Nature cast her features in a fine mould; they have matured in their pure, accurate first lines, unaltered by the shocks of disease. No fierce dry blast has dealt rudely with the surface of her frame; no burning sun has crisped or withered her tresses: her form gleams ivory-white through the trees; her hair flows plenteous, long, and glossy; her eyes, not dazzled by vertical fires, beam in the shade large and open, and full and dewy: above those eyes, when the breeze bares her forehead, shines an expanse fair and ample, - a clear, candid page, whereon knowledge, should knowledge ever come, might write a golden record. You see in the desolate young savage nothing vicious or vacant; she haunts the wood harmless and thoughtful: though of what one so untaught can think, it is not easy to divine. On the evening of one summer day, before the Flood, being utterly alone - for she had lost all trace of her tribe, who had wandered leagues away, she knew not where, - she went up from the vale, to watch Day take leave and Night arrive. A crag, overspread by a tree, was her station: the oak-roots, turfed and mossed, gave a seat: the oak-boughs, thick-leaved, wove a canopy. Slow and grand the Day withdrew, passing in purple fire, and parting to the farewell of a wild, low chorus from the woodlands. Then Night entered, quiet as death: the wind fell, the birds ceased singing. Now every nest held happy mates, and hart and hind slumbered blissfully safe in their lair. The girl sat, her body still, her soul astir; occupied, however, rather in feeling than in thinking, - in wishing, than hoping, - in imagining, than projecting. She felt the world, the sky, the night, boundlessly mighty. Of all things, herself seemed to herself the centre, - a small, forgotten atom of life, a spark of soul, emitted inadvertent from the great creative source, and now burning unmarked to waste in the heart of a black hollow. She asked, was she thus to burn out and perish, her living light doing no good, never seen, never needed, - a star in an else starless firmament, - which nor shepherd, nor wanderer, nor sage, nor priest, tracked as a guide, or read as a prophecy? Could this be, she demanded, when the flame of her intelligence burned so vivid; when her life beat so true, and real, and potent; when something within her stirred disquieted, and restlessly asserted a God-given strength, for which it insisted she should find exercise?

Behind the abandoned house, two faerie horses chew on dandelions as they wait for their riders. Slight as deer, with a soft halo of light surrounding their bodies, they glide between the trees like ghosts. Oak goes to the first. Her coat a soft grey, her mane braided into something that looks like netting, and which is hung with gold beads. Tooled leather saddlebags rest against her flanks. She nuzzles into his hand.

I found the same excitement in hunting frogs and deer for the first time. The first time I went frog-hunting, I was dumb-founded that someone could have that much fun without doing something immoral or illegal. I was the ice chest man on my first hunt, which basically meant every time my dad caught a frog I would quickly open the lid and then shut it before the frog jumped out. I realized the best part was being the catcher. I don’t want to brag, but I became one of the greatest frog catchers on the planet.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

Someday Even the oldest of the trees continues its wonderful labor. Hummingbird lives in one of them. He’s there for the white blossoms, and the secrecy. The blossoms could be snow, with a dash of pink. At first the fruit is small and green and hard. Everything has dreams, hope, ambition. If I could I would always live in such shining obedience where nothing but the wind trims the boughs. I am sorry for every mistake I have made in my life. I’m sorry I wasn’t wiser sooner. I’m sorry I ever spoke of myself as lonely. Oh, love, lay your hands upon me again. Some of the fruit ripens and is picked and is delicious. Some of it falls and the ants are delighted. Some of it hides under the snow and the famished deer are saved.

Push up some mountains. Cut them down. Drown the land under the sea. Push up some more mountains. Cut them down. Push up a third set of mountains, and let the river cut through them. “Unconformity” is the geologic term for an old, eroded land surface buried under younger rock layers. Put your outspread hand over the Carlin Canyon, Nevada unconformity and your fingers span roughly forty million years- the time that it took to bevel down the first set of mountains and deposit the younger layers on top. What is forty million years? Enough time for a small predatory dinosaur to evolve into a bird. Enough time for a four-legged, deer-like mammal to evolve into a whale. And far more than enough time to turn an ape-like creature in eastern Africa into a big-brained biped who can marvel at such things. The Grand Canyon’s Great Unconformity divides 1.7 billion-year-old rock from 550 million-year-old rock, a gap of more than one billion years. One billion years. I earn my salary studying the Earth and teaching its history, but I admit utter helplessness in comprehending such a span. A billion pages like those of this book would stack up more than forty miles. I had lived one bullion seconds a few days before my thirty-second birthday. A tape measure one billion inches long would stretch two-thirds of the way around the Earth. Such analogies hint at what deep time means- but they don’t get us there. “The human mind may not have evolved enough to be able to comprehend deep time," John McPhee once observed, “it may only be able to measure it.

Butterflies by Maisie Aletha Smikle Colorfully colored butterflies Black yellow orange and green With their beautiful specks Align the garden decks Butterfly butterfly… Lovely flies that ain't got butter Their beauty makes one stutter And their heart go pitter patter And will soon melt like butter They won’t eat from a platter And one can only mutter Butterfly butterfly .... Radiant as the sunshine Beautiful as the colors of the rainbow Harmless as a deer Adorn for all to see First it was a caterpillar Crawling on its tiny legs It's entire body stretches out on a leaf In the twinkling of an eye The caterpillar transforms And are given wings to fly And fly it must…. It was not created to crawl Miraculous indeed Is the life of a butterfly Displayed for all to see Hope in the life of a radiant butterfly

Everyone in the delivery room was laughing at the story, including me. I never knew whether the doctor thought it was funny or not. She certainly did not join in the lightheartedness the rest of us felt. Because my doctor was also one of my bosses, I respected her and yet felt a bit intimidated by her at the same time. Jase was not intimidated at all. He was so relaxed, and that alleviated all the stress and tension I had felt since I first arrived at the hospital. True to his personality, he kept most of the room enthralled and laughing at his stories. As a lifelong hunter, he is no stranger to blood and gore. He thought the surgical process was very interesting and wanted to study everything inside of me. I’m sure his comment that my insides looked like a deer he had skinned the previous day was the first of its kind uttered during a C-section. At one point, the doctor said to him, “Jason, you have to be quiet now.” “Why?” he asked. “Because I’m getting close to the baby with this scalpel, and Missy has to stop laughing.” “Oh,” he said. “My bad.” As the doctor prepared to remove Cole, the room became quiet; I didn’t know exactly what was going on because I couldn’t see around the sheet, but I knew the time had come for our baby to be born. Jase watched everything intently. The doctor pulled on the baby, but he would not budge. In Jase’s words, “He just wouldn’t come out.” So Jase decided to lend a hand. He reached into the area near where the doctor was working, which caused every person to freeze. The room fell completely silent. As Jase recalled later, the doctor’s eyes filled with fire, and she shot him laser-sharp looks. No words were spoken, but he immediately raised his hands as if to say, “Don’t shoot,” and backed off.

The underlying reason why this transition was piecemeal is that food production systems evolved as a result of the accumulation of many separate decisions about allocating time and effort. Foraging humans, like foraging animals, have only finite time and energy, which they can spend in various ways. We can picture an incipient farmer waking up and asking: Shall I spend today hoeing my garden (predictably yielding a lot of vegetables several months from now), gathering shellfish (predictably yielding a little meat today), or hunting deer (yielding possibly a lot of meat today, but more likely nothing)? Human and animal foragers are constantly prioritizing and making effort-allocation decisions, even if only unconsciously. They concentrate first on favorite foods, or ones that yield the highest payoff. If these are unavailable, they shift to less and less preferred foods.

CUTTING THROUGH by Kendra Kopelke It takes five seconds to cut across someone’s property. I did it a lot. I led my dog onto the grass between two houses, checked first to see if anyone appeared to be home. We wanted to catch a break from monotony. Like thieves we wanted what we wanted. We wanted to thread through the dull canvas that was our neighborhood, to make up for the people who let us down. We loved empty backyards, dead, twisted gardens, the rush and fear of being exposed and unseen in broad daylight. We were foxes, deer. We were out there, where nowhere is. Maybe the neighbors would look out their windows and see us for what we were. We walked quickly heads down, imagined rifles pointed at our backs, fists shaking behind glass, voices putting us in our place. We told ourselves each time this is the last time.

THE FOUR TRUTHS OF SUFFERING Over 2,500 years ago, seven weeks after attaining enlightenment under the Bodhi tree, the Buddha gave his first teaching in the Deer Park outside Varanasi. There he taught the Four Noble Truths. The first is the truth of suffering—not only the kind of suffering that is obvious to the eye, but also the kind, as we have seen, that exists in subtler forms. The second is the truth of the causes of suffering—ignorance that engenders craving, malice, pride, and many other thoughts that poison our lives and those of others. Since these mental poisons can be eliminated, an end to suffering—the third truth—is therefore possible. The fourth truth is the path that turns that potential into reality. The path is the process of using all available means to eliminate the fundamental causes of suffering. In brief, we must: Recognize suffering, Eliminate its source, End it By practicing the path.

Here are three elements we often see in town names: If a town ends in “-by”, it was originally a farmstead or a small village where some of the Viking invaders settled. The first part of the name sometimes referred to the person who owned the farm - Grimsby was “Grim’s village”. Derby was “a village where deer were found”. The word “by” still means “town” in Danish. If a town ends in “-ing”, it tells us about the people who lived there. Reading means “The people of Reada”, in other words “Reada’s family or tribe”. We don’t know who Reada was, but his name means “red one”, so he probably had red hair. If a town ends in “-caster” or “-chester”, it was originally a Roman fort or town. The word comes from a Latin words “castra”, meaning a camp or fortification. The first part of the name is usually the name of the locality where the fort was built. So Lancaster, for example, is “the Roman fort on the River Lune”.

When warm weather came, Baby Suggs, holy, followed by every black man, woman, and child who could make it through, took her great heart to the Clearing--a wide-open place cut deep in the woods nobody knew for what at the end of the path known only to deer and whoever cleared the land in the first place. In the heat of every Saturday afternoon, she sat in the clearing while the people waited among the trees. After situating herself on a huge flat-sided rock, Baby Suggs bowed her head and prayed silently. The company watched her from the trees. They knew she was ready when she put her stick down. Then she shouted, "Let the children come!" and they ran from the trees toward her. "Let your mothers hear you laugh,"she told them, and the woods rang. The adults looked on and could not help smiling. Then "Let the grown men come," she shouted. They stepped out one by one from among the ringing trees. "Let your wives and your children see you dance," she told them, and groundlife shuddered under their feet. Finally she called the women to her. “Cry,” she told them. “For the living and the dead. Just cry.” And without covering their eyes the women let loose. It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath. In the silence that followed, Baby Suggs, holy, offered up to them her great big heart…“Here,” she said, “in this here place, we flesh; flesh that weeps, laughs; flesh that dances on bare feet in grass. Love it. Love it hard. Yonder they do not love your flesh. They despise it… No more do they love the skin on your back. Yonder they flay it. And O my people they do not love your hands. Those they only use, tie, bind, chop off and leave empty. Love your hands! Love them! Raise them up and kiss them. Touch others with them, pat them together, stroke them on your face ‘cause they don’t love that either. You got to love it - you! And no, they ain’t in love with your mouth. Yonder, out there, they will see it broken and break it again. What you say out of it they will not heed…What you put into it to nourish your body they will snatch away and give leavins instead. No they don’t love your mouth. You got to love it." "This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance; backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you. And oh my people, out yonder, hear me, they do not love your neck unnoosed and straight. So love your neck; put a hand on it, grace it, stroke it, and hold it up. And all your inside parts that they’d just as soon slop for hogs, you got to love them. The dark, dark liver - love it, love it, and the beat and beating heart, love that too. More than eyes or feet…More than your life-holding womb and your live-giving private parts, hear me now, love your heart. For this is the prize."" -Baby Suggs

My first reaction was that someone had fused a person and a deer together. The creature had a head and shoulders and arms that were more or less where they should have been, though the skin was a pale shade of blue. But below that he had fur, a mix of blue and tan, covering a four-legged body that really did look like it belonged to a deer, or maybe a small horse. He ducked his head out the doorway and I could see that even the fairly normal-looking parts of him weren’t all that normal. For a start, he had no mouth, just three vertical slits. And then there were his eyes. Two of them were where they should have been, although they were a glittery green color that was kind of shocking. But the real shock was the other eyes. He had what seemed like horns, only on the top of each horn was an eye. The horns could move, twisting to point the eyes front and back or up and down. I thought the eyes were bad, until I saw the tail. It was like a scorpion’s tail, thick and powerful-looking. On the end was a wickedly curved, very sharp-looking horn or stinger.

know that the first mineral product of the Ohio Valley was salt?” Ned asked. When Nancy shook her head, he went on, “As you know, salt has been an essential food for man and animal since the beginning of time. In prehistoric days salt attracted not only human inhabitants to this area, but also animals like the giant sloth, the mammoth elk, deer, and buffalo.” “That’s fascinating,” said Nancy. “Don’t stop.” “Professor will relate one more story and that’s the end of his knowledge.” Nancy giggled and Ned went on, “The Indians here were fearful that the white men would take away all their territory, so they raided and burned settlements. It was not until the American Army took over that the raids were stopped, around 1794.” By this time Ned was nearing Pine Hill. Nancy happened to look up the high embankment at the woods which ran to the Rorick garden. Suddenly she caught a flash of sunlight on glass. “Ned,” she said, “somebody is watching us with binoculars! See him up there among the trees?” Ned turned to look, resting his paddle. “You think that’s your phantom?” he asked.

And now, for the first time, the Lion was quite silent. He was going to and fro among the animals. And every now and then he would go up to two of them (always two at a time) and touch their noses with his. He would touch two beavers among all the beavers, two leopards among all the leopards, one stag and one deer among all the deer, and leave the rest. Some sorts of animal he passed over altogether. But the pairs which he had touched instantly left their own kinds and followed him. At last he stood still and all the creatures whom he had touched came and stood in a wide circle around him. The others whom he had not touched began to wander away. Their noises faded gradually into the distance. The chosen beasts who remained were now utterly silent, all with their eyes fixed intently upon the Lion. The cat-like ones gave an occasional twitch of the tail but otherwise all were still. For the first time that day there was complete silence, except for the noise of running water. Digory’s heart beat wildly; he knew something very solemn was going to be done. He had not forgotten about his Mother, but he knew jolly well that, even for her, he couldn’t interrupt a thing like this. The Lion, whose eyes never blinked, stared at the animals as hard as if he was going to burn them up with his mere stare. And gradually a change came over them. The smaller ones—the rabbits, moles, and such-like—grew a good deal larger. The very big ones—you noticed it most with the elephants—grew a little smaller. Many animals sat up on their hind legs. Most put their heads on one side as if they were trying very hard to understand. The Lion opened his mouth, but no sound came from it; he was breathing out, a long, warm breath; it seemed to sway all the beasts as the wind sways a line of trees. Far overhead from beyond the veil of blue sky which hid them the stars sang again; a pure, cold, difficult music. Then there came a swift flash like fire (but it burnt nobody) either from the sky or from the Lion itself, and every drop of blood tingled in the children’s bodies, and the deepest, wildest voice they had ever heard was saying: “Narnia, Narnia, Narnia, awake. Love. Think. Speak. Be walking trees. Be talking beasts. Be divine waters.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

Ode to My Socks Maru Mori brought me a pair of socks knitted with her own shepherd's hands, two socks soft as rabbits. I slipped my feet into them as if into jewel cases woven with threads of dusk and sheep's wool. Audacious socks, my feet became two woolen fish, two long sharks of lapis blue shot with a golden thread, two mammoth blackbirds, two cannons, thus honored were my feet by these celestial socks. They were so beautiful that for the first time my feet seemed unacceptable to me, two tired old fire fighters not worthy of the woven fire of those luminous socks. Nonetheless, I resisted the strong temptation to save them the way schoolboys bottle fireflies, the way scholars hoard sacred documents. I resisted the wild impulse to place them in a cage of gold and daily feed them birdseed and rosy melon flesh. Like explorers who in the forest surrender a rare and tender deer to the spit and eat it with remorse, I stuck out my feet and pulled on the handsome socks, and then my shoes. So this is the moral of my ode: twice beautiful is beauty and what is good is doubly good when it is a case of two woolen socks in wintertime.

Much like his birth, Cole’s first hunting experience was a little more traumatic. He was give years old and we were getting ready to have our Christmas party at Phil’s house in 2002. Because we hunt on private land, we’re allowed to shoot deer from our vehicles. Cole and I climbed into my truck right before dark, and I drove next to the woods. As I was explaining safety and other things about hunting to him, a deer walked right into the middle of a trail. We hadn’t been there for five minutes before the deer showed up! I looked at Cole and pointed toward the front of the truck. Without saying anything, I leaned my gun out the driver’s-side window of my truck and shot the deer. The deer did a double backflip and hit the ground. I looked at Cole and his mouth was wide open. I could have picked his jaw up from the floorboard. “That’s how you do it, son,” I told him. Cole didn’t say anything. I figured his ears were still ringing, and I instantly regretted not telling him to cover them. It ended up being a pretty traumatic experience for him, and I feared he’d never want to go hunting again. In hindsight, he might have been a little too young to witness something like that.

She finds herself, by some miraculous feat, no longer standing in the old nursery but returned to the clearing in the woods. It is the 'green cathedral', the place she first kissed Jack all those weeks ago. The place where they laid out the stunned sparrowhawk, then watched it spring miraculously back to life. All around, the smooth, grey trunks of ancient beech trees rise up from the walls of the room to tower over her, spreading their branches across the ceiling in a fan of tangled branches and leaves, paint and gold leaf cleverly combined to create the shimmering effect of a leafy canopy at its most dense and opulent. And yet it is not the clearing, not in any real or grounded sense, because instead of leaves, the trees taper up to a canopy of extraordinary feathers shimmering and spreading out like a peacock's tail across the ceiling, a hundred green, gold and sapphire eyes gazing down upon her. Jack's startling embellishments twist an otherwise literal interpretation of their woodland glade into a fantastical, dreamlike version of itself. Their green cathedral, more spectacular and beautiful than she could have ever imagined. She moves closer to one of the trees and stretches out a hand, feeling instead of rough bark the smooth, cool surface of a wall. She can't help but smile. The trompe-l'oeil effect is dazzling and disorienting in equal measure. Even the window shutters and cornicing have been painted to maintain the illusion of the trees, while high above her head the glass dome set into the roof spills light as if it were the sun itself, pouring through the canopy of eyes. The only other light falls from the glass windowpanes above the window seat, still flanked by the old green velvet curtains, which somehow appear to blend seamlessly with the painted scene. The whole effect is eerie and unsettling. Lillian feels unbalanced, no longer sure what is real and what is not. It is like that book she read to Albie once- the one where the boy walks through the wardrobe into another world. That's what it feels like, she realizes: as if she has stepped into another realm, a place both fantastical and otherworldly. It's not just the peacock-feather eyes that are staring at her. Her gaze finds other details: a shy muntjac deer peering out from the undergrowth, a squirrel, sitting high up in a tree holding a green nut between its paws, small birds flitting here and there. The tiniest details have been captured by Jack's brush: a silver spider's web, a creeping ladybird, a puffy white toadstool. The only thing missing is the sound of the leaf canopy rustling and the soft scuttle of insects moving across the forest floor.

The first time I saw your father, I’d just come home from the hunt. The forests of Calydon are thick with game, but the deer are so clever that it was the first time I’d managed to bring one down. I was so proud of what I’d done that I insisted on carrying the buck into the throne room myself and dropped it at my father’s feet before I noticed we had a guest.” She smiled at the memory. “I’ll bet Father thought you were Artemis herself,” I said. That made my mother laugh. “Not Artemis. You know how he feels about her. But he did say he mistook me for one of her huntress nymphs. That was just before he told me he had to marry me or die.” I made a face. “Father said that?” “Men say many things when they want to win a woman. Whether or not they mean what they say…” She shrugged. “Your father meant it. Poor soul, it seemed like he would die, because none of my father’s advisers thought I should marry him. Tyndareus came to Calydon as a landless exile; his brother had stolen his kingdom.” The story of Father’s early trouble and final triumph was so well known that the palace stones could tell it. “Did you come to Sparta to marry him after he won back his crown?” I asked. “Or did he have to go back to Calydon for you?” “Are you asking because you want to know, or because you want to distract me from what we need to talk about?

As Marlboro Man slid open the huge barn doors and flipped on the enormous lights mounted to the beams, my heart began beating quickly. I couldn’t wait to smell its puppy breath. “Happy wedding,” he said sweetly, leaning against the wall of the barn and motioning toward the center with his eyes. My eyes adjusted to the light…and slowly focused on what was before me. It wasn’t a pug. It wasn’t a diamond or a horse or a shiny gold bangle…or even a blender. It wasn’t a love seat. It wasn’t a lamp. Sitting before me, surrounded by scattered bunches of hay, was a bright green John Deere riding lawn mower--a very large, very green, very mechanical, and very diesel-fueled John Deere riding lawn mower. Literally and figuratively, crickets chirped in the background of the night. And for the hundredth time since our engagement, the reality of the future for which I’d signed up flashed in front of me. I felt a twinge of panic as I saw the tennis bracelet I thought I didn’t want go poof, disappearing completely into the ether. Would this be how presents on the ranch would always be? Does the world of agriculture have a different chart of wedding anniversary presents? Would the first anniversary be paper…or motor oil? Would the second be cotton or Weed Eater string? I would add this to the growing list of things I still needed to figure out.

About the Phones Closing my car door, you always say - Watch for deer and text when you get home. I want to, I do, but I will forget. Time moves and I forget. - Look I am trying, I am, but it's not the kind of thing that trying solves. Once on the side of a highway, a cop told me about dragging a full grown buck out the windshield of a wrecked car all by himself. About the sounds it made, Like the devil learning what regret feels like. About the woman it kicked to death in the driver's seat. The phone call he had to make to her grown daughter after whose first question was, Did the deer survive? Different cop, different time, different highway. Said she keeps her phone on silent then spoke about securing the crime scene in that classroom in Blacksburg where one student shot all the others. Every single one of them had a cell phone, she said, and for hours after every single one rang and rang or vibrated across the floor in the same slow way that blood pools. No one was allowed to answer, no one, so instead the phones rang all night until batteries were empty, voicemails full of a thousand Call me when you get this so I know you're okays. Turns out time moves the way blood does. Batteries too. Runs out like a startled deer across a road. - Listen I am trying to find a way to tell you this. There are things that trying solves but this is not one of them.

Wendell was no sooner gazing at the silver sewing needles than he was brushing away a tear. "They are like my father's," he said wonderingly. "I remember the flicker of them in the darkness as we all sat together by the ghealach fire, with the trees surrounding us. He would bring them everywhere, even the Hunt of the Frostveiling---that is the first hunt of autumn, the largest of the year, when even the queen and her children roam through the wilds with spears and swords, riding our best---oh, I don't know what you would call them in your language. They are a kind of faerie fox, black and golden together, which grow larger than horses. My brothers and sisters and I would crowd round the fire to watch him weave nets from brambles and spidersilk. And all the moorbeasts and hag-headed deer would cower at the sight of those nets, though they barely blinked at the whistle of our arrows." He fell silent, gazing at them with his eyes gone very green. "Well," I said, predictably at a loss for an answer to this, "I hope they are of use to you. Only keep them away from any garments of mine." He took my hand, and then, before I knew what he was doing, lifted it to his mouth. I felt the briefest brush of his lips against my skin, and then he had released me and was back to exclaiming over his gifts. I turned and went into the kitchen in an aimless haste, looking for something to do, anything that might distract me from the warmth that had trailed up my arm like an errant summer breeze

Although father was a very precious man and the loss of him is very great to me, as it is to all honest folk who knew him, it is Solace's death that is the harder for me to bear. All the world mourns father, whose labors God blessed while he lived. Many will remember him. Not so my Solace, who made no mark upon the world. Nights I can barely sleep for the loss of her weight against my body. In dark of night, I hear her cry, and start awake. But it is a voice of my dream only, and it wakes me to an aching loneliness. Now, all these months since her death, I think of her, and how she would have grown and changed. I see her walking beside me with a rolling gait, reaching out a plump hand to clasp my fingers. I see her hair lengthened and curling about her face. I imagine the sound of her voice as she says her first words, the small frown at her brow as she puzzles at something, a glimpse of her milk teeth as she smiles. It will be so, always. As the years pass, she will live and grow in my mind's eye, from infancy through sweet girlhood, and when I am old I will see her still, coming herself into womanhood, her sky-blue eyes expressing a kindly wisdom, her laugh as she lifts up her own babe. Yet all that time, she will lie in the ground, an infant always, her life ended just a little after the world had turned a full year. In my dreams, she comes to me. But always, in the end, frightfully. For I see her in her grave. Frail little finger bones, bleached white, curl around a crumbling parchment, a rotting peg doll, and a scatter of wampum beads fallen loose from a decaying shred of deer hide.

Toward an Organic Philosophy SPRING, COAST RANGE The glow of my campfire is dark red and flameless, The circle of white ash widens around it. I get up and walk off in the moonlight and each time I look back the red is deeper and the light smaller. Scorpio rises late with Mars caught in his claw; The moon has come before them, the light Like a choir of children in the young laurel trees. It is April; the shad, the hot headed fish, Climbs the rivers; there is trillium in the damp canyons; The foetid adder’s tongue lolls by the waterfall. There was a farm at this campsite once, it is almost gone now. There were sheep here after the farm, and fire Long ago burned the redwoods out of the gulch, The Douglas fir off the ridge; today the soil Is stony and incoherent, the small stones lie flat And plate the surface like scales. Twenty years ago the spreading gully Toppled the big oak over onto the house. Now there is nothing left but the foundations Hidden in poison oak, and above on the ridge, Six lonely, ominous fenceposts; The redwood beams of the barn make a footbridge Over the deep waterless creek bed; The hills are covered with wild oats Dry and white by midsummer. I walk in the random survivals of the orchard. In a patch of moonlight a mole Shakes his tunnel like an angry vein; Orion walks waist deep in the fog coming in from the ocean; Leo crouches under the zenith. There are tiny hard fruits already on the plum trees. The purity of the apple blossoms is incredible. As the wind dies down their fragrance Clusters around them like thick smoke. All the day they roared with bees, in the moonlight They are silent and immaculate. SPRING, SIERRA NEVADA Once more golden Scorpio glows over the col Above Deadman Canyon, orderly and brilliant, Like an inspiration in the brain of Archimedes. I have seen its light over the warm sea, Over the coconut beaches, phosphorescent and pulsing; And the living light in the water Shivering away from the swimming hand, Creeping against the lips, filling the floating hair. Here where the glaciers have been and the snow stays late, The stone is clean as light, the light steady as stone. The relationship of stone, ice and stars is systematic and enduring: Novelty emerges after centuries, a rock spalls from the cliffs, The glacier contracts and turns grayer, The stream cuts new sinuosities in the meadow, The sun moves through space and the earth with it, The stars change places. The snow has lasted longer this year, Than anyone can remember. The lowest meadow is a lake, The next two are snowfields, the pass is covered with snow, Only the steepest rocks are bare. Between the pass And the last meadow the snowfield gapes for a hundred feet, In a narrow blue chasm through which a waterfall drops, Spangled with sunset at the top, black and muscular Where it disappears again in the snow. The world is filled with hidden running water That pounds in the ears like ether; The granite needles rise from the snow, pale as steel; Above the copper mine the cliff is blood red, The white snow breaks at the edge of it; The sky comes close to my eyes like the blue eyes Of someone kissed in sleep. I descend to camp, To the young, sticky, wrinkled aspen leaves, To the first violets and wild cyclamen, And cook supper in the blue twilight. All night deer pass over the snow on sharp hooves, In the darkness their cold muzzles find the new grass At the edge of the snow.

Death The first of the Modoc Indians, Kumokums, built a village on the banks of a river. Although it left the bears plenty of room to curl up and sleep, the deer complained that it was very cold and there wasn’t enough grass. Kumokums built another village far from there and decided to spend half of every year in each. For this he divided the year into two parts, six moons of summer and six of winter, and the remaining moon was dedicated to moving. Life between the two villages was as happy as could be, and births multiplied amazingly; but people who died refused to get out, and the population got so big that there was no way to feed it. Then Kumokums decided to throw out the dead people. He knew that the chief of the land of the dead was a great man and didn’t mistreat anybody. Soon afterward Kumokums’s small daughter died. She died and left the country of the Modocs, as her father had ordered. In despair, Kumokums consulted the porcupine. “You made the decision,” said the porcupine, “and now you must take the consequences like anyone else.” But Kumokums journeyed to the far-off land of the dead and claimed his daughter. “Now your daughter is my daughter,” said the big skeleton in charge there. “She has no flesh or blood. What can she do in your country?” “I want her anyway,” said Kumokums. The chief of the land of the dead thought for a long time. “Take her,” he yielded, and warned, “Shell walk behind you. On approaching the country of the living, flesh will return to cover her bones. But you may not turn around till you arrive. Understand? I give you this chance.” Kumokums set out. The daughter walked behind him. Several times he touched her hand, which was more fleshy and warm each time, and still he didn’t look back. But when the green woods appeared on the horizon he couldn’t stand the strain and turned his head. A handful of bones crumbled before his eyes. (132)

Among the many people Chris met while doing charity work was Randy Cupp, who invited him and Bubba out to shoot with him come deer season. When Chris passed away, Randy made it clear to me that the offer not only still stood, but that he would love to give Bubba a chance to kill his first buck. With deer season upon us, the kids and I decided to take him up on the offer. Angel, Bubba, and I went out to his property on a beautiful morning. Setting out for the blind, I felt Chris’s presence, as if he were scouting along with us. We settled into our spots and waited. A big buck came across in front of us a short time later. It was an easy shot--except that Bubba had neglected to put his ear protection in. He scrambled to get it in, but by the time he was ready, the animal had bounded off. Deer--and opportunities--are like that. We waited some more. Another buck came out from the trees not five minutes later. And this one was not only in range, but it was bigger than the first: a thirteen pointer. Chris must have scared that thing up. “That’s the one,” said Randy as the animal pranced forward. Bubba took a shot. The deer scooted off as the gunshot echoed. My son thought he’d missed, but Randy was sure he’d hit him. At first, we didn’t see a blood trail--a bad sign, since a wounded animal generally leaves an easily spotted trail. But a few steps later, we found the body prone in the woods. Bubba had killed him with a shot to the lungs. Like father, like son. While Bubba left to dress the carcass, I went back to the blind with Angel to wait for another. She was excited that she might get a deer just like her brother. But when a buck walked within range, tears came to her eyes. “I can’t do it,” she said, putting down her gun. “It’s okay,” I told her. “I just can’t.” “Do you want me to?” I asked. She nodded. I took aim. Even though I was married to a hard-core hunter, I had never shot a deer before. I lined up the scope, walking him into the crosshairs. A slow breath, and I squeezed the trigger. The shot surprised me--just as Chris said it should. The deer fell. He was good meat; we eat what we kill, another of Chris’s golden rules. “You know, Angel, you’re going to be my hunting partner forever,” I told her later. “You’re just so calm and observant. And good luck.” We plan to do that soon. She’ll be armed with a high-powered camera, rather than a rifle.

On these lands, in both the occupied places and those left to grow wild, alongside the community and the dwindling wildlife, there lived another creature. At night, he roamed the roads that connected Arcand to the larger town across the Bay where Native people were still unwelcome two centuries on. His name was spoken in the low tones saved for swear words and prayer. He was the threat from a hundred stories told by those old enough to remember the tales. Broke Lent? The rogarou will come for you. Slept with a married woman? Rogarou will find you. Talked back to your mom in the heat of the moment? Don't walk home. Rogarou will snatch you up. Hit a woman under any circumstance? Rogarou will call you family, soon. Shot too many deer, so your freezer is overflowing but the herd thin? If I were you, I'd stay indoors at night. Rogarou knows by now. He was a dog, a man, a wolf. He was clothed, he was naked in his fur, he wore moccasins to jig. He was whatever made you shiver but he was always there, standing by the road, whistling to the stars so that they pulsed bright in the navy sky, as close and as distant as ancestors. For girls, he was the creature who kept you off the road or made you walk in packs. The old women never said, "Don't go into town, it is not safe for us there. We go missing. We are hurt." Instead, they leaned in and whispered a warning: "I wouldn't go out on the road tonight. Someone saw the rogarou just this Wednesday, leaning against the stop sign, sharpening his claws with the jawbone of a child." For boys, he was the worst thing you could ever be. "You remember to ask first and follow her lead. You don't want to turn into Rogarou. You'll wake up with blood in your teeth, not knowing and no way to know what you've done." Long after that bone salt, carried all the way from the Red River, was ground to dust, after the words it was laid down with were not even a whisper and the dialect they were spoken in was rubbed from the original language into common French, the stories of the rogarou kept the community in its circle, behind the line. When the people forgot what they had asked for in the beginning - a place to live, and for the community to grow in a good way - he remembered, and he returned on padded feet, light as stardust on the newly paved road. And that rogarou, heart full of his own stories but his belly empty, he came home not just to haunt. He also came to hunt.

propose that we consider our farmers on a spectrum, let’s say, of agrarianism. On one end of the spectrum we have farmers like James, interested in producing the finest foodstuffs that they can, given the soil, the climate, the water, the budget, and their talent. They observe how efficacious or not their efforts are proving, and they adapt accordingly. Variety is one of the keys to this technique, eschewing the corporate monocultures for a revolving set of plants and animals, again, to mimic what was already happening on the land before we showed up with our earth-shaving machinery. It’s tough as hell, and in many cases impossible, to farm this way and earn enough profit to keep your bills paid and your family fed, but these farmers do exist. On the other end of the spectrum is full-speed-ahead robo-farming, in which the farmer is following the instructions of the corporation to produce not food but commodities in such a way that the corporation sits poised to make the maximum financial profit. Now, this is the part that has always fascinated me about us as a population: This kind of farmer is doing all they can to make their factory quota for the company, of grain, or meat, or what have you, despite their soil, climate, water, budget, or talent. It only stands to reason that this methodology is the very definition of unsustainable. Clearly, this is an oversimplification of an issue that requires as much of my refrain (nuance!) as any other human endeavor, but the broad strokes are hard to refute. The first farmer is doing their best to work with nature. The second farmer is doing their best despite nature. In order for the second farmer to prosper, they must defeat nature. A great example of this is the factory farming of beef/pork/chicken/eggs/turkey/salmon/etc. The manufacturers of these products have done everything they can to take the process out of nature entirely and hide it in a shed, where every step of the production has been engineered to make a profit; to excel at quantity. I know you’re a little bit ahead of me here, but I’ll go ahead and ask the obvious question: What of quality? If you’re willing to degrade these many lives with impunity—the lives of the animals themselves, the workers “growing” them, the neighbors having to suffer the voluminous poisons being pumped into the ecosystem/watershed, and the humans consuming your products—then what are you about? Can that even be considered farming? Again, I’m asking this of us. Of you and me, because what I have just described is the way a lot of our food is produced right now, in the system that we all support with our dollars. How did we get here, in both the US and the UK? How can we change our national stance toward agriculture to accommodate more middle-size farmers and less factory farms? How would Aldo Leopold feel about it?

The first time Christina and Lachlan Meet ...Christina wasn't about to stop fighting—not until she took her last breath. Boring down with her heels, she thrashed. "Get off me, ye brute." She would hold her son in her arms this day if it was the last thing she did. And by the shift of the crushing weight on her chest, she only had moments before her life's breath completely whooshed from her lungs. The very thought of dying whilst her son was still held captive infused her with strength. With a jab, she slammed the heel of her hand across the man's chin. He flew from her body like a sack of grain. Praises be, had the Lord granted her with superhuman strength? Blinking, Christina sat up. No, no. Her strike hadn't rescued her from the pillager. A champion had. A behemoth of a man pummeled the pikeman's face with his fists. "Never. Ever." His fists moved so fast they blurred. "Harm. A. Woman!" Bloodied and battered, the varlet dropped to the dirt. A swordsman attacked her savior from behind. "Watch out," she cried, but before the words left her lips the warrior spun to his feet. Flinging his arm backward, he grabbed his assailant's wrist, stopped the sword midair and flipped the cur onto his back. Onward, he fought a rush of English attackers with his bare hands, without armor. Not even William Wallace himself had been so talented. This warrior moved like a cat, anticipating his opponent's moves before they happened. Five enemy soldiers lay on their backs. "Quickly," the man shouted, running toward her, his feet bare. No sooner had she rolled to her knees than his powerful arms clamped around her. The wind whipped beneath her feet. He planted her bum in the saddle. "Behind!" Christina screamed, every muscle in her body clenching taut. Throwing back an elbow, the man smacked an enemy soldier in the face resulting in a sickening crack. She picked up her reins and dug in her heels. "Whoa!" The big man latched onto the skirt of her saddle and hopped behind her, making her pony's rear end dip. But the frightened galloway didn't need coaxing. He galloped away from the fight like a deer running from a fox. Christina peered around her shoulder at the mass of fighting men behind them. "My son!" "Do you see him?" the man asked in the strangest accent she'd ever heard. She tried to turn back, but the man's steely chest stopped her. "They took him." "Who?" "The English, of course." The more they talked, the further from the border the galloway took them. "Huh?" the man mumbled behind her like he'd been struck in the head by a hammer. Everyone for miles knew the Scots and the English were to exchange a prisoner that day. The champion's big palm slipped around her waist and held on—it didn't hurt like he was digging in his fingers, but he pressed firm against her. The sensation of such a powerful hand on her body was unnerving. It had been eons since any man had touched her, at least gently. The truth? Aside from the brutish attack moments ago, Christina's life had been nothing but chaste. White foam leached from the pony's neck and he took in thunderous snorts. He wouldn't be able to keep this pace much longer. Christina steered him through a copse of trees and up the crag where just that morning she'd stood with King Robert and Sir Boyd before they'd led the Scottish battalion into the valley. There, she could gain a good vantage point and try to determine where the backstabbing English were heading with Andrew this time. At the crest of the outcropping, she pulled the horse to a halt. "The pony cannot keep going at this pace." The man's eyebrows slanted inward and he gave her a quizzical stare. Good Lord, his tempest-blue eyes pierced straight through her soul. "Are you speaking English?

First she saw light, the rising sun reflecting off something at the clearing’s edge. In that moment before she heard the voices, she confusedly thought she was seeing fireflies in the daytime, then realized it was silver brooches catching the light. No one had told her to expect the family, but there they were: Rising Hawk’s uncle, his parents, and assorted cousins, including Dream Teller, who gave Livy a tight smile she took for a peace offering. Rising Hawk lagged behind, carrying a scrawny deer over his shoulders, his eyes focused on the path. The others had the good sense and tact to pass on with a simple greeting, but Buffalo Creek Woman put her hands to Livy’s chest and with a stream of words, finally cut short by Cold Keeper, forgave her everything.

Along came Aldo Leopold. He was a U.S. Forest Service ranger who initially supported Pinchot’s use-oriented management of forests. A seasoned hunter, he had long believed that good game management required killing predators that preyed on deer. Then one afternoon, hunting with a friend on a mountain in New Mexico, he spied a mother wolf and her cubs, took aim, and shot them. “We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes,” Leopold wrote. “There was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch. I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, no wolves would mean a hunter’s paradise. But after seeing the fierce green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view.” The wolf’s fierce green fire inspired Leopold to extend ethics beyond the boundaries of the human family to include the larger community of animals, plants, and even soil and water. He enshrined this natural code of conduct in his famous land ethic: “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” Carol inscribed Leopold’s land ethic in her journal when she was a teenager and has steadfastly followed it throughout her life. She believes that it changes our role from conqueror of the earth to plain member and citizen of it. Leopold led the effort to create the first federally protected wilderness area: a half million acres of the Gila National Forest in New Mexico was designated as wilderness in 1924. Leopold had laid the groundwork for a national wilderness system, interconnected oases of biodiversity permanently protected from human development.

I closed my eyes, laid my head back on the pillow, and savored my first moments alone with my child. Seconds later, the door to my room opened and my brother-in-law, Tim, walked in. He’d just finished working a huge load of cattle. Marlboro Man would have been, too, if I hadn’t gone into labor the night before. “Hey!” Tim said enthusiastically. “How’s it going?” I yanked the bedsheet far enough north to cover the baby’s head and my exposed breast; as much as I loved my new brother-in-law, I just couldn’t see myself being that open with him. He caught on immediately. “Oops--did I come at a bad time?” Tim asked, a deer caught in the headlights. “You just missed your brother,” I said. The baby’s lips fell off my nipple and she rooted around and tried to find it again. I tried to act like nothing was happening under the covers. “No kidding?” Tim asked, looking nervously around the room. “Oh, I should have called first.” “Come on in,” I said, sitting up in the bed as tall as I could. The epidural had definitely worn off. My bottom was beginning to throb. “How’s the baby?” he asked, wanting to look but unsure if he should look in her direction. “She’s great,” I answered, pulling the little one out from under the covers. I prayed I could get my nipple quickly tucked away without incident. Tim smiled as he regarded his new niece. “She’s so cute,” he said tenderly. “Can I hold her?” He reached out his arms like a child wanting to hold a puppy. “Sure,” I said, handing her over, my bottom stinging by now. All I could think about was getting in the shower and spraying it with the nozzle I’d noticed earlier in the day when the nurse escorted me to the bathroom. I’d started obsessing over it, in fact. The nozzle was all I could think about. Tim seemed as surprised at the baby’s gender as his brother had been. “I was shocked when I heard!” he said, looking at me with a smile. I laughed, imagining what Marlboro Man’s dad might be thinking. That the first grandchild in such a male-dominated ranching family turned out to be a girl was becoming more humorous to me each minute. This was going to be an adventure.

with an Excel spreadsheet?” I made a face like that was ridiculous, but of course there had been an Excel spreadsheet. As soon as everyone was ready, we set off. Joni tramped away in one direction with my seven-year-old, Maggie, whose foghorn voice sent birds skittering into the sky as she harangued her aunt to hurry so they could get back first. “It’s not a race,” Joni said, fading into the tree line. “I want to get the biggest log,” Maggie bellowed. Joni’s own kid, Lola, refused to leave the camp. With the infinite disdain of a teenager, she said there was no need to fatigue ourselves. Fatigue ourselves. Lola went gliding in her slow-motion gait to pluck dead twigs from the trees, like a nymph picking enchanted fruit for a heartsick knight. She high-stepped off into the undergrowth and, for all I knew, changed into a deer, such was the inscrutable nature of my niece, the Lady Lola. By contrast, the all too scrutable Billy was screaming to go with the big boys, who I knew would abandon him up a tree given half a chance. “Carry me,” he said no more than five feet from the camp. So he scrambled onto my shoulders, his arms clamped in a fierce little

He was reading a cheap-looking booklet. Since he was literate, I thought he might be one of the people I was being hired to divert with knowledge. I was right. His name was Abdullah Akbahr. With my encouragement, he would write several interesting short stories. One, I remember, was supposedly the autobiography of a talking deer in the National Forest who has a terrible time finding anything to eat in winter and gets tangled in barbed wire during the summer months, trying to get at the delicious food on farms. He is shot by a hunter. As he dies he wonders why he was born in the first place. The final sentence of the story was the last thing the deer said on Earth. The hunter was close enough to hear it and was amazed. This was it: “What the blankety-blank was that supposed to be all about?

At the unexpected sight of Spence, Colbie startled hard. How was it that he was the one who needed glasses and yet she’d not seen him standing against the window? “No, I don’t kill a lot of people,” she said cautiously because she was wearing only a towelin front of a strange man. “But I’m happy to make an exception.” He laughed, a rough rumble that was more than a little contagious but she controlled herself because, hello, she was once again dripping wet before the man who seemed to make her knees forget to hold her up. “I didn’t mean to scare you,” he said and pushed off the wall to come close. She froze, but he held up his hands like, I come in peace, and crouched at her feet to scoop up the clothes she hadn’t realized she’d dropped. Leggings, a long forgiving tee, and the peach silk bra-and-panty set that hadn’t gotten so much as a blink from the TSA guy. But it got one out of Spence. He also swallowed hard as she snatched them back from him. “Hold on,” he said and caught her arm, pulling it toward him to look at her bleeding elbow. “Sit,” he said and gently pushed her down to a weight bench. He vanished into the bathroom and came back out with a first aid kit. It took him less than two minutes to clean and bandage the scrape. Then, easily balanced at her side on the balls of his feet, he did the same for both her knees, which she hadn’t noticed were also scraped up. “You must’ve hit the brick coping as you fell in the fountain,” he said and let his thumb slide over the skin just above one bandaged knee. She shivered, and not from the cold either. “Not going to kiss it better?” she heard herself ask before biting her tongue for running away with her good sense. She’d raised her younger twin brothers. Scrappy, roughhouse wild animals, the both of them, so there’d been plenty of injuries she’d kissed over the years. But no one had ever kissed hers. Not surprising, since most of her injuries tended to be on the inside, where they didn’t show. Still, she was horrified she’d said anything at all. “I didn’t mean—” She broke off, frozen like a deer in the headlights as Spence slowly lowered his head, brushing his lips over the Band-Aid on her elbow, then her knees. When he lifted his head, he pushed his glasses higher on his nose, those whiskey eyes warm and amused behind his lenses. “Better?” Shockingly better. Since she didn’t quite trust her voice at the moment, she gave a jerky nod and took her clothes back into the bathroom. She shut the door and then leaned against it, letting out a slow, deliberate breath. Holy cow, she was out of her league. He was somehow both cute and hot, and those glasses .

Further west, on the edge of the Iraty forest, a naked, hairy man who could run like a deer, and who was later thought to be the remnant of a Neanderthal colony, was spotted several times in 1774, indulging in his favourite pastime: scattering flocks of sheep. On the last occasion, when the shepherds tried to catch him, he ran away, giggling, and was never seen again.

I should go out on the radio with it. Must be a slow day for the media—getting more what’s-happening calls from reporters than I am getting service calls from citizens. They all want to do something on the first one, the actress on Mulholland. You know, a death-of-a-Hollywood-dream story. And they’d probably jump all over this latest call, too.” “Yeah, what is it?” “A citizen up in Laurel Canyon. On Wonderland. He just called up and said his dog came back from a run in the woods with a bone in its mouth. The guy says it’s human—an arm bone from a kid.” Bosch almost groaned. There were four or five call outs like this a year. Hysteria always followed by simple explanation: animal bones. Through the windshield he saluted the two body movers from the coroner’s office as they headed to the front doors of the van. “I know what you’re thinking, Harry. Not another bone run. You’ve done it a hundred times and it’s always the same thing. Coyote, deer, whatever. But listen, this guy with the dog, he’s an MD. And he says there’s no doubt. It’s a humerus. That’s the upper arm bone.

At first, the Other Side will use what I call default signs to communicate with us: objects, animals, or events that jolt us into seeing a meaning that might otherwise escape us. Default signs might be coins, birds, butterflies, deer, numbers, and electrical disturbances, such as empty cellphone messages, among other things. You find a dime standing on its edge in the dryer just as you are thinking of and missing someone (this very thing happened to me). A butterfly lands on your arm for an instant on your birthday. A car drives past with a license plate that has the birthdate of a loved one who has crossed, who was just on your mind. You get blank cellphone messages on the anniversary of a loved one’s crossing.

The debate of August 6, 2015 was held in Cleveland, Ohio, and broadcast on Fox News and Facebook. It was the first debate and the most anticipated question that loomed was how Trump would perform. He’d never participated in a formal debate before, making him a neophyte up against practiced and supposedly ruthless opposition. The world had no idea what was coming, and neither did the deer-in-the-headlights Republicans who were helpless to counter the sheer aggressive force of Donald Trump.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, 'What good is it?' If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.

through any structure without detection by his prey. He was a flawless assassin. It was just before five local time when Steven settled into the plush leather seating of the first-class compartment. The Deutsche Bahn Intercity Express, or ICE, was a high-speed train connecting major cities across Germany with other major European destinations. The trip to Frankfurt would take about four hours, giving him time to spend some rare personal time with his team. Slash was the first to find him. The men shook hands and sat down. Typically, these two longtime friends would chest bump in a hearty bro-mance sort of way, but it would be out of place for Europe. “Hey, buddy,” said Steven. “Switzerland is our new home away from home.” “It appears so, although the terrain isn’t that different from our place in Tennessee,” said Slash. “I see lots of fishin’ and huntin’ opportunities out there.” Slash grew up on his parents’ farm atop the Cumberland Plateau of Tennessee about halfway between Nashville and Knoxville. His parents were retired and spent their days farming while raising ducks, rabbits and some livestock. While other kids spent their free time on PlayStation, Slash grew up in the woods, learning survival skills. During his time with the SEAL Teams, he earned a reputation as an expert in close-quarters combat, especially using a variety of knives—hence the nickname Slash. “Beats the heck out of the desert, doesn’t it?” asked Steven. After his service ended, Slash tried a few different security outfits like Blackwater, protecting the Saudi royal family or standing guard outside some safe house in Oman. “I’m not saying the desert won’t call us back someday, but I’ll take the Swiss cheese and German chocolate over shawarma and falafel every friggin’ day!” “Hell yeah,” said Slash. “When are you comin’ down for some ham and beans, along with some butter-soaked cornbread? My folks really wanna meet you.” “I need to, buddy,” replied Steven. “This summer will be nuts for me. Hey, when does deer hunting season open?” “Late September for crossbow and around Thanksgiving otherwise,” replied Slash. Before the guys could set a date, their partners Paul Hittle and Raymond Bower approached their seats. Hittle, code name Bugs, was a former medic with Army Special Forces who left the Green Berets for a well-paying job with DynCorp. DynCorp was a private

Musk first appeared in Sanskrit literature by way of Muslim conquest, around the ninth century. Navi-gandha, navel perfume, after the dark scented grains in the male musk deer gland, found in the faraway forests of Tibet. In Islam, musk emanates from heaven, even said to be the prophet Muhammad’s favorite scent.

The first three notes just happen to be, Do-Re-Mi. Do-Re-Mi-Fa-Sol [pronounced So]-La-Ti. Oh, let's see if I can make it easier.[singing] Doe, a deer, a female deer. Ray, a drop of golden sun Me, a name I call myself. Far, a long, long way to run. Sew, a needle pulling thread. La, a note to follow Sol Tea, a drink with jam and bread. That will bring us back to Do... (sung by Maria)

The first Board of Commissioners were F. Law Olmsted, J. D. Whitney, William Ashburner, I. W. Raymond, E. S. Holden, Alexander Deering, George W. Coulter, and Galen Clark.

The last word in ignorance is the man who says of an animal or plant, ‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism as a whole is good, then every part is good, whether we understand it or not. If the biota, in the course of eons, has built something we like but do not understand, then who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.