Buried him next to my cabin door, in that sunken, blissful spot where he had napped, always waiting for the next hunt: beneath the wild rose bushes. I buried him, as I had Ann, with bones and antlers...
The thing about nature is that each species does what it's best at. That's why it's all so locked together. I'm certain that at its center is some kind of peace or unity or harmony - the white light p...
Slater used to be a poet, he's nothing now, and he sort of looks on Robby and me with awe because we aren't nothing yet, we haven't given up yet, awed at me because I'm thirty-one and haven't given up...
Fit in where you don't: make your own space..be different..don't give in. Exist somewhere you're not suppose to, or where you don't want to. Be your own men; do what you want, and don't hurt anybdoy
We try and map boundaries, and to string fence - we try to set up a border between life and death, between man and nature, and complicity versus innocence. But the truth is, there is no complicity, th...
Every spare moment was spent tromping about in the exploration, pursuit, and gathering of elusive living things; or, when the weather was too stormy, reading about the exploration, pursuit, and gather...
The crops, however, I examine closely, to see what each bird has been feeding upon. Clover. Kinnickkinnick. Snowberries. Wheat. Barley. Crickets. Grasshoppers. Fir needles. Huckleberries. Rose hips. T...
My life, I realize suddenly, is July. Childhood is June, and old age is August, but here it is, July, and my life, this year, is July inside of July. The
Is freedom a lateral component, or a vertical one?
There's the slightly intoxicating feeling that accompanies the largest blizzards—the realization that there's a chance, increasing by every second, that you are about to be trapped by beauty.
The rich-soil part, the mystery beneath all those reasons, is that I love it. There is an awareness, an addictive alertness, a super-heightened sensitivity that approaches and then becomes a kind of s...
MAY IS THE MONTH of disorderly conduct.
I think that this almost made up to Chubb for the time about the nighthawk, and I think it was good for grandfather, too, that it reminded him to never forget again that the heart of it all is mystery...
You can't manufacture love: you can't build it back up, like a fire. You start out with a certain amount, and then you hope it is strong enough and lasting enough to sustain itself against the hard wi...
What constitutes a fit between artist and mentor? It is not necessarily style, or even sensibility, though sensibility gets closer to describing it. Aesthetic might be the best. If a shared aesthetic...
There is romantic nonsense these days about the beauty of death, about the terrible end becoming the lovely beginning, and I think that’s wrong, a diminution of the beauty of life. Death is as terribl...
I look down and see that Colter has returned and has gone on lock-solid, drop-dead point about twenty feet in front of us, head and shoulders hunched and crouched, bony ass stuck way up in the air, bo...
I buried her like a pagan. I put deer bones in with her, for her journey; a blanket, for warmth; flowers, cedar fronds, stones from places we’d been, grouse feathers, a tidbit of raw venison hamburger...
The heart of it all is mystery, and science is at best only the peripheral trappings to that mystery--a ragged barbed-wire fence through which mystery travels, back and forth, unencumbered by anything...