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Wildlife
OR-93
The wolf has traveled a thousand miles in two months. A director of a wolf-advocacy group said his arrival here is “something akin to the [first] moonwalk.”
October 2021Deep Eddy
They fished three tournaments together without breaking the top fifty before I told him to sign me up as his partner instead. At least I knew the difference between monofilament and fluorocarbon. I mean, damn.
August 2021
Wanting Things To Be Different
A relapse of Lyme disease: / fever and chills, flickers of pain. / I want to sleep all the time, and my arms ache. / I lie on the steel grate that juts over the stream.
May 2021Small Animals
A few times a year, especially in spring, one of my cats clambers through the flap in the door carrying some fresh dilemma for me.
April 2021
Backyard Mercy
A fruit fly fell in my fine crystal glass / half full of five-dollar wine. / Annoyed, I almost flung the final sips / behind a rosebush.
April 2021
Nesting
They take turns at the feeders, but if one lingers too long, the others — usually males — will jabber insults until the offender leaves. I have a secret nickname for the house sparrows: Little A-holes.
February 2021
The Howling Wilderness
Doug Smith Tells The Truth About Wolves, But Will Anyone Listen?
Wolves are an odd species. We have persecuted them more than any other wild animal, and yet they will stop to look at you, and occasionally take a step toward you. To me those moments are spiritual. That’s what we’re losing today.
December 2020
Morally Indefensible
It is often said of laying hens, veal calves, and dogs kept in cages for experimental purposes that this does not cause them to suffer, since they have never known other conditions. . . . This is a fallacy.
December 2020
Letter From A Cabin
On A Fifty-Mile-Long Dirt Road In Montana’s Centennial Valley, Written To My Sister In Vermont, August 2016, Never Sent
I’ve logged more experience than most with simplicity and the complexity you discover inside simplicity, minimalism and asocial behavior, endurance and landscape.
December 2020
