You may have to huddle in the dark of a street culvert for three nights before the raccoon comes. To see the animal, you must first remain very still. Then a mountain lion comes from behind while I am crouched, looking at its tracks. I choose a coyote and I get a very rainy day. I have no idea how proficient trackers do it - choosing their animal, Out of habit, my eyes train on shapes and movements, and if I see any animal, it is invariably unexpected. More often it is a quarter mile in an afternoon, shuffling around the trees, looking for a soft place to sit. Sometimes for a hundred miles, circling mountain ranges or following canyons for weeks and months. I would rope into canyons looking for all the fear and quiescence and exquisite forms that roil in the wilderness.
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I would become a river guide in the North American deserts and take young students from cities into the wilderness, teaching them how to smell for coyotes and how to let tarantulas walk over their hands. My truck would be buried axledeep in the sandpits of New Mexican back roads. I would blow dust from tracks and crawl on my stomach through forests to see the animal. I would be blatantly watched by grizzly bears and hummingbirds. In these decades I would grope into the land. Not for decades would I hear of John James Audubon or Aldo Leopold or Ann Zwinger. I had a fantasy of running away to the woods, becoming a nomad and a hermit, but soon enough the sixty minutes of tape ran out. I had not known that the sunrise was so lavish and that you could actually feel the color when it reached your face. So rarely was I awake at this time of the day that it felt like my birthday or Thanksgiving. With my tape recorder, I walked these fields fanning below the east side of the Rocky Mountains in Colorado. I would hold the pencil in my teeth and hum thoughtfully as I had seen the adults do. I understood only that they flew and that they did it well. It was important, as important as anything, and I acted as if I knew what I was doing, as if I knew something about birds. I worked at the entries, putting the last letter or two of a word on the next line if it wouldn’t fit. Occasionally I would just make loops with the pencil so that it looked like cursive. I wanted so badly toīe able to write like an adult. My penmanship was terrible, shaky, typical for elementary school. Writing things down: the time, the place, what the bird looked like. In time I moved on, recording birds in different trees, in other lots. Their officious prattle lifted like shouts from the stock market floor.
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I walked outside, through the neighborhood, and at the edge of a field full of red-winged blackbirds, I took out the tape recorder. In it I placed a spiral notepad, a sharpened pencil, a paper bag containing breakfast, and a heavy thrift-store tape recorder with grossly oversized buttons. Was very young when I woke before dawn and grabbed the small knapsack beside the bed. Pull up a chair and see what other wild creature comes to speak with you. Return to your house, where this book waits on a table. Drink out of a stream or from the lucid depths of a bedrock water hole.
Paw up the dirt and taste it on your lips. Even better, I suggest that before you read the next story, you open your door and walk into the woods where only birds and spying raccoons might see you, or into a desert of lizards and jackrabbits, if that is what is at hand. If you are one of those people who insist on reading books from left to right, I recommend a sip of clear water before starting each new chapter. This is how each story came to me: unexpectedly, halting my breath before I could draw it in. I have hoped, in fact, that you, the reader, might come upon this book by accident, finding it on a desk, left open to a passage on mountain lions, or flipping its pages until you are caught in the stares of fifteen sorcerous ravens. They need not be read in any particular sequence or all in one sitting. Other stories have been written since then. Ome of the stories in the following pages originally appeared in a book I wrote in 1997 called Crossing Paths. Little, Brown and Company Hachette Book Group USA 237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Visit our Web site at First eBook Edition: December 2007 ISBN: 9-5 1. Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher. A l so b y Cr a ig Ch i ld s House of Rain The Way Out The Desert Cries Soul of Nowhere The Secret Knowledge of WaterĬopyright © 1997, 2007 by Craig Childs All rights reserved.
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