But poor Stickeen, the wee, hairy, sleekit beastie, think of him! When I had decided to dare the bridge, and while I was on my knees chipping a hollow on the rounded brow above it, he came behind me, pushed his head past my shoulder, looked down and across, scanned the sliver and its approaches with his mysterious eyes, then looked me in the face ( Read more... )

In like manner, geologists will sometimes use the calender year as a unit to represent the time scale, and in such terms the Precambian runs from New Year's Day until well after Halloween. Dinosaurs appear in the middle of December and are gone the day after Christmas. The last ice sheet melts on December 31st at one minute before midnight, and the ( Read more... )

I used to sit in class and listen to the terms come floating down the room like paper airplanes. Geology was called a descriptive science, and with its pitted outwash plains and drowned rivers, its hanging tributaries and starved coastlines, it was nothing if not descriptive. It was a fountain of metaphor -- of isostatic adjustments and degraded ( Read more... )

Falconers have a word for hawks in the mood to slay: they call the bird in yarak. The books say it comes from the Persian yaraki, meaning power, strength and boldness. Much later I was amused to find that in Turkish it means an archaic weapon and is also slang for penis: never doubt that falconry is a boys' game. I'm back in Cambridge now, and as I ( Read more... )

It was the Tragedy paper that led me to read Freud, because he was still fashionable back then, and because psychoanalysts had their shot at explaining tragedy too. And after reading him I began to see all sorts of psychological transferences in my falconry books. I saw those nineteenth-century falconers were projecting onto their hawks all the ( Read more... )

It's a fascinating story. Goshawks once bred across the British Isles. 'There are divers Sorts and Sizes of Goshawks,' wrote Richard Blome in 1618, 'which are different in Goodness, force and hardiness according to the several Countries where they are Bred; but no place affords so good as those of Moscovy, Norway, and the North of Ireland, ( Read more... )

Most of us who live with animals have been guilty at one time or another of that particular flavor of solipsism that involves projecting our own human thoughts and feelings onto the animals we live with. (I once dated a guy who told me the key to understanding his mom was to take every sentence where she talked about what the dog was thinking/ ( Read more... )

I am supposed to meet Sarge at two in the afternoon. At ten-thirty in the morning, I ask Dick for a ride off the island. It took us four and half hours to get up here, but I am sure I can get back in three, and I want some extra time in case I go astray. He poles me to shore. I jump out, thank him, and go up the bank. I go on up a rise, circle a ( Read more... )

INTERVIEWER ( Read more... )

Eagle, with its montane setting, seems to attract more people who intend to stay. In they come - young people in ones and twos - form all over the Lower Forty-eight. With general trapping catalogues under their arms, they walk around wondering what to do next. The climate and the raw Alaskan wild will quickly sort them out. Some will not flinch. ( Read more... )