Walking with a loaded rifle in an unfamiliar forest bristling
with the signs of your prey is thrilling.
It embarrasses me to write that, but it is true.
I am not by nature much of a noticer,
yet here, now, my attention to everything around me,
and deafness to everything else, is complete.
Nothing in my experience has prepared me for the quality of this attention.
I notice how the day's first breezes comb the needles in the pines,
producing a sotto voce whistle and
an undulation in the pattern of light and shadow
tattooing the tree trunks and the ground.
I notice the specific density of the air.
But this is not a passive or aesthetic attention;
it is a hungry attention,
reaching out into its surroundings like fingers, or nerves.
My eyes venture deep into thickets my body could never penetrate,
picking their way among the tangled branches,
sliding over rocks and around stumps
to bring back the slenderest hint of movement.
In the places too deeply shadowed to admit my eyes,
my ears roam at will,
returning with the report of a branch cracking at the bottom of a ravine,
or the snuffling of a. . .wait: what was that?
Just a bird.
Everything is amplified.
Even my skin is alert,
so that when the shadow launched by
the sudden ascent of a turkey vulture
passes overhead
I swear I can feel the temperature momentarily fall.
I am the alert man.¹

A Walk in the Woods

Tuco loves riding in mountains or desert.
But he rides in another time and place.
Silence fills the air
and each creature lives quietly,
carefully.

Except most men.
The crashing through the brush ahead
may be mule deer
or peccary
in the bajada near a desert wash
fleeing some armed idiot
seeking "nature" to kill.

Turkey vultures will circle high,
then low,
then high again.
Patient, they follow
the air currents across the desert.
Hawks are more directed,
resting and watching
then lifting into the air
to swoop toward prey.

Today Tuco is roaming an eastern slope
of a narrow, shallow desert valley.
And thinking about that article he read this morning,
the line "Even my skin is alert,..." brings a smile again.

Even if only in memory,
Tuco knows the desert
and its sounds,
which are now silent
or over-run
by
"the alert man"
seeking his wild adventure.
All the while
missing the world
that is.

It just is.