Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild - Hardcover

Askins, Renee

 
9780385482226: Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0385482221 ISBN 13: 9780385482226
Verlag: Doubleday, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

A lyrical account of the author's long-time love affair with wolves offers thoughtful insights into the role of the wilderness in the American cultural consciousness and describes the long and difficult efforts to restore wild wolves to Yellowstone National Park.

Die Inhaltsangabe kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

RENÉE ASKINS founded the Wolf Fund in 1986 for the sole purpose of reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone National Park. She has been profiled in Time, Harper’s Bazaar, Audubon, the New York Times, People, and Parade and her writing has been featured in Harper's Magazine and in the anthology Intimate Nature: The Bond Between Women and Animals. She has traveled and lectured extensively on the topic of wildness in our culture. She lives in Wilson, Wyoming, with her husband, her daughter, four dogs, and three parakeets.

Aus dem Klappentext

Part memoir, part meditation, part love story, Shadow Mountain is an impassioned commentary on how our connection to the wild can rescue or destroy us.

While completing an undergraduate research thesis, Renée Askins was given a two-day-old wolf pup to raise. Named Natasha, the pup, was destined for a life in captivity. Through her work with Natasha and her siblings, Askins developed a deep, fierce love for the species. On the day Natasha was unexpectedly taken from her and sent to a remote research facility, Askins made a promise to the wolf pup: "Your life, your sacrifice, will make a difference." And it did.

Renée Askins spent the next fifteen years in the grueling effort to restore wolves to Yellowstone, where they had been exterminated by man some seventy years before. The campaign's popularity with the American public aroused the rage of the western ranching community and their powerful political allies in Washington. She endured death threats, years of contentious debate and political manipulations, and heartbreaking setbacks when colonizing wolves were illegally killed. But in March 1995, Askins witnessed the realization of her mission when wolves were released into their native home in Yellowstone the first wolves to be found there in almost a century.

A born storyteller, Renée Askins offers moving and vibrant examples of the reciprocity that exists between man and animal. And, like a wolf in the shadows, Askins circles the issues surounding the conundrum of embracing wild nature. Shadow Mountain explores the wildness present within animals and humans, urging us to recognize both its light and its shadow its power to heal and harm. Roaming from wolves to the Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show, from passion to politics, Shadow Mountain is the story of shared struggles and destinies, of failure and redemption, and offers insight into how we can mend our contentious relationship with wildness by understanding the power of the wild to guide and shape us.

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

One

On this cold night

winter's last rally

rakes across the fledgling breast

of spring like claws. The last white bear

turns, hungering,

northward.

We put on layers of sweaters again

and light a circle of lamps

deep in the heart of the house. But

we are restless, keep listening.

You are the first to get up.

You pace a few silent steps

then go. Upstairs I find you

perched at the window,

an early stork

staring from the slender chimney

of your bones down

at icy slivers of teeth

slicing into tender garden growth.

Without thinking why

we gather the afghans

and carefully fold our long limbs

down into them.

With a soft ritual clicking of bills,

necks twining, wings rising,

we begin

the ancient migration

back to the place

of our birth.

"storks,"

marcia casey


My first memories are of meadows. Evening meadows, when the sun's honey-warm rays turned the long grasses and birch borders into an enchanted and radiant secret. It is the light I mostly remember, when the dark was seducing the day and the shadows would flicker and splinter in a spectacle of courtship. It was the hour of whimsy and expectation. Perhaps it was the melon light that beckoned the deer. They emerged like druids from the forests, miragelike in the tall shimmering grass, unable to resist those last lingering moments of summer sunlight to warm their shadow-cooled backs.

My mother would count them. Two, three, four, ten, twenty-six, twenty-seven, twenty-eight. My older sister Robin and I would listen and watch, two small daughters perched beside their mother on the liver-colored seat of a plump black Volkswagen Bug. There was no television in our remote cottage in the Thunder Bay State Forest of northern Michigan, and my father had to travel for his work, leaving my mother in the silence of those white pine forests for days at a time.

That's how the summer evenings of my early childhood passed, our Volkswagen parked alongside some meadow, with its nose edged into the tall summer grass like a huge Lab sniffing the dirt, with my mama counting the deer. It's also how I learned to count, but for years I would be confused about what numbers really followed others because my mother's voice would drift off at fourteen or thirty-seven, like the sun slipping behind a darkened cloud into some secret shadowed place that concealed the loneliness of a young mother, and then suddenly her voice would reemerge brilliant and warm on twenty-six or forty-three. I doubt that it mattered to her how many deer there were, the numbers were only a mantra to give order to the loneliness, to arrange an eternal evening according to a knowable rhythm. Occasionally she would remark on how large a fawn had gotten, or on the limp of a doe, but mostly she would just count, thirty-eight, thirty-nine, forty . . . and the light would fall and her voice would trail off and the deer would slip back into the shadows.

It was in this way the wild would be made intimate, the outside wariness transformed into some sort of interior attentiveness. In my early childhood I unconsciously absorbed the notion of reciprocity--the idea that as we enter the realm of animals, offer our presence, and bear witness to the lives of creatures, they in turn offer their own gifts, their own example and accompaniment through the loneliness of our human existence. For millions of years animals lived without humans, but we have never lived without animals. Edwin Muir said, "Long before man appeared on earth he existed as a dream of prophecy in the animal soul."

Even four decades later those early images of long grasses and the arch of evening light, the silhouettes of deer melting into a darkened border of shadowed trees, the comfort and caress of my mother's voice, and the warmth of my sister's body pressed against me illuminate my life like moonlight through stained glass. Partly due to the clarity of hindsight and partly because the power of my childhood experiences with the wild still resonates in my life today, I have grown to appreciate how important, how formative, childhood contact with the natural world can be. It is the foundation that is laid by early interactions with the wild that give us an understanding of "otherness," and a context beyond one's self. Early contact with animals and wild places can help to develop a matured empathy and capacity for human relationships, for our connection with a sense of place and landscape, all of which are critical to the unfolding of our personalities and our feelings of belonging to a greater planetary community of creatures, places, and people.

As I believe in the power of wildness and wild things to guide us, so have I come to believe in the importance of place and its potency in our lives. I feel with certainty that everything follows from place, that place makes us who we are, that landscape carves out a certain character and community, and that ultimately the places in which we choose to live govern the unfolding of our lives. And so it was, nearly thirty years after leaving Thunder Bay National Forest, I would discover a place that provided a counterpoint, an adult analogue, to the enchantment of those lovely Michigan meadows. For ten years I lived there with my lover, and came to cherish it. It was my shelter, my solace, my home. It was a place called Shadow Mountain.

Our little log house nestled into a stand of aspens at the base of the mountain like a child leaning into the soft folds of a young mother's skirts. Shadow Mountain was a sensuously curved goddess of a mountain in comparison to the hard-lined granite pinnacles encircling our valley in northwest Wyoming. The forests of pine and aspen that draped down her gentle slopes fell like long unruly tresses, spilling from her shoulders into the sage meadows at her base in a resplendent cascade of arboreal curls and crescents. She stood like a solemn guardian behind the north shoulder of our home, her shadow engulfing us at dawn. As the sun rose behind her it first lit the western horizon of the Tetons, enveloping the peaks in shades of coral and crimson. Cascading down the dim slopes, the sunlight raced toward us across the hazel meadows of Antelope Flats like a wave of radiance. We would often sit drinking our morning tea as the dawn light melted the lingering pool of darkness around us, ushering in the day.

Our little compound at Shadow Mountain, which was comprised of our home, a few tiny cabins, sheds, and an old barn, had become a gathering place for wild animals, from badger to bald eagle, coyote to curlew. Fifty yards from our door the bison had created massive wallows which in time had became watering holes. Except at the height of winter, it was rare for a day to pass without having at least one and often several hundred bison drift through the yard. Sometimes during rut they would gather for days, their rutting growls so deafening it was impossible to sleep, a circumstance only made worse by their habit of rubbing on the log ends of the house, which made it rock like a boat in a storm. A weekly chore, listed between vacuuming and emptying the garbage, was the cleaning of bison snot off the plate-glass windows where the ever-curious bovines stared in and the slightly anxious hominids stared out. Our animal visitors included mule deer, an occasional moose with a gangly legged calf, black bears, a few grizzlies, weasels, once a great gray owl, ravens, coyotes--the list reads like a passenger manifest for the Ark. During the spring and fall migrations there were large gatherings of antelope and herds of elk that numbered in the thousands. The winter before we left the wolves arrived, but therein lies the story to come.

The place...

„Über diesen Titel“ kann sich auf eine andere Ausgabe dieses Titels beziehen.

Verlag
Doubleday
Erscheinungsdatum
2002
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385482221
ISBN 13 
9780385482226
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
321
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

Weitere beliebte Ausgaben desselben Titels

9780385482264: Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild

Vorgestellte Ausgabe

ISBN 10:  0385482264 ISBN 13:  9780385482264
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004
Softcover