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

Askins, Renee

 
9780385482264: Shadow Mountain: A Memoir of Wolves, a Woman, and the Wild
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0385482264 ISBN 13: 9780385482264
Verlag: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

After forming an intense bond with Natasha, a wolf cub she raised as part of her undergraduate research, Renée Askins was inspired to found the Wolf Fund. As head of this grassroots organization, she made it her goal to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, where they had been eradicated by man over seventy years before. In this intimate account, Askins recounts her courageous fifteen-year campaign, wrangling along the way with Western ranchers and their political allies in Washington, enduring death threats, and surviving the anguish of illegal wolf slayings to ensure that her dream of restoring Yellowstone’s ecological balance would one day be realized. Told in powerful, first-person narrative, Shadow Mountain is the awe-inspiring story of her mission and her impassioned meditation on our connection to the wild.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Renée Askins is a writer, naturalist, environmental activist, and founder of the Wolf Fund. Educated at Kalamazoo College and Yale University, she has written and lectured extensively on the relationship between humans, animals, and the wild. She has been profiled in Time, Audubon, The New York Times, Life, 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. Askins has received awards from the Outdoor Writers of America, the Student Conservation Association, and the Wyoming Wildlife Federation. She lives in Wilson, Wyoming, with her husband, Tom Rush, and their daughter, four dogs, and three parakeets.

Von der hinteren Coverseite

After forming an intense bond with Natasha, a wolf cub she raised as part of her undergraduate research, Renee Askins was inspired to found the Wolf Fund. As head of this grassroots organization, she made it her goal to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, where they had been eradicated by man over seventy years before. Here, Askins" recounts her courageous fifteen-year campaign, wrangling along the way with Western ranchers and their political allies in Washington, enduring death threats, and surviving the anguish of illegal wolf slayings to ensure that her dream of restoring Yellowstone's ecological balance would one day be realized. Told in powerful, first-person narrative, Shadow Mountain" is the awe-inspiring story of her mission and her impassioned meditation on our connection to the wild.

Aus dem Klappentext

After forming an intense bond with Natasha, a wolf cub she raised as part of her undergraduate research, Renée Askins was inspired to found the Wolf Fund. As head of this grassroots organization, she made it her goal to restore wolves to Yellowstone National Park, where they had been eradicated by man over seventy years before. Here, Askins recounts her courageous fifteen-year campaign, wrangling along the way with Western ranchers and their political allies in Washington, enduring death threats, and surviving the anguish of illegal wolf slayings to ensure that her dream of restoring Yellowstone s ecological balance would one day be realized. Told in powerful, first-person narrative, Shadow Mountain is the awe-inspiring story of her mission and her impassioned meditation on our connection to the wild.

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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...

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Verlag
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Erscheinungsdatum
2004
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0385482264
ISBN 13 
9780385482264
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
preigu
mail@preigu.de

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