In these eloquent essays, naturalist and adventurer Childs (House of Rain
) describes some of his extraordinary experiences with creatures—from wasps, red-spotted toads and hummingbirds to grizzly bears, coyotes and jaguars. Seeking entrée into animal societies, he interprets messages left in marks on the ground and in scents on leaves and trees, and communicates with animals directly using their own language of stares, gestures, postures, sounds, scents and gaits. He goes looking for animals alone in hazardous wilderness areas—tracking mountain goats in Colorado’s Gore Range or surprising a secret society of ravens in a canyon in Utah. Always longing to be at one with animals, he is not afraid to climb an aspen to see the world from a porcupine’s perspective, run with a herd of elk or wonder how it would feel to jump from a plane and fly with a bald eagle. Childs’s captivating essays, rich in sensuous imagery (the porcupine “looks like a mop, a bundle of ponderosa pine needles, a mobile hairstyle”), are hauntingly beautiful and replete with evocative observations of animal life. 42 b&w illus. (Dec. 12)
