If you ask me, the best essay in Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac is “Smoky Gold.” It’s about hunting grouse amid the tamaracks, which turn gold in October in Wisconsin.
The essay shows you what it’s like to be a naturalist on a walk. Leopold is supposed to be hunting grouse. His dog knows more about where the grouse are than he does. But Leopold keeps coming across interesting things, like an abandoned farm.
Many people go on hunts or walks. When a naturalist walks, he or she is swamped by questions.
I try to read, from the age of the young jackpines marching across an old field, how long ago the luckless farmer found out that sand plains were meant to grow solitude, not corn. Jackpines tell tall tales to the unwary, for they put on several whorls of branches each year, instead of only one. I find a better chronometer in an elm seedling that now blocks the barn door. Its rings date back to the drouth of 1930. Since that year no man has carried milk out of this barn.
He keeps getting sidetracked by interesting questions.
It’s hard on such a day to keep one’s mind on grouse, for there are many distractions. I cross a buck track in the sand, and follow in idle curiosity. The track leads straight from one Jersey tea bush to another, with nipped twigs showing why.
This reminds me of my own lunch, but before I get it pulled from my game pocket, I see a circling hawk, high skyward, needing identification. I wait till he banks and shows his red tail.
That’s what it’s like. That rings true to me.
• Source: Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac; New York: Ballentine Books, 1982, pp.
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