Sublime

People like him show that a deeper intimacy with nature is possible and that this intimacy does not have to rely on the obliterative arrogance of Western culture.

In eleven long years John Bergson had made but little impression upon the wild land he had come to tame.

Bluffs, with nothing in any direction except endless frozen-over chaff,

His was the most interesting story, at least to Carter. At 5:55 p.m., with the fire just a minute away and rushing toward him at ever greater speed, he’d lit a second fire, up the hill he needed to climb. As his fire burned the grass in front of him, he walked into it and threw himself onto the hot ashes. He’d called for his men first to abandon th

This, the most widely distributed tree in North America with close kin on three continents, all at once feels unbearably rare. She

People from another planet will wonder what’s wrong with earthly names, that it takes so many different ones to tag a thing. But here he lies, alongside this friend he has known only weeks, joined again after so many lifetimes. Nick and Olivia, Watchman and Maidenhair—the complete quartet of them—open to the January night, under topless columns of

Across the road from where she’s parked, aspens tumble down the basin toward Fish Lake, where five years earlier a Chinese refugee engineer took his three daughters camping on the way to visiting Yellowstone. The oldest girl, named for a Puccini opera heroine, will soon be wanted by the feds for fifty million dollars of arson. Two thousand miles to

To Rick, the Druids were like the Kennedys, American royalty.