“I felt the snowflakes fall upon my face, and stood thinking of another time, and another time still, until I was moving from midnight to midnight under ever more remote and vaster snows. Wolf came to my side with a little whimper. It was he who was civilized now.” (Loren Eiseley [from his essay The Angry Winter, in The Unexpected Universe, Harcourt Brace & Co., 1969])
Good dogs have accompanied most seasons of my life, seasons of rambling and poking into hidden folds of land, of climbing to the next ridge and the one beyond, rounding the next bend of whatever canyon or track that has caught our eye, or ear, or nose - until one of us stops, and then turns to face back, toward the journey home.
The anthropologist/philosopher Loren Eiseley dedicated The Unexpected Universe to his dog, Wolf, and in the essay I’ve quoted above, he related a wintry night’s reflections on an ever-changing climate’s effects on mammalian history.
I’ve studied each dog’s way of expressing caution or interest in what’s ahead, and each dog has learned to read me in much the same way. In this way, in time we become trusted partners for daytime rambles on and off trails, and through night-time encampments in front and back country. Over the last seven-plus years my rambling partner has been BDog, as she’s come to be known - an agile, powerfully built blend of several canine lineages. For this holiday weekend, I invite you to enjoy some of the landscapes BDog has explored, and to consider some of our planet’s gifts to those of us adapting to the cooling and warming of season and climate so far. The exact locations of the images are not important. I’d rather that you seek out your own treasured places, and then find ways to defend what you come to love.
In her maturity, BDog is an adept in the observational arts, at times standing, sitting, or lying for an hour or more - motionless except for her roving gaze, an ear twitch, the slight puffing of cheeks as she samples knowledge a landscape has on offer. If our rambling choices have taken us far enough from the human concerns we label civilization, we sink into irrelevance among the lives and planetary processes surrounding our resting place, and I too take time to note the infinitesimal…
The Unexpected Universe’s dedication simply reads, “To Wolf, who sleeps forever with an ice age bone across his heart, the last gift of one who loved him.” (Loren Eiseley, 1969)
Up next, “Say That…I Kept my Dream”: The shadowed canyons of Everett Ruess - until then, take care of yourself, and help someone else along the way. -B