The tree-climbing, barb-dodging adventures of a one-time research assistant.
Everything I know about porcupines I learned from Woman-Who-Walks-With-Porcupines. Actually, allow me to be a little more specific. Everything I know about porcupines I learned by climbing a 15-foot papershell pinyon pine with a restraining noose in one hand and a pole-mounted hypodermic syringe full of narcotics in the other in order to capture a porcupine for Woman-Who-Walks-With-Porcupines...
The Rancherías Loop Trail meanders through dramatic desert scenery and thousands of years of history.
Something remedial happens to a desert land once human exploitation ceases and its resources are left to their own devices. The desert ecology, like the surface of damaged skin, slowly knits itself back together, rouging over scars and coaxing precious moisture up from its retreat. Grasslands begin to return, man-made barriers collapse as if old scores are being settled and predators find their way back to a new, burgeoning array of prey. At the same time, all that remains of a desert's human past, from the lithic scatter of nomadic tribes to the dross of civilized occupation, erodes away one grain at a time until all that is left is the present...
The Contrabando Trail at Big Bend Ranch State Park doubles the pleasure of a pen-wagging paragrapher.
The horse's name is Hank. Or Bunk. Something simple and cowboy-sounding like that. The rider can't quite remember, because the rider suffers from a youth-wasting disease called “getting older.” The horse is calm and even-tempered and doesn't much mind when the rider drops into the saddle like a hoisted anvil. Hank, in other words, is a good mount...
The deep canyons of the Rio Grande remind us how our lives are written in water.
A spring afternoon in 1974 has “hotted” up, withering and pallid from the Mexican sun as if August, not April, had just begun. I am sweating in a friendly cantina on the streets of la Villa de Boquillas del Carmen and sucking on a tiny bitter lime. My eyes are watering and I am hoping the acrid juice of the lime will offset the fiery slivers of serrano pepper slicing into my fresh-made taco and my tongue and lips and the farthest reaches of my throat. My friends — my lifelong pals, as I believed at the time — M and K and N and J are laughing. So is the bartender, who hands me a beer and some salt. He positions a 45 on a turntable, then drops the needle onto the rotating vinyl, and suddenly, the Rolling Stones are scratching their way out of the tiny speaker. Through fresh tears and winced eyes I can see my friends dancing herky-jerky amid their easy laughter. There is M, a riot in his deadpan wit and pop sensibility. There goes K, outfitted to the teeth with a sure-fire solution for every possible circumstance. And here is N, redheaded and beautiful and ready to embrace everything the world has to offer...
Rare flora and fauna hang on for dear life in the hidden wetlands of West Texas.
It isn't difficult to understand why some ancient desert cultures appropriated the snake as their symbol for both lightning and water. Lightning, like the snake, strikes fast and deadly, yet its arrival in a desert also signals rain — a factor that often determines life or death in an arid world. The early Papago (now known as Tohono O'odham) of the southwestern desert placed their faith in the corúas, or serpent gods, which protected the desert's water. Every water source had its own corúa replete with killer fangs to deter abuse. But should the serpent die, claimed the Papago, its protectorate would evaporate...
When Falcon Lake's water table drops, ghost towns emerge from the depths.
Arturo the gatekeeper steps from the shadow of his sandstone dwelling into the light of the early afternoon. His simple abode, a blade-sharp rectangle of rocks, lies along the boulevard of a Mexican city built more than two and a half centuries ago. A coyote skull rests on one of the building's cornerstones. Arturo's dog, rousted from her nap by the arrival of visitors, appears at the edge of the Tamaulipan thornscrub, then waits patiently for a friendly sign before approaching. She is shy or cautious, one brown eye avoiding the visitors' gaze, one blue eye ticking hard like a ricocheting marble...
A little more than a 100 years ago a team of naturalists wrote home about their tour of the Trans-Pecos region. E. Dan Klepper writes a letter to his late father, Dan Klepper, about what has changed and what, for the time being, seems to have remained the same.
Dear ol' Dad,
After recently completing a hopscotch trek across the Trans-Pecos, from the Chisos Mountains in the southern Big Bend all the way north to the Guadalupe Mountains, I thought I would take the opportunity to write and catch you up. Many things have changed since we last spoke, at least for most of the world and perhaps a bit for Texas as well. You will probably not be surprised to learn that Texans continue to embrace their outdoor pursuits with a growing interest in non-consumptive sports — a good thing for all wildlife as well as the game animals. Oh, and the battle to preserve our remaining natural world rages on. It continues to use much of the same artillery it has since the fight began (loss of species, loss of habitat, loss of clean air, land and water) and maintains a similar imbalance of power but perhaps with a few more soldiers added to conservation's battalions. Some of the skirmishes have been lost along the way, the true victims being either the species gone extinct or us humans who are the poorer for their absences. I am never quite sure who suffers the greater tragedy. But some struggles have actually been championed in the intervening years, proving that the fight is worth our sacrifices. For instance, I don't believe that in all the seasons we spent hunting the Texas brush together for quail and deer that we ever saw a single golden eagle. And now, 10 years after your passing, I have seen a dozen cross the mountains and basins of the Texas west just this year, free and born wild...
The Davis Mountains' rugged terrain has helped protect it from human meddling.
A most amazing phenomenon has occurred in the West Texas highlands surrounding Davis Mountains State Park. Aside from the addition of a few more fences, a cell tower, a scattering of new homes and businesses, and some black-top paving, time in this part of the state appears to have stopped. In fact, this cool, clear mountain country seems to have remained basically the same for the last 125 years. A testament to this paradox can be found in a passage from the journal of geologist Burr Duval, a member of an 1879 mineral expedition who described the region during his travels across the state.
“Certainly, under the light of a morning sun,” Duval observed, “this country is exceedingly lovely to look at — On my right some four or five miles are rough and rugged iron-colored mountains, on my left are hills of nearly equal height, smoothly sloping and gently rounded, covered to their very summits with the most magnificent grasses, which even now look cured and not dead — Before me lies a gently undulating valley miles in extent … Not a living thing is in sight except a herd of antelope in the West — perhaps a mile away.”...
Canoeing the spring-fed waters of the Rio Grande's Lower Canyons.
“Hardly had we begun to enjoy the pleasing sensation of drifting down the stream when a roaring noise was heard ahead,” reported geologist Robert T. Hill during his 1899 survey of the state's Rio Grande canyons. “This came from seething and dangerous torrents of water foaming over huge rounded boulders of volcanic rock which everywhere form the bottom of the river.”
Hill, the first scientist to successfully navigate the deep gorges of the Texas river wilderness, included in his survey the notorious segment known today as the Lower Canyons, and published a record of his expedition. More than 100 years after Hill's run, this riparian no-man's land continues to be the most uninhabited and inaccessible stretch of backcountry in the state. The Lower Canyons, located in the remote regions of the southwest Texas desert, were just part of the 350-mile Rio Grande corridor that Hill ultimately surveyed. His journey began at the mouth of the Rio Concho and ended at the limestone bluffs below the courthouse of Langtry's Judge Roy Bean. He made his run with five companions including his 19-year-old nephew Prentice, a local trapper named James MacMahon, a cook and two extra boatmen “of great strength, inured to hardships, skilled with oar and gun, and capable of unlimited endurance.” Together, they rowed three wooden boats loaded with surveying equipment, guns, ammunition, food stores and bedrolls down the orneriest waterway in West Texas.
“Reaching these rapids,” Hill continued, “we had to get out of the boats and wade beside them, pushing them off or over stones, or holding them back by the stern-lines. This process had to be repeated many times a day for the entire distance, and, as a consequence, all hands were constantly wet. The swift current and uncertain footing of the hidden rocks make them very dangerous. A loss of balance or a fall meant almost certain death.”...
The mysterious Karankawa tribe wore facial tattoos, wrestled competitively and sent letters throught the sky.
"Smoke is a wily character. It can rise above canyons in surprising white puffs, turn menace-black then suddenly vanish as if its fire collapsed under the weight of its own awakening. Smoke reads, but only in the sense that its relinquished clues reveal as much about what is unknown as what is true. Wind is its co-conspirator, revising the smoke message with each successive breath in the same way that ocean waves rearrange sand grains along a beach — rhythmic and incalculable. History too is wily and its record, like smoke, shifts with each revision or dissipates altogether when overwhelmed by a more compelling force.
The Karankawas, an extinct tribe of Indians thought to have inhabited the Texas Gulf Coast, understood smoke. They mastered its contrary nature and transformed it, like many early American tribes, into the substance that holds all of history in the balance — written language."...
More than simply an ingenious water pump, the windmill remains an elegant memento of simpler times.
The afternoon heat reaches 102 degrees as I recline beneath the shelter of my tent's mesh awning. After a week on the edge of the Chihuahuan Desert, I have concluded that the only activity a living creature can endure in this place is motionless rest in shade. I hear the call of an anhinga, the water turkey, somewhere above me. But I don't bother spotting it because to do so would require that I move. Instead, I remain in torpor and listen to the bird's eerie call beat against the swelter.
Our ancestors ate every part of a game animal — because it was delicious.
My father, the consummate outdoorsman, would cook and eat anything. Not only was he curious about the way the natural world worked, he also wanted to know how it tasted. Huntsman, angler, trapper, skinner, gutman, butcher and cook — my father spent his entire life practicing the vocations that define the art of wild game. He knew precisely how to track, hook, bring down or reel in nature's critters then make them fit for the table.
The floods of 2002 unearthed a geologic wonder in Central Texas.
Once the clouds opened up above the plateaus and canyons of the central Texas Hill Country , the rain began to fall in unrelenting torrents. The deluge swiftly overwhelmed the voids and pockets of the Hill Country's subterranean limestone, filling the organic maze of crevices, cracks and tunnels until the groundwater rose to the surface like an angry sprite, once bone dead and dry, now awake, alive and spitting up mad.
Texas bird artists carry on a timeless tradition.
Thoughout history, the dreams and aspirations of humankind have been symbolically depicted by one creature above all others – the bird. In fact, artifacts from our ancient past indicate that nature governed all the creative arts, and birds, in particular, played a primary role.