 Every animal encounter is expanded in some way to teach about the species, be it an examination of the skeletal and muscular structure that allows the flight of a bald eagle, or the scientific naming of the raccoon by Carolus Linnaeus in 1757. Childs follows a raven, "a sorcerer wearing sleek black robes," into a remote canyon where an entire flock or "unkindness" of ravens gathers and agitates at his arrival. There he discovers the eerie secret of these ravens and the ritual performed in commemoration. High on a desert butte in Arizona, Childs observes peregrine falcons. "In their spring season of mating and reproduction, they scream from sunrise to sunset, patrolling their territory at blinding speeds, raking their voices down the chalkboard of the cliffs."
A beautiful essay that exudes the essence of desert summers is the red-spotted toad. We desert dwellers struggle to describe to others the intensity of summer heat and light. Childs writes, "The desert was bright, embedding shards of straight white sunlight into my eyes." Oh yes, we've been there!
On a blistering hike he finds a patch of shade at the base of a canyon, and there a miracle…a population of toads and a collection of maidenhair ferns. Childs takes us back 250 million years, describing how the amphibians left the sea and have now adapted. "It is feasible then that a red-spotted toad can settle itself into sand where there are trace amounts of moisture and patiently draw water from stone."
In a fascinating chapter, Childs details his work in an archeological dig in a rich cave in Colorado. There, as part of an expedition team, he discovered the bones of a camel that stumbled into the cave during an Ice Age a million years ago. The cave contained a treasury of bones of all sorts of animals. It was decided that wood rats brought in most of the pieces including bones of wolves, striped skunks, cheetah kittens, extinct horses, a snowy owl and the skeleton of a black-footed ferret that was 350,000 years old. In a grittier story, Childs tells of using all of his wits, wariness and luck in a struggle to rescue a raging raccoon trapped in a ten-foot pothole.
You will want to own this book, to dip again and again into the rich language, and to experience an explicable longing to be once again, an animal.
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