Quotes About Wilderness

slope at where they had come from, with Dog standing and panting beside him, when a tiny flicker of movement caught his eye. Preacher squinted. Could have been a bird flitting from

within the four walls of avalanches, I call out to Yeti. Stomping my feet for warmth on the snow the snow eternal.

I love nature, I just don't want to get any of it on me.

The earth is black in front of the cliff, and no orchids grow. Creepers crawl in the brown mud by the path. Where did the birds of yesterday fly? To what other mountain did the animals go? Leopards and pythons dislike this ruined spot; Cranes and snakes avoid the desolation. My criminal thoughts of those days past Brought on the disaster of today.

animals don't escape from somewhere but from something

Ravi was right. Truly I was to be the next goat. I had a wet, trembling, half-drowned, heaving and coughing three-year-old adult Bengal tiger in my lifeboat. Richard Parker rose unsteadily to his feet on the tarpaulin, eyes blazing as they met mine, ears laid tight to his head, all weapons drawn. His head was the size and colour of the lifebuoy, with teeth. I turned around, stepped over the zebra and threw myself overboard.

It's a natural law (or supernatural, if you're so inclined) that weird things appear where people tend to disappear. African jungles, Pacific islands, Himalayan wastelands—wherever expeditionary parties go missing, that's where lost species, Stonehengey stone idols, the flitting shadows of yetis, and ancient, unsurrendering Japanese soldiers are sure to pop up. The

exploring Arizona's mazelike Mogollon canyon range,

Our focus is on those wild foods that are widespread, easily recognizable and identifiable, and sufficient to create meals.

A marsh pheasant has to walk ten paces for a bite to eat and a hundred for a sip of water. But still it wouldn't want to be tamed and put into a cage. Even treated like a king, it could never be happy and content.

No voice, no low, no howl is heard; the chief sound of life here is a hiss.

She was never seen rummaging through the kitchen waste behind the mess hall. She ate what could be found in the yard and on the factory grounds. Seeds, leaves, and flowers in the weeds. And all kinds of insects—worms and caterpillars, maggots and beetles, spiders and snails.

For I chase but one hind, he says, one strange deer timid and wild, and she leads me off the paths that other men have trod, and by myself into the depths of the wood.

Oread" Whirl up, sea— whirl your pointed pines, splash your great pines on our rocks, hurl your green over us, cover us with your pools of fir.

Everything smelled wet and feral like it did before a thunderstorm, and she wanted to run, swift and eager, beyond the edge of what she could see.

wolves always come

The braided weeds and briars of her hair fall around her, serving as a cape. Large black eyes peer out from the tangle. She wears a gown of drab cloth and bark. When she moves, I see her feet are bare. Rings shine on several of her toes.

She was white like the sands, tawny like the sands, solitary and burning like the sands.

For all of nature's wonder and beauty, it is also hostile and unpredictable.

The size of the land can be humbling. It puts my human existence into perspective, not in the sense of feeling like a bug on the windshield of life, but more a feeling of belonging to something too big to comprehend. The times when I have a view of the broad vistas sometimes make me feel as big as the land. I love the size of the land, how it rolls on and on, untamed and for the most part untouched.

As a child I was attracted to Tarzan and everything that had to do with jungles. It seemed to me -- and this is in retrospect -- that there was something primal, something right about it. Tarzan represented a pure being, somehow before the fall.

Put me in the wild I be there for a while.

Dryads gathered in knots, hushed, and for once satyrs did not chase them but stood solitary sentinel, horned heads upflung and broad nostrils quivering. Kelpies and selkies hesitated, between horseform and biped shape, their wicked teeth gleaming as they snorted and stamped; among them, night-mares or elfhorses along the shores of the Dreaming Sea—which touches all shores, always—tossed their manes but did not neigh.

In wilderness I sense the miracle of life, and behind it our scientific accomplishments fade to trivia.