Shadowmeld Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
By Bill Stokes
Kickass, the doorstop dog, reports that the keeper has finally finished his before-sleep book—”Those of the Forest” by Wallace Grange, which is an accounting of the symbiotic existence of all things, complete with all the necessary predatory/parasitic violence and transformative extinctions.
There are no people in Grange’s beautiful detailing of what occurs on the ridge and in the swamp of his book’s setting, but humans are powerfully there in their absence and their absurd denial that they are not a part of Nature.
In his routine of two-pages-and-then-out, for many nights the keeper fell asleep in the company of snowshoe rabbits and twittering chick-a-dees as blizzards raged or summer rainstorms pelted gently down.
Grange was Wisconsin’s first superintendent of game and established the Sandhill Wildlife Refuge in central Wisconsin. Published by Grange in 1953, “Those of the Forest” is an astounding piece of writing; and includes such paragraphs as: “The chant of earth and sky and all living creatures is old. It sings in every green leaf. It is proclaimed again in each feather of the raven, in each hair of the mouse, and by every grain of sand upon the ridge. It surges through the veins of the living, and in the dust of life that has passed by…….”
The keeper falls asleep—comfortably accepting the eternal verity that he is part of the Grange’s ridge, or maybe his swamp.
