We found the main stream to law that the teeter-snipe pattered about in what last year were trout riffles, and so warm that we could duck in its deepest pool without a shout. Even after our cooling swim, waders felt like hot tar paper in the sun.
Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. This 1989 Oxford Paperbacks edition, ISBN 0-19-505928-X, as an introductory essay from Robert Finch commemorating the 100th anniversary of Leopold's birth.
We see Leopold, the rural sage, tracking a sunk in January, cutting a venerable dead oak, stalking a legendary fish on Alder Fork or an elusive grouse on an abandoned farm, surveying his private unofficial domain before dawn, wrestling with god-like decisions about tree-thinning, or experiencing a "curious transfusion of courage" from his pines in deep winter.
Sand County Almanac is a good book to come back to every month year round.
