A collection of vignettes about Craig Child's experiences with a wide ranging type and number of animals, we found many of the stories in here to echo our own thoughts and beliefs. Not the sort of book that needs to be consumed all at once, you can sit down, read a story or two, and come back to it later. And you will.

The Bloody Sire, by Robinson Jeffers

It is not bad.  Let them play.

Let the guns bark and the bombing-plane

Speak his prodigious blasphemies.

It is not bad, it is high time,

Stark violence is still the sire of all the world’s values.

What but the wolf’s tooth whittled so fine

The fleet limbs of the antelope?

What but fear winged the birds, and hunger

Jewelled with such eyes the great goshawk’s head?

Violence has been the sire of all the world’s values.

Who would remember Helen’s face

Lacking the terrible halo of spears?

Who formed Christ but Herod and Caesar,

The cruel and bloody victories of Caesar?

Violence, the bloody sire of all the world’s values.

Never weep, let them play,

Old violence is not too old to beget new values.

Skull of a Mountain Lion. Notice the wide zygomatic arch beneath the orbits.

The Mountain Hardwear Kiva 4 Person Tent. No longer made.

• HYPERLITE MOUNTAIN GEAR

• MYSTERY RANCH