Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) Read Online Free PDF

roaming the country as if it were still open, letting others roam, too. The new ones are testier, when they are there, but they’re usually not there and even then they’re fretful only if you’re hunting. I’d left the gun in the canoe. Having climbed over, and crossed the sterile slash of the bulldozer’s path, I found nothing on the other side different from what I’d already seen, and climbed back over again.… At the canoe, I got out my fly rod and was setting it up when a yellow Cub came flying up the river low along the wind, with two men in it. They waved. I jerked my head in answer.
    Irked perhaps by my calm—people who fly around near the ground seem to require delight and awe from earthbound watchers—they banked into a tight circle and came back tobuzz me, too low now, and with the plane’s wheels slapped the top branches of a Cottonwood.
    It scared them. They pulled up steeply and flew off in the direction they had come from, and the roar of their dive became a drone.… The pup yapped after them.
    The silent air of ruin is fragile.
    Though the day was bleak and low still, moseying up the valley had cleansed my feeling about it, a little. Below the crossing’s fast water, bream were surface-feeding on midge nymphs or something else too small to be seen. Anchoring with a rock, I cast a little Rio Grande King to where the rippled water turned slick, but it wasn’t little enough. They ignored it for a dozen or so casts, and when one finally took he was the size of a silver dollar with tail and fins, a goggle-eye. To me, bream on a fly rod are as pretty fishing as a man can want, but there are times when they aren’t worth working for. I put the little one back in the water, reeled in, and shoved on.
    Just around the bend there, the canoe balanced now and shooting smoothly along, I saw another cleanness. A bald eagle came flapping easily down the wind, passed within short shotgun range of me, and lit in a dead tree upstream. I put the glass on him and he sat there, spruce black and white, fierce-eyed enough for anyone’s Great Seal.…
    They practically do not exist any more in our part of the country. Those who study such matters believe that the whole nation, not counting Alaska, contains only a couple of thousand or so of them now. They don’t adapt. They need big space and big time and big solitude for their living and their breeding, and not finding them, perish.…
    Most people who feel at all about birds and animals seem to have a specialized affection for those species that adjusttidily to the proximity of man and man’s mess. I lack it, mostly. A robin’s nest in a pruned elm in one’s garden is pleasant to watch, and English sparrows’ squabbles and loves are worth laughing at if you haven’t got anything better to laugh at, and gulls do circle with white grace about our coastal garbage dumps. But for me they lack the microcosmic poetry that some see in them. They lack the absoluteness of the spacious, disappearing breeds—of geese riding the autumn’s southward thrust, of eagles, of grizzlies, of bison I never saw except in compounds … Of wolves … Of wild horses that have been hunted down in twenty years or so and have been converted into little heaps of dog dung on the nation’s mowed lawns. And antelope, and elk grazing among the high aspens, an old bull always on guard …
    I’m aware that the bald eagle eats carrion and has other unaesthetic habits, noted by good Benjamin Franklin. It doesn’t affect the other feeling. Sheepmen shoot the goldens now with buckshot from airplanes, in the western country. We don’t deserve eagles; they will go.
    What hurt was knowing that when I was younger I would have shot this one. The gun lay by my foot, and an ancient itch had stirred my hand toward it as he passed.… For nothing, for pride of destruction that has marked us as a breed …
    “Hell,” the old-timers used to brag in front of the feed stores in Weatherford and