Jack Turner

If anything is endangered in America it is our experience of wild nature—gross contact. There is knowledge only the wild can give us, knowledge specific to the experience of it. These are its gifts to us. In this, wilderness is no different from music, painting, poetry, or love: you concede the abundance and try to respond with grace.

Not until I was driving home did I realize I’d felt no desire to shoot the lion, an unusual reaction since I shot almost everything then, believing firmly that the world was here for my amusement and that killing was fun. But the lion was different. I have heard wolves howl and seen grizzlies wander high meadows and a tiger feed on a young water buffalo, but no wild animal has captured my imagination like that first lion. I might say she was a totem, but I believe it is simpler than that: I was smitten.

On my travels in Tibet I was always delighted by the tradition of sky-burial. The human body is cut up and the bones broken to the marrow and left for animals, mostly birds. Later the bones are pounded and mixed with tsampa—a roasted barley—and again offered to the animals. Finally everything is gone, gone back into the cycle. Recently, when a friend lost her beloved dog, she carried it out to a beautiful view of the mountains, covered it with wild flowers, and left it for the coyotes and ravens and bugs. We should have the courage to do the same for ourselves, to re-enter the great cycle of feeding.