The Book of Yaak Read Online Free

ecosystem: the way that the richness, or tithing, of rot, and the flexibility, the suppleness, of diversity, guarantees that an ecosystem, or any other kind of system, will have a future. I like to walk—and sometimes crawl—through the jungle up here, examining the world on my hands and knees—watching the pistonlike rise and fall of individual trees—noticing the ways they block light from some places and funnel or focus light into other places—watching the way, when the weaker trees fall, that they sometimes help prop up and brace those around them. Other times the fallen trees crash all the way to the ground to become fern-beds, soil-mulch, lichen-pads. It's not a thing we can measure yet, but I like to imagine that each different tree, after it has fallen, gives off a different quality of rot—a diversity even in the manner in which nutrients are released to the soil. The slow rot of a giant larch having a taste to the soil, perhaps, of bread; the faster disintegration of ice-snapped saplings tasting like sugar, or honey. The forest
feasting
on its own diversity, with grace and mystery lying thick everywhere.
    ***
    Like the manner in which nutrients are recycled through the forest, so too are the movements of the animals through it like a cycle, or a pulse—a rhythm of blood, chlorophyll and magic: especially the migratory patterns. There are a lot of deer in the valley—an overabundance, or sign of imbalance, some would say—against which, of course, a correction will always occur, as long as the earth corrects itself to the sun; for as long as there is gravity. It—the rhythm of the increasing deer herds—becomes more pronounced, more visible—more strongly felt—each winter.
    In spring, summer and fall, the deer occupy nearly every square foot of the valley; it would be difficult for you to go anywhere here during those seasons where you could not find deer, or the signs of deer. But then as winter's snows cover most of their available forage, and as thermal regulation—south slopes, and heavy overstories and canopies—- become critical, as temperatures drop, the places where the valley will allow deer to survive become extremely narrow. As the winter deepens, you can see almost all of the deer in the valley, and the elk too, being squeezed into a small fraction of the whole: the parameters tightening daily, so that each day, if you are deep into the rhythm of your place, you can feel the deer coming down off the mountains in the night, moving lower and lower into the valley and rotating toward those south slopes—crowding into spaces one-tenth, or one one-hundredth, of that which they previously occupied. You can feel the energy shifts, the lone deer and does with fawns combining and joining into huge herds, which then move like braids or ribbons, weaving their way along the same few ice trails, cutting paths deeper and deeper, browsing the limited winter food, and waiting for the release of spring....
    It becomes a pulse, winter like the contraction of a heart squeezing blood through the vessels of an organism—and you can feel the waiting for backwash, the waiting for the moment between beats, when the blood can wash back into the heart's chambers and take a brief rest—six months' worth— before being constricted, squeezed tight again: the deer flowing up and then down the mountains, focusing and then spreading, concentrating then sprawling, and it too is like art, like breathing.

    For so long, the story of the West has been that blood-scribing, that heartbeat of lighting out for "the territory"—the continental drift, westward toward freedom and liberty, as if some great magnetic store of it lies somewhere west of the Great Plains. But I sense that pulse may be—of necessity—finally changing and slowing, even reversing itself. I see more and more the human stories in the West becoming those not of passing through and