Poetry is engendered in solitude, so what better meter for it than the clip of a buckskin horse?

Animals used to provide a lowlife way to kill and get away with it, as they do still, but, more intriguingly, for some people they are an aperture through which wounds drain. The scapegoat of olden times, driven off for the bystanders sins, has become a tender thing, a running injury. There, running away is me: hurt it and you are hurting me.

Animals are stylized characters in a kind of old saga - stylized because even the most acute of them have little leeway as they play out their parts.

There are two kinds of writers: hustlers and sanctimonious hustlers.

Indeed, if "biology is chemistry with history," as somebody has said, then nature writing is biology with love.

Men greet each other with a sock on the arm, women with a hug, and the hug wears better in the long run.

A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller.