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After many years with a hunting rifle at his side, Nick Jans began to feel “Something was changing ... each time I pulled a trigger and felt the hollow weight of death.” In time he would give away his shotgun, exchanging it for a camera and for the patient enterprise of simply seeing. Instead of noting only bear, wolverine, or moose, he began to track the smaller, more delicate signs of life. “The life and death of a redbacked vole or a white-crowned sparrow was just as dramatic, just as noble as that of a bull moose, if you only leaned in and watched.” Essay by essay, readers of Tracks of the Unseen will feel the first, thin layers of a mythic place slip away. The power of connection that this book offers is both true and compelling. In memorable words and pictures, Nick Jans brings light to the edges of nature’s mysteries. |
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Excerpt The Unseen Back in those days, life was simple. I lived to hunt, and more than anything else, I wanted to shoot a wolverine. Rifle across my knees, trigger finger flexed, I roared ahead, watching the tracks disappear under the machine’s skis. After a quarter mile, the wolverine left my trail and cut into soft snow — hard going for him, easy for me. I squeezed my throttle and leaned forward, knowing he couldn’t be more than a few hundred yards ahead. I |
t’s been eighteen years, but they’re still clear as yesterday: wolverine prints
right in my tracks. They couldn’t have been more than an hour old. I was doubling back to camp, following the packed groove my snowmobile had made in the deep April snow, thinking about a
warm tent and dinner more than anything else, and suddenly there they were — crisp, soft-edged, glowing in the evening light. Somewhere, probably less than a mile ahead, a big male wolverine
stood, head cocked, listening to the rattle of my engine. In these open tundra hills, there was no place to hide. I had him.
never did catch up. The tracks circled around the hill, doubled back, crossed
my trail, then some led to where I’d started. I retraced my route and came back to the same spot. I had to be missing something. After a half hour, I felt like a puppy chasing his own
tail. I couldn’t sort out where I was, let alone the prints of the wolverine. He had to be right there in front of me, a dark, moving object in a still, white landscape, somehow invisible,
disappearing inexplicably into itself as in one of those Escher drawings. Frustrated and whipped, scratching my head in the arctic twilight, I finally gave up. |
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Review ...this title successfully conveys the timelessness of living off the land and sustains a universal rather than regional appeal. —Library Journal |
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Fulcrum Publishing – 16100 Table Mountain Parkway, Suite 300 – Golden, Colorado 80403
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