A discerning view from the north woods

The essays and excerpts in this noteworthy collection cover more than three decades of observation and reflection about an increasingly unnatural world by one of the senior statesmen of American nature writing. Although he reports on treks through remote places, Hoagland, author of “Cat Man” and “The Final Fate of the Alligators,” is at his best when he invites the reader to accompany him as he walks his land in northern Vermont. He describes the frogs and turtles in the pond, the empty porcupine skins left by the reintroduced fishers and the local bears fondly, but not sentimentally. Forty acres of second-growth forest seem to encompass the whole of nature as Hoagland discusses history, biology and ecology in well-turned phrases.

But the warning he once sounded in an essay about mountain lions feels ominously prophetic 30 years later: “The swan song sounded by the wilderness grows fainter, ever more constricted, until only sharp ears can catch it at all.”

-- Charles Solomon