04/03 © Ronald L. Moody (2003)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Thinking Like a Mountain -
Seeing Beyond the Hunter's Path

"The people who make a difference are not the ones
with the most credentials, the most money, or the most awards
-- they are the people who care." -- anonymous

The view across the Rocky Mountain horizon will stop a strong man cold. If you are not accustomed to seeing overwhelming vastness in one place, the first full dose will make you sit down -- to see so far at one vision that you could not walk to the end of the viewscape in a week.

Following the elk who led me across this high ridge, knowing them from their tracks, I had the crazy thought. Did they see the vastness of the view and marvel at it when they passed this rise?

I suppose not. People assume animals like elk and deer are "dumb." They are genetically programed, we believe, for such practical affairs as eating, escaping predators, and reproducing, and have no mind for anything but business. Now I'm trying to think how that makes dumb animals different from humans. I shoulda just followed the tracks.

I am confident, however, that I, and not the elk, can understand that a horizon exists at the end of the mountains out there -- and that the world is different beyond the mountains -- and that we humans have the power to change it all and choke the life out of the land while the elk does not.

Aldo Leopold wrote about the epiphanal awareness that will come to the hunter who learns to "think like a mountain." Vastness of the alpine view is only one aspect of the mountain's thought of wildness. Wind in tamarack and green fire in the wolf's eye reveal dimensions of comprehension beyond mere sight.

There is a center and we are not in it. The mountain knows that, people do not.

The accursed blessing of knowledge inspires people to weave wealth out of wildness -- while blinding the beneficiaries of wealth to the lunacy of bequeathing a wounded mountain to the future generation. The elk may not do calculus, but neither do they eat the sustenance and shrink the spirit of their descendents.

To quote Forrest Gump: "stupid is as stupid does."

The hunter who simply follows the track and doesn't look up to the horizon is the more contented person. The elk are contented. The calculus of the future bothers neither hunted nor hunter. It is the horizon-gazer who frets and grieves for what the world of our grandchildren will be.

In the spring one is reassured that the center will hold, that what the mountain knows will prevail while frivolous human ambitions settle into the stone diary of Earth -- one chapter beyond the dinosaur. Green fire will burn in many unborn eyes. I wish I could see the viewscape beyond mankind. But that's more than my share, and wanting it is greed.

Aldo Leopold discovered the life force of the Earth in the mountain of the western desert. I recall a moment when I first noticed the dimensions beyond the hunter's path -- in the dogwood and hickory womb of an autumn Mississippi hardwood bottom.

If you don't care, it's better for you that you cannot see, better not to look at all. Up to that point I hunted simply for the fun of it. Beyond that step on the path I began to care. Not much at first. But passion either grows or dies. Accursed blessing.

As if tasting Eve's forbidden fruit, the person who cares can no longer be satisfied with the nakedness of unthinking contentment.

First care about the deer, then the greenbriar beyond the deer, then the stream that waters the greenbriar, then the white oak that shades the water.

Soon enough, one's vision perceives the shadowed presence of a thinking mountain away there just over the horizon; thankful to be part of all which surrounds the center.