A few weeks ago, on a warm winter evening along the North Platte River, I meet a small, gentle man by the name of Gilford Rauch. His day job is a mid-level executive for one of the big insurance companies in Omaha. I don't know exactly what that means but by the looks of Gilford I figured he might be an actuary or, at least, someone who spends most of his days in a windowless room with long columns of numbers as his main stimulation. He is a bandy-legged man of perhaps sixty years but with a nearly perpetual contented grin under his substantial bifocals. As we shook hands I felt a delicate but wiry hand take hold with a strength and solidness that surprised me.

At first it seemed incongruous that Gilford Rauch was there on the North Platte River to hunt waterfowl. Leprechauns came to mind as I watched this near-stranger explain to my friend and me about the morning he had just experienced. "Glorious," he said. "The sun swelling over there behind that ridge, the sound of green heads winging just out of sight out in the twilight. Canadians honking in all directions." The quick little hands pointed the directions out to us as if we had no idea what he was talking about. "Glorious. There were muskrats purring up and down the river. Flickers and robins in the Russian olives. Oh, my goodness. Glorious."

Circumstance had brought us together in a tiny modular home moved onto the banks of the North Platte by mutual friends - waterfowl hunters from far off cities. My friend and I were there to consider the possibilities of including a chapter on the North Platte in a book we plan to write. We were there as observers of the grand ecosystem of the North Platte. We had been offered a place to sleep. But Gilford Rauch, for a few days at least, was a humble and thankful participant. Twice as we familiarized ourselves with the cabin and enjoyed an adult beverage Gilford excused himself and stepped out onto the deck to gaze across darkening fields to the river. We pulled our sleeping bags in from the truck and checked out the facility and decor. It was "Interior Design by Ducks Unlimited". If you have ever wondered where all those auctioned wildlife prints end up, check out the hunting camps along the North Platte River. There were prints of ducks of course, but also raccoons, songbirds, bears, mountain lions, deer, elk, and lots of wading birds. There were goose highball glasses, bass coasters, a great blue heron wine rack, black lab throw rugs, decoy lamps, blue-bill wallpaper, and lots of pictures of puppies chewing on boots. We were having a good laugh about interior decorations when Gilford came in from outside and without thinking I rudely asked him what he was doing on the porch. He ginned his disarming grin, then threw cold water on our conversation when he said. "I'm a spiritual man. This is a wonderful time of day. I go out side to give thanks."

Now I was stuck. I couldn't let his earnest statement silence us for the night. "You pray?" I asked.

"In my way," Gilford said. "I'm a Connectionist."

"A what?" I didn't mean for it to come out the way it did.

"A Connectionist." His eyes had slipped to the floor but he still smiled. He seemed to change the subject. "Would you like me to cook dinner? I'd like to."

I was looking for a change of subject. I didn't know what a Connectionist was or what sort of whacko I might be talking to but I was pretty sure I didn't want a theological lecture. "That'd be great. Could I help?"

"No, no. Just have another drink and keep me company."

It turns out that Gilford had shot three small ducks that morning and that he was quite a cook. As he cooked and drank, he chattered away about a pair of otters he had once seen swimming among his decoys, a moose that had browsed within fifty yards of him as he fished on a Wyoming stream. He talked about one evening when he had been giving thanks to the "Magic powers" (That is what he said. It made us uncomfortable.). He was looking up into the autumn sky when he noticed a few birds flying very high. He found his binoculars and dialed them in to find thousands - no, tens of thousands of small birds too high to identify. "They were headed south," he said. "Imagine." The memory of that autumn evening silenced him and my friend and I looked at each other and shrugged. But by then the ducks were roasting and the kitchen had filled with as rich a smell as I could remember. And searching for a memory that could match that odor I came across a day when I too had seen those tens of thousands of tiny birds winging south. I thought they might be warblers and they stretched from the northern horizon out of sight in the ten power binoculars to the south. How had I allowed myself to forget that sight?

We had another whisky in the goose highball glasses and pulled up chairs to try Gilford's duck. "Come and share the only sacrament that Connectionists observe," he said. "Come join in the circle of life." I was again embarrassed but beginning to get it. Gilford was neither a wacko nor your garden-variety insurance executive. And he was a damn good cooker of ducks. At least a damned good cooker of ducks that he had harvested that morning, alone on the banks of Platte River, in the center of all that he held dear.



by Gervase Hittle

Recently I have read an interesting book, 1491, New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, which considers in a fair amount of depth and breadth, the impact and effects that some very populous cultures had on the environments in which they lived. These cultures existed throughout the American continent, extending from the ancient Siberian land bridge through North America, Mexico, and Central America to South America. The book presents the work of scholars and researchers in a way that is very readable, very interesting, and extremely challenging. The stylistic presentation reminds me somewhat of Robert Ardrey's, African Genesis, which I read sometime in the mid-seventies. Ardrey's book primarily considered the emergence of the human specie based on the scholarship and research of many anthropologists, archeologists, and geologists. Of course, if you do not happen to accept the idea of an evolutionary emergence of humankind from prior species, you will likely not appreciate this book. Likewise if you hold to the notion that pre-Columbus inhabitants of the American continent existed by hardly making an ecological footprint on their environments, you will likely have a very difficult time with this book. But if you have a mind that is open to possibility and probability, you will likely end up admiring the work and re-considering some of the views you may hold regarding these ideas. I know I have, and I recommend the book to you.

I bring up both of the above mentioned books as an aid to whomever works with, cares about, or lives within a relatively natural environment - a wilderness environment, if you will. 1491 provides substantial evidence that the ancient American cultures radically altered their environments to sustain their populations. They constructed massive earthworks that served as irrigation and transportation canals, created areas for agriculture and habitation, roads, cities, and temples. They traded goods with neighboring groups. They had economies based on barter rather than monetary exchange. They modified the land to provide sustenance for themselves but they did so in a manner that was sustainable, unlike many real or proposed incursions on our present day environments (think ANWAR), which are not necessarily based on sustainability but rather on maintaining and expanding cultures that harm the environments, largely for monetary gain, at the expense of both the environments and the people who live therein.

Bear with me on this segue.

Within the last month Dan and I have twice been called to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The first time was to help our friend Ed Iron Cloud bring the Oglala College's buffalo herd back into their home pastures. The second time Dan, Jill, Erney, and I went to meet with the rangers of the tribe's Park and Recreation Department to recover our own buffalo which had found a way through our fence (about which we had allowed ourselves to become smugly proud) and into the Reservation's huge pastures. Mind you this terrain is very rugged badlands/grasslands country and both of these ventures required a day's work for everyone involved. We recovered the buffalo in both cases. Dan and I then returned to the breach and repaired it. The entire weeklong series of events struck me, regarding the two books previously mentioned, that we, too, were altering our environments in an attempt to assist their sustainability. Then I began looking at the non-natural additions to the landscape: cattle, fences, stock dams/dugouts, the remnants of windmills, introduced grasses, including cheat grass, western and crested wheat grass, et. al. What struck me next is that these things that people have added to their environment, rightly or wrongly, are an attempt to contribute to the environment's ability to sustain itself and its inhabitants.

At this juncture there is no turning back the clock or the calendar. Cattle, fences, and cheat grass are here to stay, and today there may be no such entity as a pristine, hands-off wilderness. Wilderness may have only existed prior to the emergence of humankind on earth. The remnants of man's hand on the land are here to stay. The best we can do now, the best we can ever have done is not to destroy what we have, not exploit it in any manner that takes away its ability to sustain itself and us.