The camera caught my wife, a doe prancing on her toes in the woods. A picture can be worth a thousand words, but sometimes just a few words says a lot, too. Descriptive writing always catches my eye and makes me want to read more.
A favorite writer of mine is Jim Harrison. He was interviewed in the October, 2011 Outside magazine. The author of the article described Harrison this way - "His head looks as though it belongs to the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate." I laughed when I read that. Harrison's face does look pretty craggy, and his glass eye aims a different direction than where he is looking.
A poet I met this summer at the Western Writers Convention, Red Shuttleworth, writes on his blog, Global warming's so evident you can rope it, and another
All night, one coyote-racket dream after another
You've been swinging off a lard-greased chandelier
in the heaven of half-remembered cow towns,
scared of falling into barb wire and rattler dens.
Sad lines, too, catch your eye. In the book Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, one woman wrote One of the emigrants in our party ... lost several members of his family by death while crossing the plains and at one of our camps ... a daughter died ... they buried her beneath a big plain tree on the banks of a small stream which they christened Grave Creek ... The oxen were corralled over her grave so that Indians would not dig her up and get her clothing. (They used the oxen to trample over and wipe out the evidence of a grave.)
Private Charles Creighton of the 7th Cavalry accompanied Custer's march and wrote in his diary on the 31st day, We spent a few days here learning how to pack a mule. Believe me, we had some fun. The mules had never been packed and we were as green as the mules. We had some that would buck the saddle off in the bush and we had to find our bacon which was just getting ripe for us. If we had waited and left it where it was dropped off overnight, it would have crawled off. (Up to this point of the journey the mules had been hitched to the freight wagons, but as they neared the Little Big Horn they wanted to travel faster and leave the wagons behind.)
Fred Kaufman on that same day of the Custer journey to oblivion described this, A blacksmith was shoeing a mule which was very unruly. One trooper was twisting hard at a twitch, the other held onto the long ears. Not only with his hands but with his teeth, and all the while the smith was cursing at the top of his lungs.
A favorite writer of mine is Jim Harrison. He was interviewed in the October, 2011 Outside magazine. The author of the article described Harrison this way - "His head looks as though it belongs to the end of something a Viking would use to knock down a medieval Danish gate." I laughed when I read that. Harrison's face does look pretty craggy, and his glass eye aims a different direction than where he is looking.
A poet I met this summer at the Western Writers Convention, Red Shuttleworth, writes on his blog, Global warming's so evident you can rope it, and another
All night, one coyote-racket dream after another
You've been swinging off a lard-greased chandelier
in the heaven of half-remembered cow towns,
scared of falling into barb wire and rattler dens.
Sad lines, too, catch your eye. In the book Women's Diaries of the Westward Journey, one woman wrote One of the emigrants in our party ... lost several members of his family by death while crossing the plains and at one of our camps ... a daughter died ... they buried her beneath a big plain tree on the banks of a small stream which they christened Grave Creek ... The oxen were corralled over her grave so that Indians would not dig her up and get her clothing. (They used the oxen to trample over and wipe out the evidence of a grave.)
Private Charles Creighton of the 7th Cavalry accompanied Custer's march and wrote in his diary on the 31st day, We spent a few days here learning how to pack a mule. Believe me, we had some fun. The mules had never been packed and we were as green as the mules. We had some that would buck the saddle off in the bush and we had to find our bacon which was just getting ripe for us. If we had waited and left it where it was dropped off overnight, it would have crawled off. (Up to this point of the journey the mules had been hitched to the freight wagons, but as they neared the Little Big Horn they wanted to travel faster and leave the wagons behind.)
Fred Kaufman on that same day of the Custer journey to oblivion described this, A blacksmith was shoeing a mule which was very unruly. One trooper was twisting hard at a twitch, the other held onto the long ears. Not only with his hands but with his teeth, and all the while the smith was cursing at the top of his lungs.
