Susan Brind Morrow brings her singular sensibility as a classicist and linguist to this strikingly original reflection on the fine but resilient threads that bind humans to the natural world. Anchored in the emblematic experiences of a trapper and a beekeeper, Wolves and Honey explores the implications of their very different relationships to the natural world, while illuminating Morrow’s own experience of the lives and tragic deaths of these men who deeply influenced her. Ultimately for Morrow these two—the tracker and trapper of wolves, the keeper of bees—are a touchstone for a memoir of the land itself, the rich soil of the Finger Lakes region in upstate New York. From the ancient myth of the Tree of Life to the mysterious reappearance of wolves in the New York wilderness, from the inner life of the word “nectar,” whose Greek root (“that which overcomes death”) reveals our most fundamental experience of wonder, to the surprising links between the physics of light and the chemistry of sweetness, Morrow’s richly evocative writing traces startling historical, scientific, and metaphorical resonances. Wolves and Honey , attuned to the connections among various realms of culture and nature, time and language, jolts us into thinking anew about our sometimes neglected but always profound relationship to the natural world. "A sudden, loss-tinged memoir of upstate New York's Finger Lakes region. . . . Willowy and beguiling." - Kirkus Reviews ?"Morrow's language is rich and sensuous, for she thinks like a poet." - Publishers Weekly "Each concise essay contains riches." - Booklist SUSAN BRIND MORROW is the author of The Names of Things. A classicist, linguist, and translator of ancient Egyptian as well as contemporary Arabic poetry, she lives in Chatham, New York. Wolves and Honey A Hidden History of the Natural World By Susan Brind Morrow Mariner Books Copyright © 2006 Susan Brind Morrow All right reserved. ISBN: 9780618619207 1 The Wood Duck Last night i dreamt I saw Bob Kime. I knew we were saying goodbye. I held him tight. Then he took off his jacket and gave it to me. It was a hunting jacket, soft and old, sort of bruised, I thought, and very dear. And then he was gone. I always thought of Bob as my own particular friend, but at the funeral home on Friday people were lined up down the block, people I didn"t know.We waited in line for an hour and a half just to get into the room to approach the open casket where his body lay. Shawn was standing beside the casket, having very much his father"s face. Had I seen the picture in the back? he said. A photograph tacked on a board among dozens of others—of Bob with his dogs, with Shawn, with snow geese on the ground at their feet—and with them one of me and Bob in our bee suits in his old red pickup twenty years ago. Last Sunday I almost called him up to ask about a hive. But then I thought, Bob will think this is pathetic,my calling like this, as though nothing has changed after all these years. If only I had called him. For on Monday he shot himself. Like the many times I have gone out to watch the moon rise, only to ?nd it has risen, huge and gold and silent in a place where I have failed to look, I had missed the point, and the point was aimed deep into my own life, into the golden territory of the familiar. At the funeral on Saturday morning Terry was there, sitting in the back row a few feet from where I stood. At ?rst I didn"t see him. Terry is in his sixties now. His black hair is white. But there were the huge sloping shoulders, the same large head, the gold outline of the glasses he has worn these last ten years as he turned to laugh with the person beside him, some stranger on edge, as we all were, in the dim yellow light of the crowded room, Bob"s soft pro?le, like something set in stone, occasionally visible through the rows of people shifting like rows of corn in the wind. When everyone rose to leave after the service was over I leaned forward and slipped my ?ngers into Terry"s large rough hand. "Well, Suzy," he said, "all your buddies are gone now." When I was growing up we thought Terry was a Cherokee Indian. It turned out that he was simply from California, and even though he had a crew cut and was something of a math whiz, and was also, it occurred to me only later, all the while a scientist and a chemistry professor at Cornell, he was our only real experience of the sixties, of an unconventional person. For a large man, who could easily have been threatening, he had an atmosphere of total ease, of kindness, and I had taken refuge in the safety of his presence for maybe thirty years. Later Lan and I drove down East Lake Road where the Kime ?elds lay in soft shining squares of pale green oats and darker soy and golden wheat, patched like a lovely quilt in a rolling sweep down toward the dark blue line of Seneca Lake. The Kime barns and dwarf apple trees and farmhouse—large and white and square, the way the farmhouse