The sound of the waters is audible to every ear, but there is other music in these hills, by no means audible to all. To hear even a few notes of it you must first live here for a long time, and you must know the speech of hills and rivers. Then on a still night, when the campfire is low and the Pleiades have climbed over rimrocks, sit quietly and listen for a wolf to howl, and think hard of everything you have seen and tried to understand. Then you may hear it –- a vast pulsing harmony –- its score inscribed on a thousand hills, its notes the lives and deaths of plants and animals, its rhythms spanning the seconds and the centuries.
- Aldo Leopold, Sand County Almanac

. . .

Early fall, sitting by a northern lake several portages in, the fire burned mostly out, just a few red coals left, but reluctant to head off to our tents, a wolf started howling probably on the large island a mile off shore. Then another, and another. The night was filled with their chorus. Then silence again. Despite the thrill, an involuntary shiver ran down my spine — the ancient rhythms of the wilderness out of which we came — the approaching change of seasons, of cold, of the faint ancient memory of hunters always moving, trying to stay fed, to stay warm, sharing the land and the seasons with wolves and moose and day and the vast starlit night.

. . .

The page above is from the first draft of the new art journal I’m working on:

Meditations On Nature: The Beauty Of Wild Places