Read Goodbye to a River: A Narrative (Vintage Departures) for Free Online

unanswerably good reasons why one should care a damn about what the land is, but if one does, one does, and rivers thread through it and are still public domain—a reasonably rare phenomenon in proud Texas, which retained title to its public lands when it came into the Union, and then gave them all away.
    Canoes, too, are unobtrusive; they don’t storm the natural world or ride over it, but drift in upon it as a part of its own silence. As you either care about what the land is or not, so do you like or dislike quiet things—sailboats, or rainy green mornings in foreign places, or a grazing herd, or the ruins of old monasteries in mountains.… Chances for being quiet nowadays are limited. Those for being unquiet seem to abound—vulgarity, as Huxley has written, being like adultery largely a matter of opportunity. But I saw a coon waddling along the riverside path that afternoon, and an old boar squirrel tightwalked unsuspecting down a branch just ahead of the boat, and having skipped lunch I shot him for supper.
    Hale had been right about the ducks. I saw none. Wet years in the Southwest are good for wildlife, but you see less of it than in the dry times, when cover is scarce and all creatures have to use the scant remaining patches of water. The river now was incidental to tanks, creeks, and even ruts as a water supply, and its heavy flow would make it unpleasant feeding for waterfowl.
    Somewhere on Schoolhouse Mountain, in the Fortune Bend (Old Man Fortune brought his slaves there in ’56 to work the land, but wisely left his family in Waco; I never read what happened to the slaves when things got rough inthat country), a man was calling cattle in the old, long, melancholy way. They called back, wending probably toward his feed-laden pickup truck.… In another drifting mile or so it was four thirty by my guess time, and I pulled out at the mouth of Ioni Creek, above a tumbling rapids, and made camp in a bed of thick, tough, oily, dark green weeds, below willows. It was the sort of place that in summer would have been insect-ridden, but the footing was sandy turf instead of mud, and I wanted to get settled before evening brought whatever weather it might bring.
    Jesse Veale fought the old, useless fight just up Ioni, one day in 1873….
    I skinned and quartered the old squirrel, thick-hided and with testicles as big as a dog’s. Since the war, somehow, I don’t much like to skin them. You cut them at the wrists and make a slash or two and peel away the tough pelt, and what you then have suddenly in your hands is a bug-eyed, naked, dead homunculus whose looks I do not care for. It isn’t the same with other animals.… I remember, from somewhere, a story of Kentucky politicians arguing over the composition of burgoo, and whether or not the squirrels that went into it ought first to be decapitated. One point of view holds that the cheek meat is the best of all.… In the story, the proponent of headlessness wound up shouting: “By God, I don’t care. When I look in a pot, be damn if I want it lookin’ back at me!”
    Which, in male company, could lead to the proctologist and the swallowed glass eye, and along many another colorful byway, but won’t … I would have been a headless-burgoo man—in fact am, since that standard stew one boils up out of squirrel and potatoes and grease and flour andwhatever else is at hand is essentially the same dish. It wasn’t much good that night, but on the other hand I was hungry and willing to use my teeth.
    I ate about dusk and sat staring at a little stick fire that needed constant fueling. The pup had dry dogfood with squirrel gravy, and sought the tent. Aloneness is most striking at evening, however it may happen to be striking you at the moment. Day’s absorbent busy-ness is past, and the dishes are stacked dirty, and you are confronted with yourself and confronted too with whether or not you like being where you are, by yourself.
    I didn’t like it overmuch just