Seeds of Another Summer by Beth Powning

Home: Chronicles of a North Country Life by Beth Powning

EXCERPT

"The coyotes are newcomers.

Several years ago, they moved into the forests above our farm. They came softly, without preamble, like sand dunes formed by the winds of night.

We encountered them in the slanting light of an August afternoon, when we were taking a short cut home on one of the logging roads back in the hills. They came trotting out of the alders, a pack of seven. They froze, scattered across the road; they stared us dead in the eyes. Their tongues lolling from grinning mouths, and their narrow faces flickered with intelligence honed sharp as lightning. They did not appear to be afraid. In the sudden, reverberant silence, I read in their eyes an indifference so profound that my spirit quailed. They had been moving fast, and they paused only for an instant, considering us rapidly; then they vanished back into the alders, flickering through the striped shadows like fish in shallows. The casual swing of their paws, the calm and instant resumption of their hunt, proclaimed that we were no more, to them, than clouds in the sky."
©copyright Beth Powning

Beth Powning's book of lyrical prose and colour photographs was published simultaneously by Penguin Books Canada (Toronto) as
Seeds of Another Summer: Finding the Spirit of Home in Nature, and by Stewart, Tabori & Chang (New York) as Home: Chronicles of a North Country Life.

These books are currently out-of-print but can be found on-line.