Field Notes by Barry Lopez

That winter I dreamed four times about wolverine. I decided I was going to go up there when spring came, regardless. I've never been able to learn what I want to know about animals from books or looking at television. I have to walk around near them, be in places where they are. This was the heart of the trouble that I had in school. Many of the stories that should have been about animals, about how they live, their different ways, were never told. I don't know what the stories were, but when I walked in the woods or out on the prairie or in the mountains, I could feel the boundaries of those stories. I knew they were there, the way you know fish are in a river. This knowledge was what I wanted, and the only way I had gotten it was to go out and look for it. To be near animals until they showed you something you didn't imagine or you hadn't seen or heard.

The characters in Barry Lopez's story collection are often academics or researchers: the Arctic voyager of "Pearyland," the fossil expert working at the American Museum of Natural History in "The Open Lot," the anthropologist in "The Entreaty of the Wiideema." They are collectors of knowledge, in a way, but their methods have a way of foundering against unknowns, mysteries which require different methods of seeing and knowing. That anthropologist seeks out the Wiideema, an unstudied (and totally invented) indigenous group in Australia because he's seeking that kind of knowledge, and finds more than he bargained for: when a Wiideema woman speaks to him for the first time, he quickly understands that it's not English she's speaking but a kind of universal language that emerges from sheer being. He can communicate with her, and them, as long as he doesn't try too hard to understand, anthropologist-like, to figure out just how it is they are communicating in the first place. In this way, the Wiideema represent something like the wolverines of "Lessons from the Wolverine," who also have their own language for speaking. The lesson they teach is that real knowledge emerges from existence, from being among the immediacy of the earth, its places, its animals; it cannot be found in systems, schemata, or books.

Over and over again Lopez contrasts this kind of knowledge with the bookish kind: the fossil expert "sees" the fossil within the rock better than any of her peers, but she never advances because she refuses to systematize or generalize. The narrator of "The Negro in the Kitchen" is a fitness-obsessed retiree who finds--as the title suggests--a strange black man in his kitchen one day, having set a place at the table for them both. The man, it turns out, is walking across the United States from the East Coast to the Pacific, searching for an intimacy with his own country. In a telling moment, the narrator gets up to examine a bird at the window and check it off his life list--a solitary vireo. His guest, who has learned birdsong by the hundreds, corrects him: it was a ruby-crowned kinglet. The man is disappointed--he's already spotted a kinglet--and when his guest leaves, he goes not to the window but to his bird book to read. Despite his air of smug (white) paternalism, he's failed to learn the lesson the "Negro in the Kitchen" has borne to him.

Field Notes is best when Lopez zeroes in on the details of place; he has a Willa Cather-like skill at describing the simple features of a landscape in way that allows us to see it with freshness, ranging from the Arctic to the American desert to rocky creeks of Colorado. He's better at places than people, which is why the story "Conversation"--in which a conservationist begs her brother, the Secretary of the Interior or something, to place the ferruginous hawk on the endangered species list--such a wooden mistake. The introductory piece, "Within Birds' Hearing," towers over the rest of the collection: a strange and hallucinatory account of a man who leaves his home in the Mojave without a map or supplies, or a clear reason, walking toward a distant creek. The man's journey is so reckless I thought for several pages Lopez was describing the migration of a bird. But maybe that's the point; we have grown incapable of following a birdlike instinct, if we ever were--in the end it is a group of mourning doves who save him by siphoning water into his mouth when he is close to death.