North Sun, or The Voyage of the Whaleship Esther by Ethan Rutherford

For none in their business can separate from the sea. And it is better to act than to be acted upon. It is possible that a terrible fate awaits each and every one of then, but the voyage has begun and it will be done. Goodnight, she thinks. Above her, the ceiling gives way to sky. Goodnight. To the whale in the deep, and the ship crushed by ice. To the gulls on the quay, her child somewhere in sleep. To the waves crashing the shore, and a hard wind a lee, to the long wait and winter, all of it, goodnight.

In New Bedford, Captain Arnold Lovejoy is approached by the wealthy Ashley family with a job: he will sail their ship, the Esther, to the Chukchi Sea, where he will bring back another captain, one of their agents and the husband of the family heiress, who has abandoned his ship to the ice and decided not to come back. The Esther will harvest whales as it goes, but it's a hard time for whalers; overfishing has sent the whale populations plummeting. A mysterious representative of the Ashleys, named Thule, joins Lovejoy on board; he seems to understand that there is more to their mission than Lovejoy has been told. There is the usual gaggle of seaman, steerers, and cooks, as well as a pair of ships' boys, brothers, who remain nameless. None of them, of course, has read Heart of Darkness, and they don't know that a ship sent after a madman is doomed to find only madness.

The ships' boys are repeatedly raped by a sinister deckhand named Eastman. Unable to defend themselves, they find their own defender in a mysterious figure who they discover swimming toward the ship one day in the middle of the ocean. This figure, who calls himself Old Sorrel, is completely naked, and has the head of a bird, complete with an enormous, snapping beak. Old Sorrel, we learn, is a kind of counterpart to the mysterious Thule. Thule needs the Esther to make it to the Chukchi Sea, to recover a valuable and magical artifact belonging to the Ashleys. But Old Sorrel's modus operandi is sinking ships, puncturing them with his enormous beak. It's suggested, perhaps, that he is the one who sank the previous ship, and is a manifestation of the Other, the sea-madness that claimed the last captain. But he also serves as the boys' only friend on the ship, and ultimately defeats the sinister rapist who pursues them.

North Sun is half realism, half fantasy, drawn from scrupulous research about whaleship journeys in the late 19th century. The crew battles the familiar, though no less frightening, hardships of the whaling life: massive, recalcitrant whales; marauding sharks; pack ice that threatens to close on the Esther and doom it to overwintering in the arctic; terrible disease and starvation. Perhaps the elements of the fantastic, like Thule and Old Sorrel, and the slithering shipworms that seem to be at Old Sorrel's beck and call, are only representations of those real-world hardships. In confronting them, perhaps the crew of the Esther are only confronting themselves, in the way that the isolation of the ship and the far north force men to confront their most immediate and unvarnished selves, desires. Lovejoy and the crew confront their own helplessness aboard the Esther: one of the most mysterious, and effective, scenes actually occurs back in the Ashleys' parlor, where we learn that the ship's benefactors have a model ship in which the crew can be seen, magically and in miniature, about their business. The forces that control the ship's journey are not always clear, but whatever they are, the crew themselves have no agency, and can only go where they're carried, toward destiny or doom.

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.