The Animal Dialogues by Craig Childs

Childs, Craig. The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild. New York: Little, Brown, and Young, 2007. Print.

Genre: narrative nonfiction

Summary: Craig Childs is a naturalist and award-winning writer. He has spent his entire life prodding the invisible tissues that connect man, animal, earth, time, life, and death. This brings together a collection of striking essays, musings, and mementos describing his encounters with all kinds of creatures and beasts. Cougars, bears, jaguars, elk, ravens, fish, sharks, owls, even the common cat and domestic dog.

Critique: Rather than a critique of this book, I offer would-be readers a warning. Do not read this book if you are neither ready nor willing to see the world in a whole new way. Do not glance at a single page or paragraph unless you can accept that the universe does not operate in the way you have always presumed. Through Childs’ eyes you will experience a world were waterfalls in the distance are loose strings and threads. Shorelines are the haggling grounds between oceans and mountains. Time is simultaneously vast and puny.

Language is different with Childs, too. He admits early on he has to use a sort of different language to convey what it is like to come into contact with animals the way he has. The experience is a lot like trying to build the sky out of sticks, he says. But you have been warned: Childs is incredibly skilled with his sticks!

Be careful, else you’ll start to speak, think, and feel differently. You too may realize dawn is not a time, but a color you can feel on your face. You may notice how “blood jacks into muscles” when you stand toe-to-claw with a hungry predator. Perhaps a growl or roar will feel like an animals voice breaking the air on your back. Or how your body transforms into “a single muscle sliding like pure light between the trees” as you run with, or maybe away from, an animal.

What’s that? You’re going to nab this book and start reading it? Even though nature is savage and full of frightening beasts — the most horrifying beast of all being the one you keep locked inside your own skin, denied the feral pleasures of sun, air, chase, and dark??? Don’t say I didn’t warn you…