If you're not learning, you're not paying attention.

I have to admit I haven't been a very good student in French lately. I have just been so darn interested in learning about nature and exploring nature that I haven't had attention for much else. I don't intend to drop French, though, so instead of giving up I took matters into my own hands and found a way to make myself interested.

I picked up a French-English dictionary and looked up words about nature that I wanted to know so perhaps I could start to say things in French that I would want to say in English; maybe so I could start to see nature in a new way. I thought a new language could be the key to a different nature, a new world so to speak with different history and unique undertones.

I brought my dictionary and my text book up on a mountain that is right next to my house. I brought along my trusty plant guide and hiked up and out of the city onto the steep, dry grassland slope of Mount Jumbo. Without stopping I took straight for a less traveled path that traversed into wilder and wilder land.

At first the brown path was well defined and easy going. It went straight accross the range land of the mountainside without going up or down the slope much. The soil was rocky and hard, and there were mounds of rich brown dirt all over the place next to the trail, and some of the mounds even spilled onto the trail. Can you guess what could have made the mounds? Badgers. Lots of Badgers. Taxidea taxus.

In a year's time, the pesky Badgers'll thrash up roughly 3% of the ground in the rangelands. They dig to make their homes which probably made some of the mounds, but most of their hunting is done by digging as well. It's how they catch little critters like rodents and bugs. What does this mean? It means that after a certain amount of time, every square inch of the rangeland in North America will be dug up by Badgers. Truth be told we're not talking about thousands of years here. 50? 100? Hoo boy that's some pretty serious activity. The profile of the grassland soil will be churned and blended by the activity of these large weasels. The organic-matter-rich A horizon will be brought down and mingle with the C and B horizons, water will flow through the open tunnels of the Badgers and this access to water will affect the rates of weathering of the parent materials under the soil. The bedrock will dissolve, break up, fall apart, and the Badgers will laugh.

So as I was in the badger fields, I spied some skat on the ground. I spent a very long time examining the various piles of skat and determined it belonged to coyotes. So much can be learned from skat! It's usually just as exciting to find it as it is to see the actual animal that left it there. In the feces there was hair and claws (mole remains? Small weasel?) there were also berry pits and twigs from the choke cherry plant. Coyotes are predators, but they tend to be fairly omnivorous.

To my right the hard grassy slope extended up hundreds of feet at an angle steeper than 100% and to my left the slope was equivalent, but it shallowed into a valley, I could have rolled a rock down to my street from there. The sounds of traffic were still loud, but as the defining edges of the path became less and less discrete, it was clear that the hillslope still had wild elements. Soon I was on grass, and only the hint of a trail, maintained more by hooves and paws than sneakers. The skat seemed fresher and fresher as I went toward the steeply slanted horizon. The yellow line of the grassy slope in front of me was almost vertical. Beside it was the blue gray sky, behind it was the entire world about to open up to me like looking around the door frame into a crowded party.

There was one piece of skat that didn't look like the rest. I believe this was badger skat. It was much blacker which indicates a diet that's high in meat, and it had a greasy sort of coating which is characteristic of the weasel family. There were also seed heads of spotted knapweed plants which would suggest that it was going HERBIVORE. What? Badger don't eat seeds! But wait! Inside the seedhead of the knapweed, there dwells a small grub from the gall fly, which is high in protein and fat! Furthermore, the knapweed seed heads grow less than 12 inches from the ground, so even a fatty badger could grab them, as opposed to the choke cherries which grow too high for badgers, but not Coyotes.

Well, I wasn't too much more than half a mile from my house. That's pretty close for coyotes, though I have never seen one except in Yellowstone. The Coyotes there had so much character and freedom and aloofness. They didn't mind running right by us Vermont boys as we made flapjacks while sitting on the bumper of the minivan. They loped quickly by us, first one, then another and they swung their low heads from side to side with their tongues out and ears up to survey the land.

Okay, anyway, I studied French under a Douglas fir. I learned so much! I practiced prepositions. L'arbre petit est derriere de l'arbre grand. Le ciel et au-dessus de moi, mais la terre est au-dessous de moi. I said, 'the little tree is behind the big tree' which made much more sense to me than the vocab from my textbook. I thought about how it must be to see a winged creature moving through the air and think oiseau rather than bird. Or nuage, rather than cloud. I didn't really get into the mindset of French, but I thought it was a good mental exercise. I had to learn the words about nature in order to connect the interest in French to my interest in the land.

Les feuilles d'automne
sont loin de moi.
Je recherche mon foyer
qui est derrière de moi.
Je réfléchis mon fleuve
qui est au-dessous de la terre.
Il va comme l'oiseau
entre les montagnes
et la côte.
Je regarde les nuages
Je regarde l'horizon.

I studied for over an hour on a little grassy bench on the slope and looked out over the city of Missoula wishing it would dissappear.