Thoreau's Legacy by Richard Hayes

of countless prey and savored the sweet, visceral smell of fear on the wind. But I am also aware of something else deep within, a stirring remembrance of man’s ancient place below animals of exquisite and terrible power. After all, it was just such bestial jaws that chased man into witting evolution. To these creatures, as to our shared earth, we humans owe nothing short of everything .
    A gull screams. The bear turns away, and gray cloud eclipses the Arctic sun.

    The old male bear wanders through a maze of bowhead whale remains at Barter Island on Alaska’s North Slope. Photo by Blake Matheson.

    Blake Matheson recently completed law school in Portland, Oregon. He plans to marry and to look for a job working on the legal protection of endangered species and their habitats.

Tiny Scales
    Curtis Childs
    I ALMOST STEPPED ON IT, IT WAS SO SMALL. IT MIGHT
have been a stick, lying on the sidewalk as the setting October sun shot red and gold through the oak leaves. But as I bent closer—look! Tiny scales! Could it be? The five-inch-long snake flailed and curled its soft body around my index finger as I picked it up. Every scale seemed flawless, thousands of miniature overlapping plates gliding across each other as the animal’s spine articulated. Carefully lifting my hand, I turned my face to gaze at the orange-red underside, confirming my guess.
    A Michigan red-bellied snake. I hadn’t held one since I was a child. My friends and I could catch two or three of them in a day, setting up bricks and rocks in the baby pool and putting the snakes in there just to watch and enjoy. Woods surrounded our subdivision then, and an hour’s adventuring could lead the three or four of us to cornfields, swamps, and ancient stumps.
    The red-bellies left when the bulldozers came. Even the big black garter snakes, which to my boyhood delight had haunted every corner of our yard, vanished. The wave of suburban development swept north from Detroit to crash over us, leaving in its wake strip malls and a gray satellite view when the froth finally receded.
    I peered more closely at the snake as insects hummed in the field. Somehow, the red-bellies had come back. These tiny, fragile reptiles had survived the overturned fields, the cement trucks, the pollution, and the drained wetlands—cosmic events to a creature this minute. But as I set her down, I looked up at the blue expanse of atmosphere overhead, suddenly aware of the magnitude of what the red-bellies might soon face. A pregnant female might move quickly enough to avoid a car’s tires, but what would she do if statewide rain patterns shifted? Where will she hide if shorter winters trigger an ecosystem imbalance, and the invertebrate prey she needs to survive move away?
    These little animals, so timid that they don’t even try to bite when held, miraculously survived the turbulence of human development. Will that triumph mean nothing in a couple of decades? Can red-bellies, and thousands of other species like them, to whom a football field is a day’s journey, do anything to grapple with the enormity of a changing atmosphere?
    We can’t know for sure, but as I watched the snake slip up over the curb into the grass, I smiled at the perseverance she stood for. Thanks for making it, thanks for the past you gave me, I thought, as scenes from years ago flashed across my mind. Now what future will I give you?

    Curtis Childs has a degree in communication from Oakland University in Michigan. He has been a disc jockey for his college radio station and a performing singer-songwriter.

American Ruby-Spot Damselfly
    Lea Jane Parker
    I am an educator for a young people’s environmental club in Arizona. As I lead a Nature Quest hike along the Verde River, I delight in seeing young faces light up when they find animal prints, damselflies and other insects, birds, plants, and interesting rocks. As they listen to the water’s rushing music, they learn about the impacts of global warming and the need