Austin, Mary Hunter

Born in 1868 in Carlinville, Illinois, and a graduate of Blackburn College, Mary Austin was a prolific writer of poetry, short stories, novels, plays, and essays. She was frequently on the lecture circuit and was active in the feminist movement. At one time, she lived in Carmel, California and was part of a social circle that included Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and George Sterling. Later, she became interestedin Native American and Spanish colonial cultures and resettled in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Some of her other nature writing included The Flock, California: The Land of the Sun, and The Land of Journey's Ending. She died in 1934.

For all the toll the desert takes of a man it gives compensations, deep breaths, deep sleep, and the communion of the stars. The Land of Little Rain,.1903

 

. . . the true desert breeds its own kind, each in its particular habitat. The angle of the slope, the frontage of a hill, the structure of the soil determines the plant. Ibid.

 

Go as far as you dare in the heart of a lonely land, you cannot go so far that life and death are not before you. Ibid.

 

None other than this long brown land lays such a hold on the affections. The rainbow hills, the tender bluish mists, the luminous radiance of the spring, have the lotus charm. They trick the sense of time, so that once inhabiting there you always mean to go away without quite realizing that you have not done it. Ibid.

 

Who shall say what another will find most to his liking in the streets of the mountains. As for me, once set above the country of the silver firs, I must go on until I find white columbine. Ibid.

 

Once at Red Rock, in a year of green pasture, which is a bad time for the scavengers, we saw two buzzards, five ravens, and a coyote feeding on the same carrion, and only the coyote seemed ashamed of the company. Ibid.

 

When the five coyotes that range the Tejon from Pasteria to Tunawai planned a relay race to bring down an antelope strayed from the band, beside myself to watch, an eagle swung down from Mt. Pinos, buzzards materialized out of invisible ether, and hawks came trooping like small boys to a street fight. Ibid.

 

Man is a great blunderer going about in the woods, and there is no other except the bear makes so much noise. Being se well warned beforehand, it is a very stupid animal, or a very bold one, that cannot keep safely hid. Ibid.

 

Man is not himself only , , , He is all that he sees; all that flows to him from a thousand sources . . . He is the land, the life of its mountain lines, the reach of its valleys. Earth Horizon. 1932.