The night I thought I heard rain and fell asleep again to the cries of snow geese, I also heard the sound of their night flying, a great hammering of the air overhead, a wild creaking of wings. These primitive sounds made the Klamath Basin seem oddly untenanted, the ancestral ground of animals, reclaimed by them each year. In a few days at the periphery of the flocks of geese, however, I did not feel like an interloper. I felt a calmness birds can bring to people; and, quieted, I sensed here the outlines of the oldest mysteries: the nature and extent of space, the fall of light from the
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