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By Root 611 0

when I needed to break away. It’s a straightforward snapshot of the pig hanging from the tree but taken from a sufficient distance that you can see in that one frame the animal and the butcher and the oak tree against the sun-filled sky and the pig-plowed earth, sloping down to a brook below. You can’t make out the buzzing yellow jackets or the turkey vultures doing lazy circles overhead or the acorns littering the ground, but I realized that here in this single picture you could actually observe this food chain in its totality, the entire circuit of energy and matter that had created the pig we were turning into meat for our meal. For there was the oak tree standing in the sun, light which it had transformed into the acorns that littered the ground and fed the pig that the man in the picture was turning into food. The man had done nothing to create this food chain, only stepped into a role prepared long ago for the Predator. And whatever of this Prey the man left behind the other animals here, the Scavengers, would in due course fold back into the earth, nourishing the oak so that it might in turn nourish another pig. Sun-soil-oak-pig-human: There it was, one of the food chains that have sustained life on earth for a million years made visible in a single frame, one uncluttered and most beautiful example of what is.

NINETEEN

GATHERING

The Fungi

Isn’t it curious how in so many of our pastimes and hobbies we play at supplying one or another of our fundamental creaturely needs—for food, shelter, even clothing? So some people knit, others build things or chop wood, and a great many of us “work” at feeding ourselves—by gardening or hunting, fishing or foraging. An economy organized around a complex division of labor can usually get these jobs done for a fraction of the cost, in time or money, that it takes us to do them ourselves, yet something in us apparently seeks confirmation that we still have the skills needed to provide for ourselves. You know, just in case. Evidently we want to be reminded how the fundamental processes that sustain us, by now hidden behind a globe-spanning scrim of economic complexity, actually work. It may be little more than a conceit at this point, but we like to think of ourselves as self-reliant, even if only for a few hours on the weekend, even when growing the stuff yourself winds up costing twice as much as it would to buy it at the store.

Playing at self-reliance takes different forms in different people, and you can probably tell a lot about a person by his choice of atavism: whether he’s drawn to the patient and solitary attentiveness of fishing, the strict mathematical syntax of building, the emotional drama of the hunt, or the mostly comic dialogue with other species that unfolds in the garden. Most of us have a pretty good idea which of these jobs we’d try for if somehow a time machine were to plunk us down in the Pleistocene or Neolithic.

At least until my adventures in hunting and gathering I’d always thought of myself as a Neolithic kind of guy. Growing food has been my atavism of choice since I was ten years old, when I planted a “farm” in my parents’ suburban yard and set up a farm stand patronized, pretty much exclusively, by my mother. The mysteries of germination and flowering and fruiting engaged me from an early age, and the fact that by planting and working an ordinary patch of dirt you could in a few months’ time harvest things of taste and value was, for me, nature’s most enduring astonishment. It still is.

Gardening is a way of being in nature steeped in assumptions of which the gardener is seldom more than vaguely aware—if at all. To work exclusively with domesticated species, for example, is bound to color your view of nature as being a fairly benign place, one that answers to human desires (for beauty, for tastiness). In the garden you will also, understandably, come to think of whatever grows there as belonging to you, since it is more or less the product of your labors performed on your land. And you will regard the wilder, less tractable residents of your