Great writing of yesteryear

“Frost had turned the willow leaves to gold and sent them skittering and tacking like fairy boats upon the quiet stream. The aspens, which last week shone of hammered gold, stand naked and modest, their brilliant shrouds, flung carelessly at their feet,”

“Outside my fences, the hunters ( it’s deer season) are in a frenzy. One car impales the next with lurching headlights.”

“I have a flashlight whose beam saves walking. Beating the gloom with a club of light, I wake the killdeer from their sleep, send the starlings clattering from the limby pine tops. Heifers ring the pines, clustered beneath in groups for warmth and company, the kindly branches protecting their backs from the early morning frost. A few push blinking to their feet, stretching their sway-baked best as though their front feet are about to walk off and leave the rest of the body behind.”

Who writes with such artistry about the natural word as a cattleman in Oregon in the late 1960’s? How long did the author ‘stick it out’ on his 6000 acres of Yamsi.

Who tells the reader about a past world, when sirloin steak sold for $1.50 a lb. When it took 900 tons of hay , approximately 25,000 bales, costing $22,500 to feet 500 cattle over a winter. When 18,000 different brands marked Oregon herds. When great meals consisted of steak, baked beans, cherry pie and beer?

Thankfully, Dayton O. Hyde is still alive at 86. And in testament to his 17 books, his mastery of description and depth of feelings for the land, I add a few more sentences from his 1971 seminal work, “Yamsi.”

“First, a spotted skunk, a species which hasn’t been seen here for thirty years, then, wet and bedraggled, a big raccoon probes for snails along the march, stands on his hind legs to peer at me above the hummocks, eyes glowing like red coals. Heavy with fawn, a doe comes mincing down off the forested hillsides and across the meadow, headed for salt. …The quiet, windless ponds are rippled now with the spreading V of a swimming muskrat, now with a flock of cinnamon teal that came guiding in on a beam of floating moonlight, and are determined to spend the rest of the night. … It is not a very safe place, for already a great horned owl has floated out of nowhere to perch on a cathedral spire of a dead jackpine right above their heads, His hoots are answered from afar from another male.” … “Fearful of frightening her ( a calving heifer), I sit in the darkness, shivering, miserable, waiting for instincts to make a mother of her, trying to hear the low bawl of motherhood, the wet licking sounds above the froggy chorus”…. “The calf is rough-haired with her licking a cowlick standing in a whorl on his ribs and another on his shoulder. He stands trembling, trying to suck his mother’s shoulder. Stupid heifer!”

Want to read more? His book Yamsi is available at Amazon, Alibris and libraries.