Eckert's Wild Season

Wild Season, published in 1967, was a book that influenced my life and my career choice. The author, Allan Eckert, explained in a simple, matter of fact style, the circle of life, during thirty days of a spring month.

On the first day in May, the reader follows the metamorphosis of a tadpole into a bullfrog. Just as a great blue heron is poised to spear the frog, the young frog, in a fortuitous fraction of timing, leaps at a mayfly, and narrowly misses becoming the bird's meal. Eckert deftly describes the events that happen to the frog in the next 24 hours after it leaves the pond. The reader is completely absorbed in the frog's struggle to eat and not be eaten.

But then, the frog makes a fatal mistake by bobbing carelessly on the water's surface while swallowing a beetle. He is snapped up by a large-mouthed bass. The frog becomes fuel to drive the female fish to spawn in a nest (a "redd") and her roe is inseminated by a male who will guard the eggs until the babies hatched.

On the third day of May, the female bass is caught by fishermen and dispatched for their dinner. Her entrails and bones are thrown in the river and Eckert vividly described the life that comes to feast on the remains of the fish. Finally, a raccoon comes and makes off with the head. As the days of May trickle by, plants, animals, and people travel on interconnected paths -- a raccoon, meadowlark, a bot fly, a grain of wheat, a rabbit, a snapping turtle, a boy who wants to kill a bull snake, and others.

Reading Eckert's book now, I am struck by his bias -- the ugly water snake, the wicked-looking head of the snapping turtle, and the decidedly ugly creature, a bot fly. Today, these anthropomorphic comments are out of style, but I didn't dwell on the negativity when I first read it. What made Wild Season an earth-shattering book for me was the ending, which brought everything full circle, and made the hair stand up on the back of my neck.

As Eckert himself wrote, "For in nature's book, everything has its place and its time; there exists a persistent interdependency of its creatures one upon another." Wild Season may be over 40 years old, but it is still a great read, and used copies are available online.