The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims by Elizabeth Gilbert

Author:Elizabeth Gilbert [Gilbert, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-fiction
ISBN: 9781408817902
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2010-09-24T10:00:00+00:00

Eustace lived in the teepee throughout his college years, becoming increasingly knowledgable about the science of outdoor living even as he became more educated in the classrooms of ASU. Most of the skills he needed to be comfortable in the wilderness he had mastered in childhood and adolescence. All those attentive hours of exploration and discovery in forests behind various Conway homes had paid off, as had his experiences on the Appalachian Trail. What Eustace himself calls his innate “vigilant, aggressive mindfulness” had already brought him expertise at an early age.

He also spent a great deal of time during those years mastering his hunting skills. He became a student of deer behavior, recognizing that the more he knew about the animals, the better he’d be at finding them. Years later, having become a truly adept hunter, he would look back on those college days and realize that he must have missed dozens of deer; that he must have been within twenty feet of deer on numerous occasions and simply not noticed. Eustace had to learn not to just scan the forest looking for “a huge pair of antlers and a massive animal in a clearing with a big sign pointing to it saying there’s a deer right here, eustace!” Instead, he learned to spot deer as he had once spotted turtles—by attentively looking for tiny differences in color or movement in the underbrush. He learned how to catch the corner of a deer’s ear flicking; how to notice small, pale patches of white belly highlighted against the autumn camouflage and recognize them for what they were. Like a musical mastermind who can pick out each nuance of every instrument in an orchestra, Eustace got so that he could hear a twig snap in the forest and know by the sound the diameter of that twig, which told him whether it had been stepped on by a heavy deer or a squirrel. Or was the snap merely the sound of a dry branch falling out of a tree in the morning breeze? Eustace learned to tell the difference.

During his years in the teepee, he also came to respect and appreciate every kind of weather that nature delivered to his home. If it rained for three weeks, there was no use objecting to it; obviously, that was what nature needed right then. Eustace would try to adapt himself and use the time indoors making clothing, reading, praying, or practicing his beadwork. He came to understand thoroughly how winter is as important and beautiful a season as spring; how ice storms are as relevant and necessary as summer sunshine. Eustace would hear his peers at school complain about the weather, and he’d go back to his teepee and write in his journal long entries about his discovery that “there is no such thing as a ‘bad’ day in nature. You can’t stand in judgment of nature like that because she always does what she needs to do.”

“My fire has been fed well tonight,”

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