"The vast country is still there, but it has somehow been altered by intrusions, "peopled" to death. It is all gone, all changed, all tamed and pacif… - Gary Paulsen

He reached now and ran one of Gretchen’s soft ears through his gnarled, bent fingers, like silk through barbwire. “And I never saw it until I started with Gretchen. Got her to sit one day. The same day, she looked a long time at me and at a piece of cookie” — and here she perked up, ears more alert with the word “cookie” — “in my hand, and she saw the cookie and my eyes and then she sat. Clean and down. As much as if she’d said, ‘I’ll sit and then you give me that piece of cookie,’ and she did and I did and it was the first time I knew I had been wrong all along. I never trained one animal. Not once . . .” “They trained you.

But the beauty of the woods, the incredible joy of it is too alluring to be ignored, and I could not stand to be away from it — indeed, still can't — and so I ran dogs simply to run dogs; to be in and part of the forest, the woods

I am full of tough hope