Never have I felt fight or flight like this. My only choice, the message going to the thick of the muscle in my legs, is to run. Get as much space between me and danger as possible. The animal is too big, too wild…

Uncommon Encounters In The Wild lays bare over fifty heart-pounding encounters with sometimes strange, sometimes entirely ordinary, animals. From mountain lions to hummingbirds, Childs, the award-winning author of Apocalyptic Planet and The Secret Knowledge of Water, has seen quite a lot. His personal life journey, which includes extensive outdoor experience from Alaska to Mexico, provides the backbone for each story, a support for his considerable animal knowledge.

The finished product is a vivid fabric of stories, distinct yet enmeshed by a common encounterer, that reveal a cloaked animal world few people will ever experience.

Childs drags you, willing or not, into ochre canyons, tents musty with the dank smell of bears, and excavation rooms three hundred thousand years old. The syntax is descriptive, but not verbose ad nauseum. Take, for example, the Utah desert:

“I drove past the sign that read NO SERVICES NEXT 106 MILES. Air coming through my open window was blast-furnace exhaust, straightening my hair and splitting it at the ends. The interstate rose to the foot of the San Rafael Swell. Sandstone slabs a quarter-mile long angled against one another like toppled stegosaurus plates. Steep canyons crowded between them. At eighty miles per hour, I worked through my typical interstate thoughts. I wanted off this road. My eyes were all over the hot stones of the San Rafael, into shadows among the canyons. I imagined hiking routes from between the shimmering bug guts on the windshield… I took the next exit.” Are you still with me, or are you in the desert by now, restless and sweating?

This post’s author on the hunt for his own animal encounters.

The imagery continues into each encounter, and this is where it really gets interesting. Did you know that the racoon’s genus Procyon, roughly meaning “before the dog,” is an incorrect description, as raccoons are more closely related to bears? Or that a barn owl’s asymmetrical hearing allows it, in a completely darkened room, to hit mice with an accuracy of forty hits for every miss? Or how about that large feline predators rarely break the bones of their prey?

“Rather, the teeth slide between vertebrae and open the spine surgically. Cat teeth are heavily laden with nerves so that the animal can actually feel its way around the spine. Each species of cat has a precise width and positioning to its teeth, designed to get into the vertebrae of specific prey, with bobcats taking rabbits, and mountain lions taking deer or elk.” Whoa.

One of Danny’s animal encounters.

Even with all your new knowledge, would you know what to do if you met a mountain lion in the wild? Childs does, and upon each encounter, especially the ones with potentially dangerous animals, he walks you methodically through why he acts the way he does. That’s not to say that your pulse won’t pound in your ears. It will.

You may also find yourself wondering, as I did, how Childs has had so many interesting encounters with wild animals. He picks up on every little detail of his surroundings, yet he asks rhetorically, “How many eyes [have] watched us pass, how many heads turned to see us careening through the woods?” I’ve walked through the woods, sometimes for weeks at a time; how many animals have I walked by, oblivious to their presence?

If you get nothing else from reading this book (and you should read this book), you will find yourself, just like I did, with wide eyes and a new sense of wonder the next time you walk into a habitat unknown to humanity.

Another of Danny’s animal encounters.

At High Trails Outdoor Science School, we literally force our instructors to write about elementary outdoor education, teaching outside, learning outside, our dirty classroom (the forest…gosh), environmental science, outdoor science, and all other tree hugging student and kid loving things that keep us engaged, passionate, driven, loving our job, digging our life, and spreading the word to anyone whose attention we can hold for long enough to actually make it through reading this entire sentence. Whew…. www.dirtyclassroom.com