|  Even an animal’s thoughts are written in its tracks: the stutters, half-starts, hesitations, and turns that show as telltale ripples among the more prominent waves of its movement. In order to read them, you have to be more than just a tracker of animals. You have to be a tracker of everything. You have to see how the tracks fit in with the landscape. You have to be able to read the stories written by winds, waters, grasses, and trees. You have to be as sensitive to the grand as to the small. And you have to be able to blend physical evidence with knowledge and intuition.
—Tom Brown, Jr. The wilderness is not safe; nature is indifferent to our individual welfare. Where many romanticize nature, and seek to nestle in the arms of a nurturant wilderness, the fact is that mama doesn’t care. Or let me say it better: mama doesn’t care any more about me than she does about bears or poison ivy and their right to protect themselves from my clumsy intrusions. Nature is not about me; and that is an ultimately liberating aspect of the wilderness experience. But that liberation imposes responsibility – the responsibility to know how to take care of yourself, because the wilderness will not do it for you.
 Betsy Armstrong, et al., The Avalanche Book (Golden CO: Fulcrum Publishing, 1992), ISBN 1-5591-119-6. The authors are both experienced research scientists with the Colorado Avalanche Information Center. The book discusses the physical and mechanical causes of avalanches, and how terrain and weather build up to create one. It talks about decisionmaking and risk-taking in avalanche country, how to survive an avalanche, how to look for and rescue victims, and passive and active techniques of avalanche control. There is a concluding chapter on the current state of avalanche studies. This is a detailed and comprehensive review of just about everything you would want to know about avalanches.
 Michael Bane, Trail Safe: Averting Threatening Human Behavior in the Outdoors (Berkeley CA: Wilderness Press, 2000), ISBN 0-89997-264-0. When you think of danger in the wilderness, you think of lions and tigers and bears, oh my. But some of the most dangerous creatures in the wilderness have two legs instead of four. This book is designed to prepare the wilderness traveler to deal with criminal behavior in national forests, public parks, and other rural and wilderness areas. It examines personal safety in the outdoors - the relationship among awareness, intuition, and fear; risk assessment and planning; and a self-defense decision tree to determine appropriate reactions to a violent encounter. Ironically, the kind of alert awareness that helps keep us secure can in fact enhance our relationship with the wild.
 Gretel Ehrlich, A Match to the Heart: One Woman's Story of Being Struck by Lightning (New York NY: Viking Penguin, 1995), ISBN 0-14017-937-2. The author of this remarkable book is a well-known nature writer, author of The Solace of Open Spaces, and the owner of ranch in Wyoming, where she was struck by lightning and – momentarily – killed. ”Before electricity carved its blue path toward me,” she writes, ”before the negative charge shot down from cloud to ground . . . before air expanded and contracted producing loud pressure pulses I could not hear because I was already dead, I had been walking.” She fell to the ground, hit her head and body on rock, and was jolted back to consciousness. This book chronicles her experience of recovery and of the physical, psychological, and spiritual consequences of the lightning strike. People who are struck by lightning, she learns, share many responses, all related to the symbolism of the heart – medical, cultural, religious. It is in water, finally, that she finds a way to extinguish the fire that lightning has lit and, ”carved from a ruined body,” return to the ranch with new life.
 Carl Ernst, Venomous Reptiles of North America (Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1999), ISBN 1-56098-447-3. This is the standard reference on the subject. It is a solid, scholarly natural history of all venomous reptiles north of Mexico – twenty snakes and the Gila monster – and it covers external morphology, venomology, and conservation, with an identification key, range maps, and color photos. Each entry gives a physical description of the reptile, the fossil record, distribution, geographic variation, habitat, behavior, reproduction, growth and longevity, food and feeding, venom and bites, predators and defense, and population.
 Kathy Etling, Cougar Attacks : Encounters of the Worst Kind (Guilford CT: The Lyons Press, 2001), ISBN 1-58574-221-X. The author of this book is an experienced hunter and regular contributor to the outdoors press, including Outdoor Life, American Hunter, and Deer and Deer Hunting. In this book she discusses the cougar - also known as the puma, mountain lion, or catamount. This animal, once hunted, trapped, and poisoned almost to extinction, is making a remarkable comeback, just as humans, pursuing their own suburban dreams, are invading the edges of its traditional territory. The humans encourage wildlife near their homes, let their pets roam loose, permit their children to play outdoors, and go jogging along scenic lonely mountain trails. The result is a series of often well publicized cougar attacks and a fierce debate about how to protect both humans and animals. This book is an examination of such attacks, the role of sport hunting and wildlife management programs, and ways in which humans can protect themselves when encountering a mountain lion.
 Steven Foster, et al., A Peterson Field Guide to Venomous Animals and Poisonous Plants (New York NY: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), ISBN 0-39593-608-X. This is one of the excellent series of books published as Peterson's Field Guides. The book discusses venomous reptiles and insects and poisonous plants, ferns, and fungi, including venomous snakes, spiders, scorpions, bees, wasps, and fire ants, poisonous mushrooms, and poison ivy, oak, and sumac. It includes both color photographs and black-and-white drawings as well as range information.
 Stephen Herrero, Bear Attacks: Their Causes and Avoidance (New York NY: Lyons Press, 1988), ISBN 0-94113-082-7. This book is a detailed and comprehensive review of what is known about attacks by grizzly and black bears, written by a leading authority on bear ecology and behavior. The book discusses both unexpected and provoked attacks, explains the basics of grizzly and black bear behavior, and tells how to avoid encounters. Along the way, the book discusses bear foods and location, signs of bear activity, aggressive and submissive behavior among bears, and bear management in the wild. More than an account of bear attacks, this book is a thorough introduction to the bears themselves.
 Scott McMillion, Mark of the Grizzly: True Stories of Recent Bear Attacks and the Hard Lessons Learned (Helena MT: Falcon Publishing, 1998), ISBN 1-56044-636-6. This book collects the stories of eighteen attacks by grizzlies between 1977 and 1997. The stories are graphic and gripping; the victims are hikers, hunters, runners, wildlife photographers, and biologists in the field, who met the Great Bear in Yellowstone and Glacier national parks, in Alaska, Montana, British Columbia. The narratives of these survivors are compelling, and talk not only of physical scars but also of enduring fear, respect, and even reverence for the animal that attacked them. Equally important, the book discusses the lessons learned – how to behave in the presence of these magnificent animals and how to avoid dangerous encounters.
 James Shelton, Bear Attacks: The Deadly Truth (Hagensborg BC: Shelton Productions, 1998), ISBN 0-96980-991-3. This book is a polemic, attacking what the author believes are serious and dangerous cultural beliefs about bears and other predators. The author has over thirty years of experience and research on bears, and the book discusses five general types of bear aggression – predatory aggression, including carcass defense; general competitiveness aggression, including breeding aggression; home range aggression; male cub-killing aggression; and female cub defense aggression. The book is filled with stories of bear attacks and how they could have been avoided. The author is contemptuous of huggy-bunny views of wild animals in general and predators in particular; he attacks the prevailing play-dead defense strategy; and he is insistent on realistic views of how natural systems really operate.
 Nancy J. Turner, Common Poisonous Plants and Mushrooms of North America (Portland OR: Timber Press, 1995), ISBN 0-88192-312-5. This is a comprehensive guide to just about every plant some part of which may be poisonous to somebody under some circumstances. The book includes chapters on poisonous mushrooms and poisonous plants of wild areas, which are of most interest to those in the wilderness, as well as on poisonous garden and crop plants and poisonous house plants and plant products. Each entry begins with a Quick Check section, includes discussions of habitat, toxicity, and treatment, and has a color photograph of the plant. Entries are by popular name, but the index includes botanic names as well.
 Martin Uman, All about Lightning (New York NY: Dover Publications, 1986), ISBN 0-48625-237-X. There is nothing that demonstrates more clearly than lightning the simultaneous beauty and terror of the wilderness. To be caught out in the open in a lightning storm will dispel forever any notion of a benevolent and nurturant nature, and will instead teach all about sheer arbitrary power. The author of this book teaches electrical and computer engineering, and he tells you everything you ever thought to ask about lightning. The book explains the physics of lightning – voltage, current, charge, speed, event sequence, frequency of occurrence, length and width of channel, temperature. And it also discusses lightning-related injuries, death rates, damage, and protection.
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