In Barry Lopez’ Arctic Dreams (a beautiful and wise book) he laments the passage of the special relationship between the hunter and the landscape; A hunter—a real hunts-to-live hunter, not a plaid-clad suburbanite gun nut—has to as a matter of life or death study his surroundings with great care. I quote: “But the meticulous inspection of the land that is the mark of a good hunter becomes most evident when he uses a pair of good field glasses. Long after the most inquiring nonnative has has grown weary of glassing the land for some clue to the movement of animals, a hunter is still scouring its edges and interstices. He may take an hour to glass 360° of the apparently silent tundra, one section at a time.” In that spirit, go visit the very good Quicktime VR panorama of the Martian Surface, set the scene into a slow, slow drift (it’s easy with a trackpad), cultivate that hunter’s eye, and spend a half-hour looking at the horizon, and the sand, and the stones.
