Leaving Santa Fe

 

Snow covered dried chiles, Santa Fe

From a coven of churches ring bells
that stop my thoughts, tender
solace to sinners - so many places
to pray. Tewas and Hopi offer
turquoise and dreams on altar
cloths beneath sacred trees.
I enter their temples. Crow Mother
rests on a branch nearby, gifts me
with corn for my faraway garden.

Leaving behind shops of art
and trinkets, my feet slow as sun
beats a past-noon descent.
Sky is high desert blue.
The air, wrung dry, shimmers
with heat, ancestral stories.
I feel the old ones stir my heart,
their whispers, my pulse.

By Carol Aronoff

Poem source here

Image by Martha Marks

New Mexico Biscochitos

By Cheryl Alters Jamison

The New Mexico state cookie, an anise- and cinnamon-scented delight, is served at every December gathering short of a fast-food breakfast. Lori Delgado shares this scrumptious recipe, which began with Agnes Trujillo, a friend of her mother-in-law, Angie’s. Whether you spell it biscochito or bizcochito, you’ll call these cookies wonderful. 

Makes about 6 dozen medium-size cookies.

Cookies

• 5 to 6 cups all-purpose flour
• 1 tablespoon baking powder
• ¼ teaspoon salt
• 1 pound lard, at room temperature
• 1 cup granulated sugar
• 3 large eggs
• 1½ tablespoons ground anise seeds
• ½ cup orange juice, preferably freshly pressed
• 1 ounce (2 tablespoons) whiskey

Topping

• ¼ cup granulated sugar
• ¾ teaspoon ground cinnamon

For the cookies

• Preheat oven to 425° F.
• Sift together 5 cups flour, baking powder, and salt.
• Beat lard in electric mixer, gradually adding sugar until extremely light and fluffy; about 8 minutes. Stop mixer every couple minutes to scrape down sides of mixing bowl. Add eggs singly, beating in each one before adding the next. 
• Mix in dry ingredients, beating only until incorporated. Add anise seeds, whiskey, and orange juice. A stiff, pie-crust–like dough is what you’re after. Add some or all of remaining flour, as needed, to get proper consistency.
• Spoon dough into cookie press, if you wish. Push out dough into shaped cookies onto cookie sheets. If you don’t have a cookie press or prefer to make them with cookie cutters, the dough can be rolled out ¼ inch thick on floured work surface and cut into favorite shapes, then arranged on cookie sheets. In either case, avoid handling the dough more than necessary.
• Bake cookies 12 to 15 minutes.

For the topping

• While cookies bake, stir together topping ingredients.

Assembly

• Transfer cookies onto baking racks to cool.
• Gently roll cookies in topping mixture. If not eaten sooner, cookies will keep for a week.

Enjoy! 

*This article was first published in an online extra December 2013 issue of New Mexico Magazine

Image by Douglas Merriam

Article source here 

Wolves - The Endangered Species

A letter to the editor of the Idaho Mountain Express

Humans have damaged wildlife more than wolves! 

Wolves are effective predators, but I am not sure why people insist on calling them “vicious.” With only teeth and fast strong bodies they hunt to live - that’s their role. 

They do not extirpate their prey. When researchers follow wolves, they find their success rate is usually less than 20 percent. That means the prey are not at all defenseless: their fast, strong bodies save them more than 80 percent of the time. Given the opportunity, wolves will surplus kill, but research shows us that they will go back to the site of surplus kills for months and feed. Assuming, of course, that people don’t lay in wait, to shoot, trap or poison at these sites. 

What puzzles me most of all is why we condemn the behavior in wolves that we, ourselves, engage in. We are outraged when a wolf “tears apart” a mother elk, but in a few months it is fine for us to go shoot the mother. Is it the “neatness” that makes it OK? We object to the “violence” of wolves against our livestock, but send the same livestock to premature violent and untimely deaths. To ask wolves to have a conscience is silly. They are wild animals. They are not supposed to have a conscience. That is a human trait. We humans are by far the worse in comparison: we do have a conscience, yet revel in the (often cruel) splintering and annihilation of wolf families. 

We nearly extirpated both elk and bison. We dare to think we are the only capable wildlife managers, refusing to admit that nature, before we came, was doing just fine. Once there were teeming herds of elk, bison and other game, living just fine with an estimated two million wolves. Why do you think it’s the wolves causing the problem?

 

By Chris Albert 

* * *

 

 

"The wolf is one of the wildest and shyest of all the animals in the northern wilderness." - after David Mech
 

Wolves are amazing creatures. They form social structures that could make any modern family blush. The Alpha male enters a lifelong, monogamous bond with the Alpha female of the pack. Wolves love wolf babies. The Beta male is responsible for the welfare of the little ones, but the whole pack plays with them and is very protective. There are friendships and there are fights within a pack, but even the weakest of all, the Omega wolf, is taken care of if he is in need. 

Wolves are very territorial species and they will protect their territory from other wolf packs. They are predators. They kill big game and sometimes cattle, but seldom attack people. However, they kill to survive and not, as it is wrongly believed, out of pleasure of killing.

In 2013 grey wolves were taken off the list of protected species in the USA. Hunters can now organize barbaric hunting rallies. They are permitted to use tracking dogs and kill wolves from helicopters. They have the permit to kill not only the magnificent grey wolves, but also the endangered and extremely rare Mexican red wolves. The plea of the conservationists and the nature lovers is ignored by the authorities in most States where wolf hunting is allowed. 

The subject is quite delicate. It is believed that hunters play important role in nature and I can understand hunting for food, but the "recreational" killing of animals is bare of any ethics. 

The argument that wolves decimate herds is a very weak one. In Poland, where wolves are protected species, the government reimburses farmers for their losses. Why this could not be done in one of the richest countries in the world is puzzling to me. 

By Dominique Allmon

For centuries wolves have been characterized as bloodthirsty beasts and the bane of helpless livestock. Determined to overcome this misconception, film makers Jamie and Jim Dutcher, the creators of the Emmy Award Winning "Wolves at Our Door" documentary spent six years in a tented camp in the wilderness of Idaho living with a pack of wolves. Please watch and share this amazing documentary. It is quite eye-opening.

Also of interest: The Wolf Man -The Diary of Paul Balenovic and A Man Among Wolves

Image source here