Rivers of My Memory
Stories and Poems from Streams and Wild Places
by
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Driving away from camp, the truck moved slowly in the half light. It crossed the caked floor of the gully where the elephants and hippos had been after the rains four months before, when it was thick, lava-like grey mud, now hard and opening in the heat, like a giant Moorish floor mosaic, and it passed through the jungle at the gully's edge, up the stony trail from the wide river valley below. A herd of impala leaped in front of the truck and crossed into the dense scrub. The sun was rising as the truck rose higher towards the edge of the plateau, beams of light streaming through the clouds, the night's light rain making the road as easy to read as The Times. Spoor of impala. warthog, hartebeest, hyena, bushbuck, waterbuck, kudu, civet cats and later of leopard unfolded on the track in front of them, and, by the waterhole formed between wide sandstone rocks near where Akmed and the boys inspected the lion bait suspended in an acacia tree and hidden from the vulture with branches, they found the front footprint of a large male lion, as big as a dinner plate.
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About the Book
In this compilation of short stories and poetry centered on rivers, mountains, and wild locations of great natural beauty, novelist and avid outdoorsman Alan Pilkington shares the memories of the unforgettable times he spent as a young man on the banks of a mountain river outside of Melbourne, Australia. Pilkington was born into a family where the men went to the mountains and fished for trout in the tumbling streams of the southern parts of Australia’s Great Dividing Range. Cultivating a lifelong love affair with the outdoors through his many stays in cabins built by successive family generations, he learned about the bush and its creatures while gaining a deep appreciation for the value of wilderness. Pilkington shares the journal entries, stories, and poems he composed while on fly-fishing and hunting adventures in Australia, New Zealand, England, the United States, Zimbabwe, and Tanzania—some serious, some lighthearted—all with a focus on rivers and how they provide inner-peace to all who seek it through them. Rivers of My Memory will touch anyone with a passion for the wilderness and who have rivers happily entwined in their memories.
About the Author
Born in a small Australian country town, Alan Pilkington eventually moved to the United States where he worked as an advertising executive in New York and Chicago. A novelist, active outdoorsman and conservationist, he now lives by a small stream, in a log home on a Colorado mountainside.