Morning Comes To Elk Mountain: Dispatches from the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge, by Gary Lantz. 239pp. University of North Texas Press, 2013.
"In many ways October is as near to perfection as life gets here on the weather-challenged Southern Plains. The heat of summer has faded, January's chill is still months away. October rains refresh the grass, refill the streams, and bring wildflowers back for an encore."
Structured in the form of a journal with entries stretching across the course of a single year, this narrative incorporates the author Gary Lantz's ten years of observations in the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge of Oklahoma. It begins with a January walk through Styx Canyon, an improbable wilderness amid geometrical wheat fields and county road grids, and concludes along the headwaters of Medicine Creek with largemouth bass, a mature golden eagle, migrating mountain bluebirds, and one of the refuge's signature buffalo.
Established in 1905 in order to reintroduce buffalo to the plains and save the species from extinction, the Wichita Mountains Wildlife Refuge is one of the nation's oldest. It lies in the southwest corner of Oklahoma and includes the Charons Garden wilderness, Bat Cave Mountain, Fort Sill, Osage Lake, Medicine Bluffs and Mount Sheridan.
A native Oklahoman and local feature writer, Lantz demonstrates an obvious affection for the place and a depth of knowledge that he's eager to share. His "dispatches" are personal, poetic, and perceptive.
