You will never again see a mountain river surging past an isolated home, cascading over ancient rocks and raising the gentle cries of birds, without being struck by its awesome influence, the turbulent life it encourages. In Barry Lopez’s critically acclaimed first work of fiction, Desert Notes, he brought alive for the reader a desert sprung from his imagination into a fresh reality of new peceptions. In its companion volume River Notes, Lopez takes us into a different country where a nameless river flows through an animated world of herons, bears, and human beings. There is violence here, in the conflict of natural forces, in the people touching the river. There are landscapes, physical and spiritual, that we have not sensed, rituals we have not understood. Like the earlier peoples of our land, and like few American writers who have reentered this world, Barry Lopez respects the river and its imperatives, understands the language of cottonwoods and the salmon, and brings us in an extraordinary dance with a heron to the oneness with nature which is our heritage. ... [i]n these haunting, passionate stories Lopez brings us home to a deeply comforting unity with the natural world. From the first-edition dustjacket.