The Seer of Slabsides by Dallas Lore Sharp

This title, "The Seer of Slabsides," does not quite fit John Burroughs -- the Burroughs I knew. He was a see-er. A lover of nature, he watched the ways of bird and beast; a lover of life, he thought out and wrought out a serene human philosophy that made him teacher and interpreter of the simple and the near at hand rather than of such things as are hidden and far off. He was altogether human; a poet, not a prophet; a great lover of the earth, of his portion of it in New York State, and of everything and everybody dwelling there with him. He has added volumes to the area of New York State, and peopled them with immortal folk -- little folk, bees, bluebirds, speckled trout, and wild strawberries. He was chiefly concerned with living at Slabsides, or at Woodchuck Lodge, and with writing what he lived. He loved much, observed and interpreted much, speculated a little, but dreamed none at all. "The Lover of Woodchuck Lodge" I might have called him, rather than "The Seer of Slabsides."

Pietro, the sculptor, has made him resting upon a boulder, his arm across his forehead, as his eyes, shielded from the sun, peer steadily into the future and the faraway. I sat with the old naturalist on this same boulder. It was in October, and they laid him beside it the following April, on his eighty-fourth birthday. I watched him shield his eyes with his arm, as the sculptor has made him, and gaze far away over the valley to the rolling hills against the sky, where his look lingered, sadly, wearily, for a moment at their vaunting youth and beauty; then coming instantly back to the field below us, he said: "This field is as full of woodchucks as it was eighty years ago. I caught one right here yesterday. How eternally interesting life is! I've studied the woodchuck all my life, and there's no getting to the bottom of him."