Practice Test

Excerpt from A Voice in the Wilderness

by Grace Livingston Hill

With a lurch the train came to a dead stop and Margaret Earle, hastily gathering up her belongings, hurried down the aisle and got out into the night.

It occurred to her, as she swung her heavy suit-case down the rather long step to the ground, and then carefully swung herself after it, that it was strange that neither conductor, brakeman, nor porter had come to help her off the train, when all three had taken the trouble to tell her that hers was the next station; but she could hear voices up ahead. Perhaps something was the matter with the engine that detained them and they had forgotten her for the moment.

The ground was rough where she stood, and there seemed no sign of a platform. Did they not have platforms in this wild Western land, or was the train so long that her car had stopped before reaching it?

She strained her eyes into the darkness, and tried to make out things from the two or three specks of light that danced about like fireflies in the distance. She could dimly see moving figures away up near the engine, and each one evidently carried a lantern. The train was tremendously long. A sudden feeling of isolation took possession of her. Perhaps she ought not to have got out until some one came to help her. Perhaps the train had not pulled into the station yet and she ought to get back on it and wait. Yet if the train started before she found the conductor she might be carried on somewhere and he justly blame her for a fool.

There did not seem to be any building on that side of the track. It was probably on the other, but she was standing too near the cars to see over. She tried to move back to look, but the ground sloped and she slipped and fell in the cinders$^1$, bruising her knee and cutting her wrist.

In sudden panic she arose. She would get back into the train, no matter what the consequences. They had no right to put her out here, away off from the station, at night, in a strange country. If the train started before she could find the conductor she would tell him that he must back it up again and let her off. He certainly could not expect her to get out like this.

She lifted the heavy suit-case up the high step that was even farther from the ground than it had been when she came down, because her fall had loosened some of the earth and caused it to slide away from the track. Then, reaching to the rail of the step, she tried to pull herself up, but as she did so the engine gave a long snort and the whole train, as if it were in league against her, lurched forward crazily, shaking off her hold. She slipped to her knees again, the suit-case, toppled from the lower step, descending upon her, and together they slid and rolled down the short bank, while the train . . . ran giddily off into the night.

The horror of being deserted helped the girl to rise in spite of bruises and shock. She lifted imploring hands to the unresponsive cars as they hurried by her—one, two, three, with bright windows, each showing a passenger, comfortable and safe inside, unconscious of her need.

A moment of useless screaming, running, trying to attract some one’s attention, a sickening sense of terror and failure, and the last car slatted itself past with a mocking clatter, as if it enjoyed her discomfort.

Margaret stood dazed, reaching out helpless hands, then dropped them at her sides and gazed after the fast-retreating train, the light on its last car swinging tauntingly, blinking now and then with a leer in its eye, rapidly vanishing from her sight into the depth of the night.

She gasped and looked about her for the station that but a short moment before had been so real to her mind; and, lo! on this side and on that there was none!

The night was wide like a great floor shut in by a low, vast dome of curving blue set with the largest, most wonderful stars she had ever seen. Heavy shadows of purple-green, smoke-like, hovered over earth darker and more intense than the unfathomable blue of the night sky. It seemed like the secret nesting-place of mysteries wherein no human foot might dare intrude. It was incredible that such could be but common sage-brush, sand, and greasewood wrapped about with the beauty of the lonely night.

No building broke the inky outlines of the plain, nor friendly light streamed out to cheer her heart. Not even a tree was in sight, except on the far horizon, where a heavy line of deeper darkness might mean a forest. Nothing, absolutely nothing, in the blue, deep, starry dome above and the bluer darkness of the earth below save one sharp shaft ahead like a black mast throwing out a dark arm across the track.

As soon as she sighted it she picked up her baggage and made her painful way toward it, for her knees and wrist were bruised and her baggage was heavy.

A soft drip, drip greeted her as she drew nearer; something plashing down among the cinders by the track. Then she saw the tall column with its arm outstretched, and looming darker among the sage-brush the outlines of a water-tank. It was so she recognized the engine’s drinking-tank, and knew that she had mistaken a pause to water the engine for a regular stop at a station.

$^1$cinders: track bed made from the residue of burnt coal

From A VOICE IN THE WILDERNESS by Grace Livingston Hill—Public Domain

Excerpt from “The Spirit of the Herd”

by Dallas Lore Sharp

In this excerpt, published in 1914, author and professor Dallas Lore Sharp describes a summer cattle roundup in Oregon. The heat and dust had been relentless for three days. The cowboys were exhausted, and the cattle were restless. The ranch boss, Wade, had led the drive to a watering place, only to find it empty.

Along with the wagon had come the fresh horses—one of them being Peroxide Jim, a supple, powerful, clean-limbed buckskin, a horse, I think, that had as fine and intelligent an animal-face as any creature I ever saw. Wade had been saving this horse for emergency work. And why should he not have been saved fresh for just such a need as this? Are there not superior horses as well as superior men—a Peroxide Jim to complement a Wade?

The horse knew the cattle business and knew his rider perfectly; and though there was nothing like sentiment about the boss of the P Ranch riders, his faith in Peroxide Jim was complete. . . .

The desert, where the herd was camped, was one of the highest of a series of tablelands, or benches; it lay as level as a floor, rimmed by sheer rock, from which there was a drop to the bench of sage below. The herd when overtaken by the dusk had been headed for a pass descending to the next lower bench, but was now halted within a mile of the rim rock on the east, where there was a perpendicular fall of about three hundred feet. . . .

In the taut silence of the stirless desert night, with the tension of the herd at the snapping-point, any quick, unwonted sight or sound would stampede them. The sneezing of a horse, the flare of a match, would be enough to send the whole four thousand headlong—blind, frenzied, trampling—till spent and scattered over the plain.

And so, as he rode, Wade began to sing. The rider ahead of him took up the air and passed it on until, above the stepping stir of the hoofs rose the faint voices of the men, and all the herd was bound about by the slow plaintive measures of some old song. It was not to soothe their savage breasts that the riders sang to the cattle, but rather to preempt the dreaded silence, to relieve the tension, and so to prevent the shock of any sudden startling noise.

So they sang and rode and the night wore on to one o’clock, when Wade, coming up on the rim-rock side, felt a cool breeze fan his face, and caught a breath of fresh, moist wind with the taste of water in it.

He checked his horse instantly, listening as the wind swept past him over the cattle. But they must already have smelled it, for they had ceased their milling, the whole herd standing motionless, the indistinct forms close to him in the dark showing their bald faces lifted to drink the sweet wet breath that came over the rim. Then they started on again, but faster, and with a rumbling now from their hoarse throats that tightened Wade’s grip on the reins.

The sound seemed to come out of the earth, a low, rumbling mumble, as dark as the night and as wide as the plain, a thick, inarticulate bellow that stood every rider stiff in his stirrups. . . .

Then the breeze caught the dust and carried it back from the gray-coated, ghostly shapes, and Wade saw that the animals were still moving in a circle. He must keep them going. He touched his horse to ride on with them, when across the black sky flashed a vivid streak of lightning.

There was a snort from the steers, a quick clap of horns and hoofs from far within the herd, a tremor of the plain, a roar, a surging mass—and Wade was riding the flank of a wild stampede. Before him, behind him, beside him, pressing hard upon his horse, galloped the frenzied steers, and beyond them a multitude borne on, and bearing him on, by the heave of the galloping herd.

Wade was riding for his life. He knew it. His horse knew it. He was riding to turn the herd, too, back from the rim, as the horse also knew. The cattle were after water—water-mad—ready to go over the precipice to get it, carrying horse and rider with them. Wade was the only rider between the herd and the rim. It was black as death. He could see nothing in the sage, could scarcely discern the pounding, panting shadows at his side. He knew that he was being borne toward the rim, how fast he could not tell, but he knew by the swish of the brush against his tapaderos and the plunging of the horse that the ground was growing stonier, that they were nearing the rocks.

To outrun the herd was his only chance for life. If he could come up with the leaders he might not only escape, but even stand a chance of heading them off upon the plain and saving the herd. There were cattle still ahead of him; how many, what part of them all, he could not make out in the dark. But the horse knew. The reins hung on his straight neck, where his rider had dropped them, as, yelling and firing over the wild herd, he had given this horse the race to win, to lose.

They were riding the rim. Close on their left bore down the flank of the herd, and on their right, under their very feet, was a precipice, so close that they felt its blackness—its three hundred feet of fall! . . .

. . . Then Wade found himself racing neck and neck with a big white steer, which the horse, with marvelous instinct, seemed to pick out from a bunch, and to cling to, forcing him gradually ahead, till, cutting him free from the bunch entirely, he bore him off into the swishing sage.

The steers coming on close behind followed their leader, and in, after them, swung others. The tide was turning from the rim. More and more were veering, and within a short time the whole herd, bearing off from the cliffs, was pounding over the open plains.

Whose race was it? It was Peroxide Jim’s, according to Wade, for not by word or by touch of hand or knee had the horse been directed in the run. From the flash of the lightning the horse had taken the bit, had covered an indescribably perilous path at top speed, had outrun the herd and turned it from the edge of the rim rock, without a false step or a tremor of fear.

From “The Spirit of the Herd” by Dallas Lore Sharp—Public Domain

tablelands: plateaus, flat areas of land sharply elevated from the surrounding area
tapaderos: leather covers for stirrups

Massachusetts: Lowell National Historical Park

During the first half of the 19th century, Lowell, Massachusetts, quickly transformed itself from a farm town to a bustling industrial city. In time, Lowell became a model of industry, gaining global recognition for its state-of-the-art technology, innovative canal and dam system, mill architecture, boardinghouses, churches, and ethnic neighborhoods. Young Yankee women, immigrant families, and European tourists all flocked to Lowell to find work at one of the many textile mills, or visit the industrious city that was becoming a popular tourist destination. As one Scottish traveler observed during his visit to America, “Niagara and Lowell are the two objects I will longest remember in my American journey, the one the glory of American scenery, the other of American industry.” Today, Lowell National Historical Park welcomes visitors to enjoy the sights of Lowell and learn about the history of one of America’s most significant industrial cities.

The Boston merchants who founded Lowell in 1821 and named it after Francis Cabot Lowell chose to locate the town along Massachusetts’s Merrimack River to take advantage of the kinetic energy offered by the Pawtucket waterfalls. Over six miles of canals powered the waterwheels of Lowell’s mills, whose massive five- and six-story brick buildings dominated the city’s landscape. . . . The most recognized of these buildings are the Lowell Manufacturing Company chartered in 1821, the Suffolk or Wannalancit Mill completed around the 1880s, the Boott Mill Company established in 1835, and the Boott Mill Boardinghouse that opened in 1838. By the 1850s, 40 textile mills employing over 10,000 workers stretched for about a mile along the river. . . .

The city’s female workforce was significant in the history of Lowell. From the early to mid-1800s, women left the constricted lifestyle of small rural towns and rural areas for independent industrial city life. Most were young single Yankee girls, who were tired of the limited opportunities offered by their domestic work. Women found that Lowell’s mills offered monthly wages for their services and provided them room and board. Although these women gained economic independence in Lowell, the mill boardinghouse keepers constantly supervised their social activities, for which they hardly had any time, considering their daily 12- to 14-hour work schedules. At the end of the day, the factory bell signaled the “mill girls” to return to their boardinghouses. They were expected to adhere to the strict code of conduct respecting curfew and attending church.

Yankee “mill girls” continued to dominate the Lowell workforce until the 1840s, when the city began to find it difficult to compete with the growing industrial development in other New England communities. As profits fell, the mill industry cut wages. These wage cuts, deteriorating working conditions, and long workdays led the “mill girls” to protest and organize strikes. When their demands went unheard, the women left Lowell, and immigrant groups replaced them in the workforce. Despite the low wages and unhealthy work conditions, immigrants were eager to find work.

The immigrants replacing the Yankee “mill girls” during the 1840s were predominantly Irish Catholics, who traveled to America during the Great Potato Famine. Although Lowell received an influx of Irish families during this time, the Irish were a part of the city’s history from its birth, and before the “mill girls” arrived, they built Lowell’s historic canals, mills, and boardinghouses. Initially, Lowell’s Protestant community was slow to welcome Irish immigrants, but the hostility between Yankee Protestants and Irish Catholics eventually disappeared. Irish immigrants dominated the industrial scene until the Civil War, when other immigrant groups began to work in the city mills.

Like the Irish, the French-Canadians, Greeks, Poles, Portuguese, Russian Jews, and Armenians who came to work in Lowell’s mills faced long work hours, low wages, and poor living conditions in the city’s crowded tenements. By the time Lowell’s industry declined, the city had become an ethnic melting pot, where each group claimed its own distinct neighborhood, like the Irish immigrants’ “New Dublin” or “Acre,” and the French-Canadians’ “Little Canada.” The city officially began to close down its mills in the 1920s and ’30s after Lowell’s outdated mills could no longer compete against the state-of-the-art cotton mills in other communities and working conditions continued to decline as Lowell’s companies stopped reinvesting in their mills. . . . Despite a brief resurgence during World War II, the city shut down its last surviving mill by the mid-1950s.

From “Massachusetts: Lowell National Historical Park”—Public Domain/National Park Service

Yankee: native to New England
Niagara: a town in northwestern New York State well known as the location of Niagara Falls, a series of waterfalls on the Canadian border
domestic work: household duties like cooking and cleaning

Excerpt from In Search of the Unknown

by Robert W. Chambers

It was at that time the policy of the trustees and officers of the Zoological Gardens neither to employ collectors nor to send out expeditions in search of specimens. The society decided to depend upon voluntary contributions, and I was always busy, part of the day, in dictating answers to correspondents who wrote offering their services as hunters of big game, collectors of all sorts of fauna, trappers, snarers, and also to those who offered specimens for sale, usually at exorbitant rates.

To the proprietors of . . . mangy lynxes, moth-eaten coyotes, and dancing bears I returned courteous but uncompromising refusals—of course, first submitting all such letters, together with my replies, to Professor Farrago.

One day towards the end of May, however, just as I was leaving Bronx Park to return to town, Professor Lesard, of the reptilian department, called out to me that Professor Farrago wanted to see me a moment; so I . . . retraced my steps to the temporary, wooden building occupied by Professor Farrago, general superintendent of the Zoological Gardens. The professor, who was sitting at his desk before a pile of letters and replies submitted for approval by me, pushed his glasses down and looked over them at me with a whimsical smile that suggested amusement, impatience, annoyance, and perhaps a faint trace of apology.

“Now, here’s a letter,” he said, with a deliberate gesture towards a sheet of paper impaled on a file—“a letter that I suppose you remember.” He disengaged the sheet of paper and handed it to me.

“Oh yes,” I replied, with a shrug; “of course the man is mistaken—or—”

“Or what?” demanded Professor Farrago, tranquilly, wiping his glasses.

“—Or a liar,” I replied.

After a silence he leaned back in his chair and bade me read the letter to him again, and I did so with a contemptuous tolerance for the writer, who must have been either a very innocent victim or a very stupid swindler. I said as much to Professor Farrago, but, to my surprise, he appeared to waver.

“I suppose,” he said, with his near-sighted, embarrassed smile, “that nine hundred and ninety-nine men in a thousand would throw that letter aside and condemn the writer as a liar or a fool?”

“In my opinion,” said I, “he’s one or the other.”

“He isn’t—in mine,” said the professor, placidly.

“What!” I exclaimed. “Here is a man living all alone on a strip of rock and sand between the wilderness and the sea, who wants you to send somebody to take charge of a bird that doesn’t exist!”

“How do you know,” asked Professor Farrago, “that the bird in question does not exist?”

“It is generally accepted,” I replied, sarcastically, “that the great auk has been extinct for years. Therefore I may be pardoned for doubting that our correspondent possesses a pair of them alive.”

“Oh, you young fellows,” said the professor, smiling wearily, “you embark on a theory for destinations that don’t exist.”

He leaned back in his chair, his amused eyes searching space for the imagery that made him smile.

“Like swimming squirrels, you navigate with the help of Heaven and a stiff breeze, but you never land where you hope to—do you?”

Rather red in the face, I said: “Don’t you believe the great auk to be extinct?”

“Audubon saw the great auk.”

“Who has seen a single specimen since?”

“Nobody—except our correspondent here,” he replied, laughing.

I laughed, too, considering the interview at an end, but the professor went on, coolly:

“Whatever it is that our correspondent has—and I am daring to believe that it is the great auk itself—I want you to secure it for the society.”

When my astonishment subsided my first conscious sentiment was one of pity. Clearly, Professor Farrago was on the verge of dotage—ah, what a loss to the world!

I believe now that Professor Farrago perfectly interpreted my thoughts, but he betrayed neither resentment nor impatience. I drew a chair up beside his desk—there was nothing to do but to obey, and this fool’s errand was none of my conceiving.

Together we made out a list of articles necessary for me and itemized the expenses I might incur, and I set a date for my return, allowing no margin for a successful termination to the expedition.

“Never mind that,” said the professor. “What I want you to do is to get those birds here safely. Now, how many men will you take?”

“None,” I replied, bluntly; “it’s a useless expense, unless there is something to bring back. If there is I’ll wire you, you may be sure.”

“Very well,” said Professor Farrago, good-humoredly, “you shall have all the assistance you may require. Can you leave to-night?”

The old gentleman was certainly prompt. I nodded, half-sulkily, aware of his amusement.

“So,” I said, picking up my hat, “I am to start north to find a place called Black Harbor, where there is a man named Halyard who possesses, among other household utensils, two extinct great auks—”

We were both laughing by this time. I asked him why on earth he credited the assertion of a man he had never before heard of.

“I suppose,” he replied, with the same half-apologetic, half-humorous smile, “it is instinct. I feel, somehow, that this man Halyard has got an auk—perhaps two. I can’t get away from the idea that we are on the eve of acquiring the rarest of living creatures. It’s odd for a scientist to talk as I do; doubtless you’re shocked—admit it, now!”

But I was not shocked; on the contrary, I was conscious that the same strange hope that Professor Farrago cherished was beginning, in spite of me, to stir my pulses, too.

“If he has—” I began, then stopped.

The professor and I looked hard at each other in silence.

“Go on,” he said, encouragingly.

But I had nothing more to say, for the prospect of beholding with my own eyes a living specimen of the great auk produced a series of conflicting emotions within me which rendered speech profanely superfluous.

From IN SEARCH OF THE UNKNOWN by Robert W. Chambers—Public Domain

Audubon: John James Audubon, an ornithologist and artist who created scientific illustrations of birds
dotage: a loss of reasoning brought about by old age

Looking for the Smallest Spark of Everything

Located underground near Geneva, Switzerland, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) helps scientists study and understand how the smallest particles of matter interact with one another. The LHC propels atomic particle beams along a 17-mile-long ring.

There are the things the world is made of,
things we can see and feel, and then
there are the things even smaller, things that seem
to exist only when we are looking right at them.

So beneath the level of molecules are atoms,
and beneath the level of atoms, we find
protons, electrons, neutrons; and beneath that—
what, exactly? Because we are talking about
everything here: your fingernail,
the candy at the back of your mouth,
the coffee your teacher drank this morning,
your little sister, and the stuffed dog
she used to carry around with her everywhere.
And everywhere.

Everything and everywhere
are made up of the same stuff, whatever
it is. How do we find it? We can listen for it
in the wavelengths from deep space,
talking back to us from unimaginable
distances. Or we can build long,
deep circular tunnels beneath the surface
of this Earth and race particles
(like racing cars, only very tiny cars
flashing along at close to the speed of light)
until everything we think we know
bangs against everything else we know.

And there, in the explosion, in the darkness,
briefly incandescent, they appear:
the quarks, the leptons, and the bosons;
the baryons and the mesons. Their names
sound like dinosaurs or maybe bands
playing terrible music in someone’s garage.

The one thing we know for sure
is that they spin. This is how gravity
enters our world, how our world is held
both together and apart, what keeps
together the pencil in your hand right now
as well as separate from, say,
Jupiter. They spin, and it is only down there
in the darkness—in the vast garage
where physicists jot down
what they can, whatever seems most real—
that they let us perceive their wild dancing,
combusting to the music they make.

Using Fire to Keep a Prairie Healthy

Inside the 40,000-acre Joseph H. Williams Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in northern Oklahoma, herds of bison roam on the scenic land that is home to hundreds of different species of plants and animals. While one of the greatest threats to the prairie is wildfire, the use of controlled fires is actually an effective way to protect this idyllic landscape.

Fires that are started by lightning or other natural circumstances are inevitable, and the results can be disastrous. However, hundreds of years ago the American Indian people who inhabited the Great Plains area between Minnesota and Texas realized that these fires could also be helpful. The bison in the area seemed to prefer grazing on tender new grass on the recently burned land rather than on grass in the unburned areas. The American Indian people began to deliberately burn areas of land for bison to graze on, which enticed the herds away from the people’s crops.

Today conservationists at the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve and farmers in the Great Plains continue to use controlled burns for land management. Intentionally burning a portion of land can dramatically improve the quality of the vegetation that regrows there. The fires burn away weedy undergrowth and help limit the overcrowding of shrubs and trees in the burn area, creating less competition for water and nutrients. Additionally, the process of burning excess plant matter adds nitrogen, an essential element for plant growth, to the soil.

One common target of controlled burns at the preserve and the surrounding area is the invasive red cedar tree. A single red cedar tree can consume up to 40 gallons of water per day, taking this vital resource away from other plant life. These tall trees also cast shade that prevents sunlight from reaching the plants beneath them. The fast-growing red cedar trees tend to crowd out prairie grasses, the primary food source for wild and domestic animals that make the prairie their home. An imbalance in one component of the prairie’s ecosystem affects the entire web of life. Controlled burns help maintain this ecosystem’s delicate balance.

Of course, these controlled fires are intended to burn only a portion of an area. A total burn, which is a risk with an uncontrolled wildfire, would destroy all wildlife as well as the crops farmers plant for income. The key to using controlled fires is knowing which areas of land to burn and when. Conservation experts at the preserve employ the “patch-burn” approach, meaning they rotate which portion of land is burned each year. They study the land to find out which areas would most benefit from being burned, and then they arrange about a dozen burns over one-third of the land. This patch burning contains the fire within a specific area and allows animals in the burn area to safely relocate. The following year, conservationists will burn a different section of the preserve, while the land burned the previous year regrows healthier than before.

Researchers have tracked and studied the variety of plant species and animals that live on the preserve, and their studies show that the patch-burn approach has restored biodiversity to the area by promoting the growth of species that were at risk of being crowded out. The patch-burn system is so successful that the conservationists at the preserve provide training to prairie farmers about conducting controlled burns on their own land. Burning land to make it healthy may seem counterintuitive, but strategic controlled fires have helped the prairie sustain life for hundreds of years and, with careful management, will continue to do so.

Letter from Brooklyn

by Jacob Scheier

I can already see how this will end.
How I will grow tired of the bridge’s
steep incline, and the absent-minded tourists
wandering into the bicycle path.
The weather will turn cold.
But that all happens later.
For now it is the early edge of fall,
leaves green still while the air narrows,
is slightly crisp, almost grazing
the hair of my arm like a passing stranger,
as though the air has been forced into intimacy
by the brevity of daylight.
But when it starts darkening at 4,
this closeness, I know, will be a felt distance,
like someone drawing your attention
to their lack of intimacy.
These days I am still walking at a cathedral pace
beneath the branches bending across avenues,
brownstones like rows of lived-in chapels,
like a pop-up picture book I could have had as a child,
but didn’t. How Brooklyn makes me nostalgic
for the moment I am walking inside of.
These late afternoons filled
with a loneliness that makes me feel
distinctly myself, and an awareness
of how rare that is.

“Letter from Brooklyn” from LETTER FROM BROOKLYN: POEMS by Jacob Scheier, published by ECW Press. Copyright © 2013 by Jacob Scheier All rights reserved.

brevity: briefness
cathedral: meditative
chapels: private places of prayer or worship
nostalgic: yearning for the past

Bird Talk

by Carl Sandburg

And now when the branches were beginning to be heavy,
It was the time when they once had said, “This is the
  beginning of summer.”
The shrilling of the frogs was not so shrill as in the
  first weeks after the broken winter;
The birds took their hops and zigzags a little more
  anxious; a home is a home; worms are worms.
The yellow spreads of the dandelions and buttercups
  reached across the green pastures.
Tee whee and tee whee came on the breezes, and the grackles
  chuzzled their syllables.
And it was the leaves with a strong soft wind over them
  that talked most of all and said more than any others
  though speaking the fewest words.
It was the green leaves trickling out the gaunt nowhere
  of winter, out on the gray hungry branches—
It was the leaves on the branches, beginning to be heavy,
  who said as they said one time before, “This is the be-
  ginning of summer.”

We shall never blame the birds who come
  where the river and the road make the Grand Crossing
  and talk there, sitting in circles talking bird talk.
If they ask in their circles as to who is here
  and as to who is not here and who used to be here,
Or if instead of counting up last year as against
  this year, they count up this year as against next
  year, and have their bird chatter about who is here
  this year who won’t be here next year,
We shall never blame the birds.

If I have put your face among leaf faces, child,
Or if I have put your voice among bird voices,
Blame me no more than the bluejays.

“Bird Talk” by Carl Sandburg—Public domain.

Serpent Mound

The Great Serpent Mound, located in Adams County, Ohio, is a human-made mound of earth that researchers believe was created between 300 B.C. and A.D. 1100 by an indigenous culture.

Ohio, 1846

Brush Creek stood low when the museum men came
with their measuring tapes and sketchbooks.
 It was winter. Fringed with ice,
 the creek doubled back on itself
as if it had forgotten something.
 Pa was in Cincinnati, or else on his way home,
  so Ma told me to lead the men
  into the marshy low grounds. It being winter,
    there was little underbrush to speak of—
    in the summer there would have been
  briars, poison ivy, biting flies. I listened
for the swish of a beaver’s heavy tail,
 the chitter of a chickadee, or the cry of a hawk,
 but the winter silence of the creek pressed
 down on all of us like a weight.
The humps in the ground were all but
invisible until you were right up on them. The figure
was even less obvious: the sinuous body,
 the tail coiled three times around,
 and at the other end, the mouth wide open.
  In the summer the creek bottom was crowded
  with so much life that you could trip over
    the ridges of earth before you saw
    anything at all. In winter you could climb
    a tree and get some idea of the whole thing:
  the serpent’s body undulating, slithering
silently across the ancient
 earth. At the mouth end, there was an oval mound
 as if the snake were about to swallow an egg—
as snakes sometimes did in our rickety
henhouse—my Pa always said, or
as if swallowing the sun, one of the museum
 men suggested, taking notes with his quill pen,
 an old-style inkhorn slung at his side.
 I liked that: swallowing the sun,
  just the sort of thing a snake might do,
  might want to do. When, later, I told my sister Ruth,
    she disagreed. It is singing to the sun,
    she insisted. That is why its mouth
  is wide open. She said, “Sometimes I think
I hear it on summer nights. Not swallowing, singing.”

Excerpt from “Growing Peppers on the ISS Is Just the Start of Space Farming”

by Melanie Canales

The author, Melanie Canales, is a first-generation Peruvian American farmer and beekeeper based in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, on lands of the indigenous Monacan and Manahoac tribes. Her work focuses on creating healthy relationships between people and their surrounding ecosystems.

Unburdened by the constraints of gravity, red and green peppers jut out at 45-degree angles inside the Advanced Plant Habitat (APH), a sort of space terrarium not much larger than a microwave. Four chile pepper plants stand effortlessly upright, despite the dozens of glossy fruits weighing them down. These plants have lived entirely in space; their leaves have never been chewed on by insects or rustled by a summer breeze, [and] their stems are unfamiliar with bending toward the sun’s arc across the sky. Scissors glint under the tank’s white and blue lights as astronaut Mark Vande Hei and his team snip the stems of those that are ready for harvest. The peppers whirl around their heads until the astronauts catch them and tape them against a board to photograph.

Back on Earth, the Plant Habitat-04 team of engineers and plant scientists are observing and conferring with the astronauts. Of the 26 peppers in this batch, only the 14 finest will stay on the International Space Station [ISS] for consumption. The rest will be wrapped in foil, sealed in a Ziploc bag, then frozen at a brisk −80 degrees, until they can come roaring back to Earth in the next cargo capsule to be studied later. Now, after a 137-day growth cycle, the astronauts remove the plants from the module and trash them. Project Plant Habitat-04 is complete. It’s taco night on the ISS.

Since 2014, NASA¹ has experimented with growing lettuces, brassicas,² and zinnias³ in space, an endeavor that relies on highly specialized technology over 50 years in the making. [Fall 2021’s] two successful pepper harvests . . . will provide data on the nutritional and psychological benefits of growing vegetables on-craft, as well as a crop’s ability to reliably produce long-term in microgravity. While controlled environmental agriculture is not new, the APH experiment represents an evolution in specialized growth habitats. It doesn’t aim to re-create Earth’s conditions, but to perfect each isolated variable of plant growth in the clinical environment of a spaceship.

“The Advanced Plant Habitat is the most complex plant growth system on orbit today,” says Lashelle Spencer, a plant scientist at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Its more than 180 sensors control and monitor temperature, humidity, and carbon dioxide. The astronauts can adjust the color and intensity of the light, and how much moisture the plants’ roots are getting. It waters itself.

It’s the day after Thanksgiving, and Spencer has been at Kennedy since 5 a.m. to facilitate the peppers’ final harvest. As part of the project team, she played a crucial role in preparing the seeds that were sent hurtling into space in June and guiding the astronauts through maintaining the plants in orbit. . . . Though astronauts can spend upwards of 100 days in space, their on-mission meals come dehydrated and pre-packaged; their vitamins and minerals are isolated in supplements, which lose nutritional value the longer they’re stored. Spencer’s goal is to create the conditions necessary for cultivating healthy plants in space, so those plants can sustain healthy astronauts on long-term missions. Astronaut food is great, she says—“especially the shrimp cocktail. But you’re missing that crunch. You’re missing that fresh pop of flavor, the green flavor that’s not there in that packaged food.”

The sensory experience of growing productive crops can also help mitigate⁴ the psychological effects of long-term space travel. . . . Spencer says the team cracked open the door of the APH every day to observe their vegetable companions with all the tenderness of home gardeners. When harvest day came, they batted their bounty around the ISS, taking selfies and delighting in watching the fruits pirouetting around the spacecraft. . . .

“We were thinking no heat, so that [the peppers] wouldn’t be dangerous, but maybe the astronauts need a little spice in their life,” says Paul Bosland, who along with his colleagues at the Chile Pepper Institute genetically engineered⁵ the NuMex Española Improved chile pepper seeds grown in Plant Habitat-04. . . .

Working with NASA, Bosland cultivated a variety that could accommodate both the nutritional needs of astronauts as well as the logistics of growing a plant in space. . . .

. . . The experiment is helping gather the data necessary to determine the nutritional content of crops grown in space, and therefore how many people they can feed, and for how long. Though much is still unknown, Spencer is certain of one thing that future astronauts will need to do: “I think in an optimal world, a scientist like me would say that they would be growing plants from day one. From the day they left to the day they came back, they would be growing them.”

From “Growing Peppers on the ISS Is Just the Start of Space Farming” by Melanie Canales from WIRED, December 21, 2021. Copyright © 2021 Condé Nast. All rights reserved.

¹NASA: National Aeronautics and Space Administration

²brassicas: a large genus of herbs, such as broccoli and cabbage

³zinnias: a genus of herbs and low shrubs that have flowers at their heads

⁴mitigate: to make something less severe or harmful

⁵genetically engineered: combined parts of DNA from different plants to produce a new plant

A Memory Revolution

A high school senior logs on to a computer at the library to double-check the application due date listed on a college admissions website. Nearby, a librarian helps a group of biology students use a database to search for recent studies about mammals. In the past few decades, the Internet has become an integral component of daily life for many people. The seemingly limitless power of search engines made the Internet search extremely common, and today people increasingly rely on the Internet’s vast accumulation of sources to access all types of information. Scientists are beginning to examine how this reliance is modifying the strategies people use to store and prioritize information in their mind.

A Dependable and Valuable Asset

Psychologist Benjamin Storm from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and researchers Sean Stone and Aaron Benjamin devised an experiment to study students’ tendency to depend on the Internet for facts. To begin, the scientists divided sixty participants into multiple groups, including an “Internet” group and a “memory” group, and placed them in front of computers. The Internet group was required to use the search engine Google to answer eight challenging trivia questions. In contrast, participants in the memory group were permitted to use only their personal knowledge to answer the questions. In the second round, the researchers administered notably easier questions. This time, they allowed each group the option of using Google as they answered. Their results showed that 83 percent of the Internet group continued to consult Google in the second round, while only 63 percent of the memory group chose to do so.

People’s growing inclination to rely on the Internet in order to retrieve information, particularly facts and figures, is called cognitive offloading. Canadian researcher Evan F. Risko and British researcher Sam Gilbert, who have written extensively about the topic, say a similar process has been taking place for centuries. In the past, people used resources like encyclopedias to assist their memories; however, today the Internet, serving as a vast extended memory, allows people to digitally access and retrieve much larger volumes of information. Consequently, people’s minds are free for other cognitive feats, such as connecting data, learning new information, or solving problems.

Filing Information Away

The use of the Internet also appears to be modifying the strategies people use to store information in their mind. Researchers Betsy Sparrow from Columbia University, Jenny Liu from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Daniel Wegner from Harvard University conducted several studies to discover how people efficiently manage their information intake.

To begin, the researchers examined how people evaluate which information deserves their effort to remember. For this experiment, participants read forty trivia facts, such as “An ostrich’s eye is bigger than its brain,” and typed the statements into a computer file. Half the participants had been previously told the file would be saved, while half believed it would be erased. Next, the participants wrote down every fact they could recall. Those who believed the information would be erased and no longer available could recall 40 percent more facts than those who thought the information would be saved.

In another experiment, the same researchers tested the ability of study participants to remember where to access information. For this trial, participants read and typed trivia statements, which they saved in folders with generic names such as “Facts” and “Items.” After spending ten minutes writing down all the facts they could recall from memory, participants were asked which folder contained a particular fact based on a keyword. For example, “Which folder has the fact about ostriches?” Overall, participants recalled the information’s location more often than the content itself, correctly identifying 49 percent of the folders for specific facts while remembering only 23 percent of the actual trivia. The researchers concluded that our memory is adapting to the Internet age by prioritizing where to locate information even when the specific details are forgotten. According to Sparrow, the Internet has become an important form of transactive memory, an external source of the recollections and associative networks that constitute memory.

As the Internet’s resources continue to expand our “external” memory, some question whether the process may cause people to depend too heavily on technology. However, Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard University, says, “Knowledge is increasing exponentially; human brainpower and waking hours are not. Fortunately, the Internet and information technologies are helping us manage, search and retrieve our collective intellectual output at different scales, from Twitter and previews to e-books and online encyclopedias. Far from making us stupid, these technologies are the only things that will keep us smart.”

Excerpt from “How We Made the First Flight”

by Orville Wright

In 1903 brothers Wilbur and Orville Wright conducted experiments related to flying machines. These experiments would eventually lead to air travel becoming a reliable form of transportation.

During the night of December 16, 1903, a strong cold wind blew from the north. When we arose on the morning of the 17th, the puddles of water, which had been standing about camp since the recent rains, were covered with ice. The wind had a velocity of 10 to 12 meters per second (22 to 27 miles an hour). We thought it would die down before long, and so remained indoors the early part of the morning. But when ten o’clock arrived, and the wind was as brisk as ever, we decided that we had better get the machine out and attempt a flight. We hung out the signal for the men of the Life Saving Station.¹ We thought that by facing the flyer into a strong wind, there ought to be no trouble in launching it from the level ground about camp. We realized the difficulties of flying in so high a wind, but estimated that the added dangers in flight would be partly compensated for by the slower speed in landing.

Final Preparations

We laid the track on a smooth stretch of ground about one hundred feet north of the new building. The biting cold wind made work difficult, and we had to warm up frequently in our living room, where we had a good fire in an improvised stove made of a large carbide² can. By the time all was ready, J. T. Daniels, W. S. Dough and A. D. Etheridge, members of the Kill Devil³ Life Saving Station; W. C. Brinkley of Manteo, and Johnny Moore, a boy from Nags Head,⁴ had arrived.

We had a “Richard” hand anemometer with which we measured the velocity of the wind. Measurements made just before starting the first flight showed velocities of 11 to 12 meters per second, or 24 to 27 miles per hour. . . .

Audacity—and Calculation

Wilbur having used his turn in the unsuccessful attempt on the 14th, the right to the first trial now belonged to me. After running the motor a few minutes to heat it up, I released the wire that held the machine to the track, and the machine started forward in the wind. Wilbur ran at the side of the machine, holding the wing to balance it on the track. Unlike the start on the 14th, made in a calm, the machine, facing a 27-mile wind, started very slowly. Wilbur was able to stay with it till it lifted from the track after a forty-foot run. One of the Life Saving men snapped the camera for us, taking a picture just as the machine had reached the end of the track and had risen to a height of about two feet. The slow forward speed of the machine over the ground is clearly shown in the picture by Wilbur’s attitude. He stayed along beside the machine without any effort.

Flight

The course of the flight up and down was exceedingly erratic, partly due to the irregularity of the air, and partly to lack of experience in handling this machine. The control of the front rudder was difficult on account of its being balanced too near the center. This gave it a tendency to turn itself when started; so that it turned too far on one side and then too far on the other. As a result the machine would rise suddenly to about ten feet, and then as suddenly dart for the ground. A sudden dart when a little over a hundred feet from the end of the track, or a little over 120 feet from the point at which it rose into the air, ended the flight. As the velocity of the wind was over 35 feet per second and the speed of the machine over the ground against this wind ten feet per second, the speed of the machine relative to the air was over 45 feet per second, and the length of the flight was equivalent to a flight of 540 feet made in calm air. This flight lasted only 12 seconds, but it was nevertheless the first in the history of the world in which a machine carrying a man had raised itself by its own power into the air in full flight, had sailed forward without reduction of speed and had finally landed at a point as high as that from which it started.

From “How We Made the First Flight” by Orville Wright—Public Domain/Federal Aviation Administration

¹Life Saving Station: one of the rescue stations along the Atlantic coastline that provided assistance to mariners in distress

²carbide: a very hard material composed of carbon and other heavy metals

³Kill Devil: the town of Kill Devil Hills in eastern North Carolina

⁴Nags Head: a town in eastern North Carolina

Wolves of the Sea

The cool and misty landscape of the Great Bear Rainforest can be found along the coast of British Columbia, Canada, and its nearby islands, from Vancouver Island to the Alaskan border. Within this protected area, wolves roam the forests, islands, and beaches. When biologist Chris Darimont began to study these wolves, he wanted to confer with local First Nations groups, as aboriginal Canadians are known, in order to learn what they knew about these wolves. He spoke with Chester Starr, an elder of the Heiltsuk Nation that has occupied the Great Bear Rainforest for thousands of years. What Starr had to say about the wolves changed Darimont’s perception of the animals.

Starr asked Darimont which wolves he and his team were going to study—the timber wolves (mainland wolves) or the coastal wolves on the islands. The question took Darimont by surprise. Biologists had always believed that the wolves that are sometimes spotted swimming between islands and eating salmon are the same wolves that live on the mainland. Darimont was intrigued by Starr’s classification of the wolves as two different groups. At first, he was hesitant to accept the idea. The distances between the mainland and the islands are small, less than a mile. Why would the wolves on the islands be any different from the wolves on the mainland? To find out, Darimont and his research team studied the wolves on the islands and in the densely forested territory of the Great Bear Rainforest for ten years.

Throughout the study, Darimont recorded several significant, observable differences between the “sea wolves,” as they are nicknamed, and the mainland wolves. Compared with the mainland wolves, the sea wolves are smaller in size and are strong swimmers. In 1996 sea wolves were spotted on an island nearly eight miles from any other land formation. While mainland wolves almost exclusively eat meat, such as deer and elk, and teach their young to hunt for land animals, sea wolves get as much as 90 percent of their nutrition from the sea and teach their young to dig for clams and to catch fish. Sea wolves regularly swim between islands and have been known to sneak up on a seal sunning itself on a rock and make a leaping attack from the water. Some salmon-eating mainland wolves come and go from the islands with the fish-spawning season, but the sea wolves are full-time island residents. Darimont suspects that some sea wolves live their entire life on the islands.

The sea wolves displayed not only physical and behavioral differences but also genetic variations from the mainland wolves. After collecting and analyzing the DNA in 800 samples of gray fur and wolf waste, researchers could produce hard biological evidence that sea wolves had genetic markers that made them distinct from the mainland wolves. A genetic marker is a variation in a DNA sequence that can be used to identify individuals or a species because it is passed down to offspring. Darimont hypothesizes that a change in habitat led to the eventual genetic differences between sea wolves and mainland wolves. Many years ago, loss of habitat and food sources forced some mainland wolves out to the islands. They learned to eat everything from kelp and fish eggs to the remains of sea creatures that washed up on the beach. Wolves living on the islands and mainland wolves became more isolated and rarely mated with each other. Over time the two types of wolves became more distinct.

It turned out that Chester Starr was right all along. “It sounded totally bizarre at first,” admits Darimont, “that there could be two versions of the species.” But he now realizes that this skepticism “definitely reflected my ignorance of indigenous knowledge at the time.” Learning to trust the wisdom of the Heiltsuk people opened Darimont up to knowledge accumulated over millennia and positioned him so that he could gather new scientific evidence about one of British Columbia’s most elusive species, the sea wolf.

Excerpt from “Scribe Like an Egyptian”

by Hilary Wilson

In ancient Egypt, literacy was the key to success. However, contrary to popular belief, not all Egyptian scribes understood hieroglyphs. Many relied instead on the simpler hieratic script for the multitude of everyday documents generated by the Egyptian bureaucracy.

Hieroglyphs—“the Words of God”—compose a writing system with more than 1,000 distinct characters, the meanings of which were lost for 1,500 years before they were deciphered by Jean-François Champollion in 1822. Including both ideograms (which convey a whole word or idea, either concrete or abstract, in a single sign) and phonograms (representing either an alphabetic sound or a group of consonants), [the writing system] was used in formal inscriptions on tomb and temple walls as well as on elaborate funerary papyri. For everyday purposes, however, scribes used a shorthand version of the hieroglyphic script known as hieratic, which was quicker to write and more economical of space. The two writings existed side by side for at least 2,500 years.

Scraps of ancient hieratic writing, mostly penned by student scribes on limestone flakes called ostraca, suggest that no matter how humble his origins, an educated Egyptian could achieve almost anything. Horemheb (d.1292 B.C.) is a good example. Born of middle-ranking parents, his scribal training led to an army career. From Scribe of Recruits, during the reign of Akhenaten (1353–1336 B.C.), Horemheb rose through the military ranks and, by the rule of Tutankhamun (1332–1323 B.C.), he was commander in chief of the Egyptian forces. As a close adviser of the young Pharaoh, Horemheb was appointed “Deputy of the King throughout the Two Lands,” and might have expected to succeed to the throne should the king die childless. He had to wait a few years, but eventually Horemheb achieved the pinnacle of his career by becoming the last king of the 18th Dynasty, making his mark by instituting dramatic reforms to the organisation of the army, the judiciary and administration in general. The lasting success of these changes owed much to his scribal background. . . .

But education was not available to all. Government departments and major temples supported schools, where boys commenced their training at six or seven, sometimes earlier. To these boarding establishments . . . family or household servants delivered the students’ food and drink rations daily for several years, during which time the student was not contributing to the family’s income. Boys from poorer families could only hope to be educated with support from a wealthier relative or patron, or through apprenticeship to an older scribe, perhaps the local clerk or land agent, who would teach them the basics of the scribe’s craft. This limited the scope for employment but such “on the job” training allowed apprentices to help out at home while learning. . . .

Scribal education began with the elementary principles of the hieratic script. The lowliest scribes, who trained for just five or six years, probably learned only the rudiments of the hieroglyphic script. Students were set exemplar documents and extracts from popular texts to copy, to practice their hieratic handwriting on basic-format letters, reports and contracts, while absorbing the good advice contained in the texts. Surviving examples of copy-work sometimes include tutors’ corrections added in red. Some significant Egyptian literary works survive almost exclusively from student copies.

A schoolboy “dictionary” of hieroglyphs with their hieratic equivalents shows that a knowledge of more than 450 signs was required for everyday writing purposes. Lessons in record-keeping and filing and labelling enabled any half-competent scribe to perform that most essential of all scribal functions: the making and updating of lists. For professions such as those of government official, priest or lawyer, a scribe would train for several more years, increasing his vocabulary to perhaps a thousand or more signs. Those with the best handwriting or drawing skills might follow the craft of creating beautifully illustrated copies of funerary texts, commonly called Books of the Dead. Others could become draughtsmen, artists or architects. Doctors compiled their own collections of medication recipes, treatments and associated incantations, many copied from texts found in the House of Life, the temple library. Lawyers had to be familiar with the corpus of civil and religious laws and precedents found in the official records, which were administered by archivists. Egypt’s bureaucratic society depended on the skills of an army of scribes of all ranks from filing clerk to tax assessor. For young Egyptians, “be a scribe” was the best of career advice.

From “Scribe Like an Egyptian” by Hilary Wilson from HISTORY TODAY, August 8, 2019. Copyright © 2019 by History Today Ltd. Company.

bureaucracy: an administrative staff of government officials
funerary papyri: a sheet or scroll of papyrus containing religious images and hieroglyphs meant to help the deceased be reborn in the afterlife
rudiments: basics
schoolboy: slang that refers to materials used during the course of receiving an education
draughtsmen: people who draw plans of machinery or structures
corpus: a collection of writings