Dispatches The Outsider
24 OUTSIDE MAGAZINE
11.19
PHOTOGRAPH BY Emily ShurFantastic Beasts
and Why to
Find Them
IN 2005, RICHARD LOUV HELPED
USHER IN THE NATURE-AS-
THERAPY MOVEMENT. HIS LATEST
BOOK ASKS US TO START
BONDING WITH WILD ANIMALS.
BY CHRISTOPHER KEYES
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, writer Richard Louv was on Alaska’s Kodiak Island to visit a re-
mote lodge where his son worked as a guide. Walking from his cabin to dinner, he stopped
briefly to double check that he had money in his wallet. A moment later, when Louv looked
up, he was greeted by “two piercing eyes” watching him from a few feet away—a black fox.
He and the fox stood frozen for a moment, locked in a staring contest. Louv eventually
moved to continue his walk, but the fox followed along, disappearing back into the woods
only when Louv arrived at the main lodge. “Today I recall few significant details about most
of the people I met in that Alaskan camp,” Louv writes in the introduction to Our Wild Call-
ing ($28, Algonquin), his new book about communing with animals. “But the black fox’s
eyes are still watching. I often wonder about the quality and mystery of that encounter.”
The 70-year-old Louv is best known as the author of Last Child in the Woods, an unlikely
2005 bestseller that established the phrase nature-deficit disorder and is widely cred-
ited with helping spark an international movement to examine the therapeutic benefits of