At seven years old, Leslie T. Sharpe became a naturalist. She was on a beach vacation with her family and, while building sand castles, happened upon a mole crab—a tiny, thumb-size creature—which sparked a realization that the world was both larger and smaller than she had imagined, that it "held as many secrets as it did surprising and secretive critters." 

Sharpe has been paying close attention to the world around her ever since—particularly at her home in the western Catskills, where she is as familiar with the habits of chipmunks and paper wasps as with those of bobcats and bears. In The Quarry Fox: And Other Critters of the Wild Catskills (Overlook Press, 2017), she draws an intimate portrait of this "resilient wilderness" of gently sloping hills, countless streams and rivers, and verdant meadows. 

Sharpe's prose is firmly rooted in the rhythms of this particular place. Although her book is ostensibly about the animals with which she shares her patch of forest—the quarry fox of the title, for example—Sharpe is at her best when she's writing about the subtle changes in season visible only to those who have practiced years of close observation. The almost imperceptible sound of a small stream freed of ice—the first sign of spring. Shifting light in August that marks the end of summer long before the warm days have vanished. Or the "genius of snow" that unexpectedly enlivens the landscape, "edging it with a new beauty." The Quarry Fox also enlivens the landscape, imbuing the humble hills and streams of Sharpe's backyard with wonder and awe. As she writes, "There is nothing so sublime that is so readily accessible as the natural world."

This article appeared in the September/October 2017 edition with the headline "Outfoxed by the World."