Houston, Tex. Post 
Dec. 18, 1949 
Drinking from a bottle is a sad, unsatisfactory way to get drunk. 
I have sant in the shivery early morning sunshine of the Ohisos Mountains

and watched the tiny highland deer mince across a slope, down an arroyo,
and 
up a hogback on the other side, on their way to feed high up on Juniper Flats.

Watching those deer, with no rifle in my hands, with none of the thrill of
the 
hunter's hot blood, I have been drunker than I ever got on hundred proof
whisky. 
Why? 
It is sometimes hard for a thinking man to feel that he belongs, that it

is right for him to be where he is. Watching deer, there in the protected
na- 
tional park, a thinking man realizes that here are some animals that do belong,

animals that threaded the rough country before men ever knew there was a
Chisos 
Mountain range, before men ever knew there was an America. 
And man knows that they, unlike the deer down on the Edwards Plateau, down

in the Nueces brush, are likely to last, because they cannot be shot at.
And man, 
to whom the ultimate rightness is intoxicating, knows that here is something

ultimately right. 
Deer and mesquite browse and the new acorns of the Emory oak, never to be

bothered by man, never to be butchered, never to be sent in pump-hearted,
quiver- 
ing retreat by the spit of a .50-50 rifle. 
Aldo beopold either never visited or chose not to write about the Chisos

country, which is the nearest to a wilderness that Texas has left. Perhaps
he 
thought it too tame. Perhaps he never discovered it. 
But he does write, intoxicatingly, about other wilderness areas, near 
wilderness areas and wastelands. 
About the wilderness at the mouth of the Colorado of the West, in Mexico

just above the Gulf of California. He never found "the great jaguar,
el tigre," 
but "No deer rounded a bush, or stopped to nibble pods under a mesquite
tree, 
without a premonitory sniff for el tigre. No campfire died without talk of
him. 
No dog curled for the night, save at his master's feet..." 
About the mountain Escudilla and its royal inhabitant, Bigfoot the grizzly.

Bigfoot killed only one cow a year, bashing in its head. But Escudilla to
a whole 
region in Arizona meant grizzly, the only one left. Then one June the govern-

ment trapper came down from Escudilla with a grizzly pelt big as the side
of a 
barn. Escudilla means bear no more. 
And he writes intoxicatingly about the wonders right under the feet of the

farmer of Wisconsin, wonders which few see and fewer ruminate on. 
But the Aldo Leopold variety of intoxication, like that which comes from
a 
bottle, is not without its after effects.