I’m reading The Starship and The Canoe by Kenneth Brower.  He writes about two men, a father and son. The father, Freeman Dyson, is a renowned astrophysicist who designs a spaceship to explore the stars.  The son, George Dyson, lives in a tree house and explores the coastal wilderness and waters of the Northwest in a canoe he designed and built.

At one point, George is camped by the Icy Strait.  He is alone as the full moon rises when he hears wolves howling near him.

“Wolves had come down silently from the forest and had infiltrated the beach grass.  It seemed to George that the sound went straight to the center of his being. It passed through the center and out the other side, traveling over Icy Strait toward the moonlit mountain.

All his sensibilities quickened. Now and again, when the wolves stopped for a moment, George heard each grass blade rustling, each wave lapping. Waiting for the wolves to resume, he heard the blowing of humpback whales as they swung in close to shore.

The wolves were ending their song, when, from the sea, the whales answered it. George swears that this is true. The whale music was, he says, like whistling, trumpeting, and singing combined. It resembled no work of man he knew, but it blended perfectly with the chorus of the whales. The forest’s mournful ululations mingled with the brass winds and wood winds of the deep. The Earth was singing to its moon, and the sea was harmonizing.

George sat silent in the middle of the music, yet did not feel left out. It seemed to him that the two worlds, land and sea, were coming together in him. This morning he had padded, like the wolves, in bare feet on the mossy forest floor, and this afternoon he had paddled Icy Strait, like the humpback whales. A triumvirate, they praised the moon: lupus, George, leviathan.”