The below excerpt comes from Tom Comitta’s novel, The Nature Book (forthcoming Coffee House Press on March 14), a “literary supercut” made entirely out of nature descriptions from 300 novels.

A note on the text from the author: “To write [this book], I searched for patterns in how authors behold, distort, and anthropomorphize nature, creating a text that operates somewhere between narrative and archive, lyrical excess and data analysis. And yet, following the story of hundreds of animals, plants, and weather patterns and incorporating plot twists and cliffhangers, the text reads like a novel. Here we find the end of the prairie section where the creatures of the plains repose after a brutal heat wave.”

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It was a still, deep-breathing summer night, full of the smell of fields, the night air. Somehow the hum and heat of the day seemed far in the past, and now the wind was right. The world seemed reversed here. Horses rested from their exertion. The crickets and the meadowlarks, the rabbits and the flies slept on the dim and purple vastness of the plains. There were stars by the millions, birds flyin across the moon. Geese maybe. The large star winked. 

As the hours passed, the full moon rose high into the sky, lighting the land. A faint breeze stirred and cooled sensationally, significantly, consistently. Midnight came and passed silently, for there was nothing to announce it. Around the middle of the night, the moon was well over in the west, and the plains were very dark. Anything could come out of the darkness—coyotes, snakes. But here there was no sound, not any. The horses were silent, the crickets, the locusts, the owls. There was only the sound of the wind rustling the grass.

At some point during the night, the first gray of daylight began in the sky, and a dark moving mass came over the western hill, a dark figure outlined by a gray blur of faint light that seemed to come from all quarters of the horizon at once. Sometimes it made a sound. The sound was comforting and reminded of a cow or a bull in a spring meadow. And, in fact, it was a moocow coming down along the grass. It brought a story of the passing hours to the fields and trees.

See, once upon a time and a very good time it was this moocow that was coming down along the grass met a nicens little pond, with rusty willow bushes growing about it. The cow was a little spotted calf. And the little calf curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to climb the hill, and lowed through the fields, crushing the silent grass, pounding the silent ground. The little calf wandered about the fields under the star-sprinkled sky, rambled into the rich scenery and luxuriant meadows, till morning put out the fireflies and the stars, until the sun leapt above the prairie, and, in the grass about the calf, all the small creatures of day began to tune their tiny instruments. Birds and insects without number began to chirp, to twitter, to snap and whistle, to make all manner of fresh shrill noises.

The sun had come up brilliantly. The ground was flooded with light; every clump of ironweed and snow-on-the-mountain threw a long shadow, and the golden light seemed to be rippling through the curly grass like the tide racing in. All about giant grasshoppers were doing acrobatic feats. The gophers scurried up and down. The earth was warm. The air was cool enough to make the warm sun pleasant and so clear that the eye could follow a hawk up and up, into the blazing blue depths of the sky.

Over gently curving land the sun just shone and the mulberry tree just glistened in the long grass. At a pond nearby—a big pond, where so many birds come—meadow larks hopped here and there while the long-billed snipe flickered round in great circles. The ducks were floating with their heads deep in the water as though they searched the bottom for food.

Here, into this pond, wild birds come from all quarters of the horizon. It is a part of life in their jolly way across the plains. They fly all the way from the ocean or mountains, or any natural features of the terrain. They must have water to drink and to bathe in before they can go on their journey, so they go looking for an area with water. They look this way and that, and far below them they see something shining, like a piece of glass set in the earth. They come to it and are not disturbed. There was a crane last week. She spent one night and came back the next evening. The following day another bird arrived, sat for a few minutes on the fallen log by the pond, and flew on almost immediately.

This morning a big white bird with long wings and pink feet came and kept flying about the pond and screaming until dark. She was in trouble of some sort. She was going over to the other ocean, maybe, and did not know how far it was. She was afraid of never getting there. She was more mournful than the other birds here; she cried in the night. Next morning, when the sun rose, she flew up into the sky and went on her way, disappeared over the rim of the prairie.

When the big white bird flew, the green plains stretched past in a leisurely flow, the empty, flat country wheeling by like a great turntable. Some places had lots of trees, some did not; some fields were green, some were not, and the hills in the distance were like the hills in every distance. Twenty-two miles ahead, the grass was short and gray. Thirty miles away, grazing peacefully on the great plains, were pale herds of antelope, and near by the demure prairie-dogs sat up.

The country rolled away toward the plains of woods and hills where the winds were always blowing and the grasses seemed to sing and whisper and laugh. To the north were sandy slopes where grass only grew in tufts. West and south, across the earthy-smelling plains, across the rolling land of the creek bottoms, masses of trees covered some of the low, rounded hills, and some of them were grassy, open spaces, and they went on for twenty miles.

In the far distance, the roll of the plains got longer; the heat shimmers gave way to cool air. The skies seemed deeper than the skies in the lower plains. Their depth and blueness robbed even the sun of its harsh force—it seemed smaller, in the vastness, and the whole sky no longer turned white at noon as it had.

Farther and farther into the vast prairie the big white bird flew, mile after mile, hour after hour, past weeds growing green, past fields of wheat, past flocks of crows that flapped heavily to the ground, past herds of nondescript cattle with cowbirds sitting on their hipbones. Always, somewhere to the north, there was a swath of blueness, with white clouds floating in it like petals in a pond. The beauty of the high prairies stretched across an enormous emptiness, the interminable plains.

The big white bird drifted through the wild afternoon in a beautiful motion. The sun was well up in the sky, and it threw a brilliant pattern of light across the land. Now the distant view was thinned with haze, and the eye traveled for fifty miles before haze and a gradually ascending tableland blurred on the horizon.

About the middle of that afternoon, the bird suddenly noticed an unusually heavy gust of wind sweep eastward across the prairie, with the promise of more wind behind it. The air was cold and smelled of wet stone. The big white bird continued on across the grass until Wait! To the west, at a great distance, emerged a faint, jagged blue line, low on the horizon. The shadowy outline was a mysterious sheet of shade until it rose miraculously out of the land: faint as a watermark on pale blue paper was the tracery of mountains, tenuous and far-off, but today accessible.

Toward the mountains the country was rolling and grassy, serene and cool. The land rolled like great stationary ground swells. But the slow succession of rise and fall in the plain changed and shortened. The earth’s surface became lumpy, rising into mounds and knotted systems of steep small hills cut apart by staring gashes of sand, where water poured in the spring from the melting snow. After a time, the most startling visions were the mountains, their ragged peaks towering above in great sepulchral forms, filling alternatively with a feeling of romance or adventure.

Never halting the rhythmic advance that the mountains themselves intended, the bird was driven by deep inner compulsion, and it flew on and on. The ridges of hills kept moving closer, as if the plains were being folded into pleats. The flat stone shelves were advancing, and the distant reaches of the sky were shrinking into waves of bluish mountains. Far ahead, these mountains covered an extensive land area, and the air surrounding them was so pure that from a distance, it was impossible to calculate how far away they were. Of course, the air was just as pure around ranges to the north, but they were not faced by flat plains, so the phenomena did not apply to them. The good part was that close up, these splendid ranges were just as impressive as they had been at a distance. They dominated the plains and served as a backdrop to extraordinary beauty.

To the west, one could see range after range of blue mountains, and at last the snowy range, with its white, windy peaks. The mountains, the magnificent, uncountable mountains, were “papier-mâché,” rocky forms so unusual they seemed to have been placed in position by an artist. Without foothills, though with curving approaches which spread some distance out upon the ground and then up at the hills, the mountains raised a magnificent barricade against the sky, the highest jagged crests floating in mist 8,000 feet above: up and up, granite rocks and stunted pines; stone accumulated in flat layers, one above the other like sheaves of paper in a pile; hills so steep that no horse could climb them. They were of innumerable, indefinable rock colors—grayish yellows, dull olives, old rose, elusive purples, and browns as rich as prairie soil. And over the whole area hung a smoky pall of energy, sometimes hiding trees, sometimes breaking into separated clouds between peaks.

Closer to the mountain range there was a little more wind in the sky than there had been. Now the wind grew strong and the bird dipped, made a quick drop, slanting down on back-swept wings. Down here, below, there were gentle hills and open sunny places. Here grew the tall trees whose tops the bird had seen from above. Shady groves were scattered on the rolling meadows, and in the groves, deer were lying down, hardly to be seen among the shadows. As the bird flew past, the deer turned their heads, and curious fawns stood up to see it more clearly.

The bird flew through the grass a long way, in the midst of great beauty, complex, almost chaotic beauty, such as the Mountains often display. For a while, the high, bare cliffs stood up, the rings of the mountains growing higher. But sometimes when the wind was coming and the trees stood upright against the sky, the mountains were almost hidden behind the hills and trees. The bird went higher in the air, and those strange cliffs rose up again. Then the mountains sheering up before the bird were very real and solid.

In a little while, that sweep of flat land shrunk beneath the high, abrupt thrust of the mountains. The peaks of the mountains came closer together in the sky, purpling in the shadows, the rock glowing golden red far back on the faces of the inner peaks. Where the sun came through it reached the margin of the crevices, then, trickling down the granite sides, cut violent shadows on the ledges and brought the mountains into the jiving finality of a form.

The bird that never alights flew on and on toward higher land. But in the place where an entrance should have been there was none. No crack. No stream that made a kind of gulch between the rocks. No mouth of a canyon. Perhaps the bird had flown for nothing, nothing, nothing. All the time it held its flight, but there was no real sense of motion. All that happened was that the steep thrust of the mountains grew higher and higher, until it was a jagged, absolute border to the world. As the bird went farther, the illusion became more instead of less convincing: the granite barrier was rising.

It seemed the bird was trying to break from the closed room of prairie and sky into the vastness of these mountains. Round and round it flew, under the old red walls like a heron, milk white with a long black bill. It flew as a heron does, legs trailing, with a down-curved, powerful wingbeat. It soared up into the sun around the cliff, then down to a riverside clearing at the foot of a grassy knoll.

The bird looked up, and everything fell into place. There in the shallows, in the deep light of the fading afternoon, the mountains parted, flaring open like two wings—one wing green, made of vertical needles, with whole pines serving as the pile of a solid carpet, the other reddish-brown, made of naked rock, ploughed with steep channels, broken with jutting knobs. Into those mountains, through broken light and shadow, the cordilleras rose and sank. Distant mountains. Near mountains. More mountains. Bluish beauties never attainable, or ever turning into hill after hill. Southeastern ranges, altitudinal failures as alps go. To the west heart and sky-piercing snow-veined colossi of stone, relentless peaks appearing from nowhere, the clouds caught here and there on their spurs.

After drinking from the river, the big white bird flew suddenly up and wheeled into the mountain range, second highest on the earth. The bird was actually in the mountains, no goofing around. Sheer rock faces rose all around, so high you could barely see their tops. Into the northward loop of the river, through the river trees, the sun touched and missed and touched again. Again and again, the eye couldn’t fix on a place. Things swam into sight and out again, the pine trees rising still and tall, the river winding, the mountains shouldering up to the timberline. The plains were shut out from sight here by design.

Well into the mountains, the distance heaved with stony ridges, needles, pyramids in whose shadowed cirques the snow curved smoothly. The imagination seemed to spring to full life in the clear air, beyond the rein of reason, and to look was to helplessly see fresh clumps of rapidly moving fluff clouds over the dark beauty of the mountain-tops. It was a scene of high and wild excitement: towering mountains watching over a long oceanic roll of ridges and peaks, a forested valley stretching southward, a peak like an ear on its side.

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Source texts in order of appearance:

O Pioneers!, Willa Cather

Bless Me, Ultima, Rudolfo Anaya

The Voyage Out, Virginia Woolf

The U.P. Trail, Zane Grey

Plainsong, Kent Haruf

Possession, A.S. Byatt

Centennial, James Michener

State of Wonder, Ann Patchett

A House for Mr. Biswas, V. S. Naipaul

Lonesome Dove, Larry McMurtry

Cities of the Plain, Cormac McCarthy

Little House on the Prairie, Laura Ingalls Wilder

The Octopus, Frank Norris

The Call of the Wild, Jack London

To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee

The Magus, John Fowles

Tess of the D’Ubervilles, Thomas Hardy

The Birchbark House, Louise Erdrich

The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck

McTeague, Frank Norris

The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett

The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan

The Shipping News, Annie Proulx

Nemesis, Issac Asimov

Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, James Joyce

The Big Sky, A. B. Guthrie Jr.

Riders of The Purple Sage, Zane Grey

Middlemarch, George Eliot

My Ántonia, Willa Cather

Murphy, Samuel Beckett

Zastrozzi, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Gilead, Marilynne Robinson

The Song of the Lark, Willa Cather

Surfacing, Margaret Atwood

Life of Pi, Yann Martel

The Rainbow, D. H. Lawrence

Lonesome Land, B.M. Bower

The White Peacock, D. H. Lawrence

Winter in the Blood, James Welch

Hawaii, James Michener

Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson

Sons and Lovers, D. H. Lawrence

The Lowland, Jhumpa Lahiri

Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

Blood Meridian, Cormac McCarthy

Ethan Fromme, Edith Wharton

The Crystal Cave, Mary Stewart

Sometimes a Great Notion, Ken Kesey

Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand

The Big Rock Candy Mountain, Wallace Stegner

Song of Solomon, Toni Morrison

The Conquest, Oscar Micheaux

The Virginian, Owen Wister

All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy

Women in Love, D. H. Lawrence

Master and Commander, Patrick O’Brian

A Sicilian Romance, Anne Radcliffe

The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers

The Surrounded, D’Arcy McNickle

Death Comes to the Archbishop, Willa Cather

The Sea-Wolf, Jack London

The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

Far from the Madding Crowd, Thomas Hardy

A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, Betty Smith

On the Road, Jack Kerouac

Moby-Dick, Herman Melville

The Mountain Lion, Jean Stafford

The Precipice, Elia Peattie

Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko

The Garden of Eden, Ernest Hemingway

The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway

Ice, Anna Kavan

Big Sur, Jack Kerouac

Neuromancer, William Gibson

Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad

Ulysses, James Joyce

The Dragon in the Sea, Frank Herbert

The Sheltering Sky, Paul Bowles

The Wizard of Oz, L. Frank Baum

Gods Without Men, Hari Kunzru

Pnin, Vladimir Nabokov

The Shining, Stephen King

Lolita, Nabokov

Clan of the Cave Bear, Jean M. Auel

Angle of Repose, Wallace Stegner

The Prairie, James Fenimore Cooper