In the title novella of Rick Bass’ latest collection of fiction, The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness, Anne, a woman reflecting on her life, observes: “I’d hate to have to choose what the single most beautiful thing I’ve seen is.” Like so many of the characters living in his fiction, and so many of the observations made in his nonfiction, Bass’ words contain a true appreciation of beauty—beauty in the natural world, yes, as evidenced by the seven books that have placed his nonfiction among the best in contemporary nature writing, as well as beauty in the imagined world. In his four books of fiction, he appreciates the struggles and satisfactions of his fictional characters, and reflects their inevitable humanity in the wonders of nature. Bass appreciates, and it shows in these meditative novellas that bond the beauty of the natural world with all the pitfalls and glories of being human.

“The Myths of Bears” explores the relationship of a roughneck couple living in the early years of this century, surviving in isolation in the wild areas of the Northern Rockies. Trapper, a skilled woodsman, has fallen victim to some disruption of the nervous system: He ties knots backwards, speaks in third person, and his hands shake and are repeatedly crushed by the hair-trigger traps he lays out for animals. His wife, Judith, watching her lover weaken and disappear under his ailments, seeks a fresh life away from the face of this decay. She finds it one late night as she crashes through her cabin window—full speed ahead—and begins a new life in the winter wild. Their relationship, peculiar as it is, only grows more so as Trapper begins to track Judith, stalking her with the vigilance and instinct of an animal. Bass examines the two, hunter and hunted, with each character’s flashbacks over the deep ridges of emotion they’ve traversed together. Symbols of this relationship surface in the surrounding wild, especially in the mysterious lore and biological realities of bears—hibernating in the snow under the couple’s feet, waking into springtime, staggering “through the woods like drunk sailors.” Ending this one, Bass remains loyal to the often harsh laws of survival.

Out of the forests and into the incomprehensible seepings of geological time, “Where the Sea Used to Be” introduces Wallis, an oil witcher whose divining rod is his own imagination, mingled with an intuition for ancient beaches. Imagine, as Wallis does, ocean waves lapping up against the foothills of the Appalachians, retreating 300 miles south in 300 million years, leaving behind pockets of oil buried deep in a massive basin. A guru in the eyes of his competitors and the people of the region. Wallis struggles with, and is able to find compromise in, the world of his successes in oil and the love he has for life. Just as time can change as ocean landscape into hidden black fluid, so can time change a man whose life has finally seeped beyond that which it once held true.

In the title novella, set in the idyllic landscapes of West Texas, a thoughtful middle-aged woman named Anne thinks back to her childhood there: the wonders of her family and the wildlife-laden land they lived on, or rather lived with. Anne’s mother died when the girl was eight, and Anne remembers sitting on the back porch with her mother shortly before, mending clothes that on that spring day happened to be red. Costa hummingbirds, rare and “a long, long way from home,” whirred in:

They buzzed all around us, humming, and when I say I feel unassailable it is a feeling like the one I had that day, the notion that the hummingbirds had unseen threads in their long needle-like bills, and were flying around and around us, tying my mother and I, my family and I, up with invisible silky grace, tighter and tighter, until our history, our past, is protected forever.

This sense of eternal, indivisible protection remains with Anne as she grows older. In her deep explorations and examinations of local nature, especially of birds, the young Anne feels her mother as a living spirit, and conquers her mother’s death with her heartfelt love of the natural world.

Anne is beautifully bonded to her family and the land; she shuffles with her little brother in the flow of the Nueces River; listens with her grandfather to the music of birdsong; writes on the backs of armadillos and turtles with phosphorescent paint and watches them swim, glowing, through a nighttime pool. Bass truly appreciates the interrelated beauties of life.

Oddities even in fiction, Bass’ characters listen far more than they speak. And they listen—to others, to themselves, to mystery—through the severe and splendid filter of the natural world. Bass tells us what so many have before: that nature teaches, contains, whispers the secrets of time. After the book ends, it’s not surprising that The Sky, the Stars, the Wilderness remains.