Hunting Grounds Research Articles

The Lantana, Blooming

The Lantana, Blooming Annalisa Grier (bio) In the year before Daniela leaves him, the first and only year of their marriage, Jay often finds himself staring at her, wondering, weighing, marveling. He feels that he has married too well, though Daniela laughs whenever he mentions it, tells him: I used to swim naked in the cow ponds and burn the leeches off with a match. In fact I'm still doing it. Don't act as if I'm a queen, Jay McFaddin, love of my life. Be a good man, leave your boots outside. At the end of their marriage, she does a very simple thing, so simple Jay wonders how it never occurred to him that she might: she hitches a ride in a semi-truck and disappears. His friend Grady says that from inside the gas station, where he was buying cigarettes, he saw Daniela climb into the cab of a Mack truck with Arizona plates. He will tell Jay that he thought she was only talking to the guy. Jay will punch Grady in the jaw as he says this and walk away, feeling righteous and wronged. Before she gets in the truck, Daniela will take Jay's handgun out of the sock drawer, wrap it in a few of his t-shirts, and stuff this all in the bottom of a backpack with a few boxes of bullets. Then she will leave. He will not understand why she does it; but still, he thinks, he should understand. The answer is there, if he can just find it. But now, before all that, before she gets into a stranger's truck and vanishes, they are eighteen, just married, living in a cabin that belonged to Jay's father, as caretaker for land owned by a big oil man from Houston. There is a trailer for the kitchen, a shed for the house, and Jay's father presents it to him solemnly, as if it is his to give: Jay is to earn his keep by periodically driving the fences for his father, but also to be prepared to leave at a moment's notice, should his father be evicted from the place he now rents in town. It is, Jay thinks, an appropriate present from his father, a man whose nomadic days are barely behind him, days his father mourns; a man who would never realize that, as a wedding present, temporary tenancy could leave something to be desired. After Jay outfits his father's shell of a shed with a wooden floor, a handmade frame for the bed—even curtains on the window—his friends move in, friends he has known since childhood. The friends bring sheds, [End Page 21] like Jay, or the trailer from a semi-truck, or even just a tent. Most of them live in rented rooms in town when they are not at camp, or in additions off the back of relatives' homes; just until I get on my feet, they say, just until I get a real job. Some, the ambitious ones, speak of houses, most of trailers. They are old friends and new adults, weighing whether they will join the Army or the Marines, one about to take over his father's car repair shop, poised in the moment between childhood and adulthood; none but Jay married, none but Jay ever accompanied in the camp by a woman, although Jay knows the women are there in the background, indefinite but present. The ranch is better for hunting than for working cattle, which is just as well, as the oil man will never run nearly enough head on it to use it all. Since he grew up bombing around it in his father's beat-up Jeep, Jay knows the property better than the rancher himself: the irregularities, the side of the railroad tracks where the fences break, the uncertainty on the edge of a ranch too big for its owner, the place where he or his friends can trespass into the good neighboring hunting grounds while maintaining plausible deniability. There is enough range between boundaries here—between the railroad tracks, the potholed two-lane highway, and the barbed...

Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South (review)

Creek Paths and Federal Roads: Indians, Settlers, and Slaves and the Making of the American South. By Angela Pulley Hudson. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010. Pp. 252. Cloth, $65.00.)Reviewed by J. M. OpalThis book is a reminder of how a simple change in focus can illuminate a given place and time. Over the past ten years, the Gulf Coast region during the decades around 1800 has attracted new attention, especially by historians of slavery. The making of the deep south or cotton kingdom by enslaved black workers and their white masters now claims center stage in larger narratives of western expansion. Hudson's book offers a fresh glimpse of that vast and complex region by focusing on the ways its native inhabitants, especially the Creek Indians, moved through it. In other words, the book makes mobility and territoriality - the ways native peoples and their neighbors traveled through the country and understood their rights to do so - the central topics of inquiry. Who could move through Indian country, and according to what treaties, customs, or agreements? What did new roads and paths through that territory mean to young braves, opportunist chiefs, and American speculators, soldiers, and settlers? In addressing these questions, Hudson offers a compelling narrative of the Creek Nation from the 1 770s to the 1830s as well as a provocative interpretation of U.S. expansionism and regional politics during the early national age.Hudson's early chapters explore Creek understandings of the landscape and of the pathways leading through it. By the time of the American Revolution, an intricate network of paths connected the forty Upper Creek towns and twenty Lower Creek towns. Travel through the forests and along the rivers was essential to both the semi-nomadic, mixed economy of the Creeks and to their cultural and spiritual understandings of the land itself. While attempting to forge a more cohesive nation out of their largely noncoercive society (63), Creek headmen tolerated American travelers along their paths, if only because they were increasingly reliant upon credit, gifts, and supplies. Single white men were seen as innocent passersby. During the last two decades of the eighteenth century, however, Creeks encountered more and more family groups traveling along their roads, in some cases with slaves and in many cases in wagons that physically expanded the paths themselves. Such persons were obviously coming to settle, not to trade. Their appearance worsened or created divisions within the Creek population, with some arguing for a negotiated coexistence and others for a more radical break with white ideas, goods, and demands. This latter group noted that no treaty made with the Anglo Americans had yet restrained them from swarming into Creek hunting grounds and that any crime committed by a single Creek - a stolen horse or slave, for example - became the collective responsibility of the entire Nation, while American authorities shrugged off thefts or murders by white settlers as the regrettable actions of a few bad men.Among the many benefits of Hudson's approach is the view it offers of the new American state, which managed to infuriate borderlands elites for alleged partiality to Indians and to take a very active role in building roads through Creek country. Especially after 1805, when both the Creek and Cherokee leadership officially agreed to let American citizens freely pass through their nations, U.S. soldiers chopped down the trees and laid down the stones to connect the Tennessee settlements with the Carolinas and New Orleans. …

Workers and the land in US history: Pointe Mouillée and the downriver Detroit working class in the twentieth century

This is the story of how the working class in the downriver Detroit region participated in efforts to make the Pointe Mouillée Wildlife Refuge a viable, unpolluted, public hunting ground, accessible to all and to keep it that way throughout the twentieth century. This is a genealogy or micro-history of a small, wet place that served as source of a primarily white, male, working-class culture and identity throughout the twentieth century. Local, downriver citizens, many of them members of the working class, participated in sportsmen's organizations and lobbied and worked with a variety of state agencies to accomplish this goal. They participated in establishing an environmental ethic and culture around the outdoor activities connected to this place – duck hunting, trapping, and fishing. That desire to ‘produce’ a certain space reflected class interests and history. It reveals a hidden aspect of the agency of one large segment of the downriver working-class community.

Forest Stakeholder Participation in Improving Game Habitat in Swedish Forests

Although in Sweden the simultaneous use of forests for timber production and game hunting are both of socioeconomic importance it often leads to conflicting interests. This study examines forest stakeholder participation in improving game habitat to increase hunting opportunities as well as redistribute game activities in forests to help reduce browsing damage in valuable forest stands. The data for the study were collected from a nationwide survey that involved randomly selected hunters and forest owners in Sweden. An ordered logit model was used to account for possible factors influencing the respondents’ participation in improving game habitat. The results showed that on average, forest owning hunters were more involved in improving game habitat than non-hunting forest owners. The involvement of non-forest owning hunters was intermediate between the former two groups. The respondents’ participation in improving game habitat were mainly influenced by factors such as the quantity of game meat obtained, stakeholder group, forests on hunting grounds, the extent of risk posed by game browsing damage to the economy of forest owners, importance of bagging game during hunting, and number of hunting days. The findings will help in designing a more sustainable forest management strategy that integrates timber production and game hunting in forests.

Current state and trends in Canadian Arctic marine ecosystems: II. Heterotrophic food web, pelagic-benthic coupling, and biodiversity

As part of the Canadian contribution to the International Polar Year (IPY), several major international research programs have focused on offshore arctic marine ecosystems. The general goal of these projects was to improve our understanding of how the response of arctic marine ecosystems to climate warming will alter food web structure and ecosystem services provided to Northerners. At least four key findings from these projects relating to arctic heterotrophic food web, pelagic-benthic coupling and biodiversity have emerged: (1) Contrary to a long-standing paradigm of dormant ecosystems during the long arctic winter, major food web components showed relatively high level of winter activity, well before the spring release of ice algae and subsequent phytoplankton bloom. Such phenological plasticity among key secondary producers like zooplankton may thus narrow the risks of extreme mismatch between primary production and secondary production in an increasingly variable arctic environment. (2) Tight pelagic-benthic coupling and consequent recycling of nutrients at the seafloor characterize specific regions of the Canadian Arctic, such as the North Water polynya and Lancaster Sound. The latter constitute hot spots of benthic ecosystem functioning compared to regions where zooplankton-mediated processes weaken the pelagic-benthic coupling. (3) In contrast with another widely shared assumption of lower biodiversity, arctic marine biodiversity is comparable to that reported off Atlantic and Pacific coasts of Canada, albeit threatened by the potential colonization of subarctic species. (4) The rapid decrease of summer sea-ice cover allows increasing numbers of killer whales to use the Canadian High Arctic as a hunting ground. The stronger presence of this species, bound to become a new apex predator of arctic seas, will likely affect populations of endemic arctic marine mammals such as the narwhal, bowhead, and beluga whales.

Offshore Exploration in the Arctic: Can Shell’s Oil-Spill Response Plans Keep Up?

All around the world, oil and gas companies are being forced by resource declines to drill in less accessible areas, and the Arctic is their newest frontier. The geology above the Arctic Circle—that is, everything above latitude 66.56°N—holds an estimated 90 billion barrels of oil and 1,669 trillion cubic feet of natural gas, or 22% of the world’s undiscovered1 conventional resources, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.2 It’s thought that these resources lie predominantly under Arctic seas, which have recently become easier to reach due to significant reductions in seasonal ice cover associated with global climate change.3 Norway, Russia, Canada, Denmark, and other northern countries are in various stages of developing offshore Arctic programs, and diplomatic squabbles have broken out over territorial rights extending all the way to the North Pole. Between 1980 and 2000 Alaska accounted for an average one-fifth of U.S. oil production.4 But with oil flowing through the Trans-Alaska Pipeline falling by more than two-thirds since a peak in 1988,4 the recent pressure to drill in the Outer Continental Shelf (OCS) off the state’s north coast has been relentless. Alaska derives at least 90% of its revenues from oil,5 so law makers in that state—supported by much of the state’s population—have pushed hard for offshore authorization. The federal government has also indicated its support, in 2011 expressing a commitment to facilitate development in the OCS region and to expedite offshore permitting in Alaska, assuming that “safety, health, and environmental standards are fully met.”6 Now the United States has taken a big step toward opening the seas off Alaska to a new round of oil and gas exploration. In a major breakthrough for the petroleum industry and loss for drilling opponents, the U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI) in February 2012 approved Shell Gulf of Mexico, Inc.’s oil-spill response plan for the Chukchi Sea, which provides habitat for polar bears, walruses, and other wildlife, and a hunting ground for Alaska Natives who still go whaling in seal-skin boats.7 Six weeks later the company’s spill-response plan for the adjoining Beaufort Sea also was approved.8 Shell must cease drilling well before the water freezes over lest a late-season blowout cause oil to accumulate under the ice through the winter. Shell Alaska spokesman Curtis Smith says DOI approval of the plans puts the company on track to launch exploration in the region this summer (final permits to drill must still be obtained). But many critics contend it’s not possible to drill safely in the region, given the isolation and harsh weather, and they question how well the plans will protect Arctic health in the event of a spill.

The behavioural and sensory ecology of Agaronia propatula (Caenogastropoda: Olividae), a swash-surfing predator on sandy beaches of the Panamic faunal province

The genus Agaronia includes dominant predators in the eulittoral zone of dissipative sandy beaches of the tropical Eastern Pacific, which show specific adaptations to this environment such as swashsurfing locomotion. We studied A. propatula in its natural habitat in El Salvador and Costa Rica, and performed field experiments to obtain insights into its ecology, behaviour and sensory physiology. Agaronia propatula is not attracted by carrion and preys mostly on the ubiquitous beach snail Olivella semistriata. This, however, reflects community composition rather than prey specialization; A. propatula is an investigative hunter and will, quite literally, attack everything that moves (with the notable exception of echinoids). Prey is identified at short range by tactile and, to a lesser degree, by chemosensation located in the propodium. We found no evidence for long-distance sensory capabilities; A. propatula rather seems to rely on the regular physical structure of its wave-dominated environment when it moves between its shallow subtidal resting zone and its upper intertidal hunting grounds where potential prey predictably congregates. On the other hand, behavioural patterns such as the rapid yet haphazard cruising of foraging individuals, or the complex prey capture sequence in which the prey is transferred to a metapodial pouch, are similar in A. propatula and Oliva. Thus, our results lead us to speculate that the development of behavioural features that proved adaptive in the intertidal environment was essential in the evolution of Agaronia from Oliva-like ancestors.

"Boomtown Rabbits": The Rabbit Market in Chatham County, North Carolina, 1880-1920

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] The Eastern cottontail rabbit thrived in the edges that ran all across the North Carolina Piedmont in the late nineteenth century. Perennial rabbit dynasties filled the fields, meadows, and hedgerows over the spring and summer mating cycles. In September of 1896, they ran in such numbers that reports came of trains hitting them by the score. On November 1 of that year, Chatham County, the happy hunting ground for Mr. Rabbit, opened what promised to be a banner season. The morning of December z, snow began falling in the region, and continued throughout the day. Nine inches fell on the county seat of Pittsboro and brought out the children for snowballs and sledding in town. Out in the countryside, the snow forced the rabbits into the open. Tireless boys chased them in the fields and caught them without dogs, guns, or traps. (1) Some of the rabbits graced the dinner table fried or in a stew, but local produce dealers bought most. That week, resellers in Siler City bought more than 1,700 from hunters, and in Harper's Crossroads, about 800. The Chatham railway depot known as Richmond reported shipping 2,400. On the morning of December 9, 7,250 pounds of rabbits, hunted, trapped, dressed, and packed in Chatham, departed the town of Moncure on a northbound express train. Within the day, wagons loaded with them saturated the state capital, Raleigh, where diners were always open about their love for Chatham rabbit. (2) Although the same cottontails flourished across the region, in the years between 1880 and 1920, Chatham County turned its rabbits into something like a regional brand, recognized throughout the South and along the eastern seaboard. By the end of the nineteenth century, the railroad district of the county's newest and biggest town, Siler City, had become the de facto rabbit capital of the Southeast. Jokes linking politics and Chatham rabbit entered the repertoire of statewide humor, as did the idealized rusticity of the county's people. This account draws mostly on newspaper sources to trace the stages in the career of a foodway: its birth in the old fields, the early development that separated it from peers in neighboring counties, its introduction to society (polite and otherwise) in the state capital, its weird turn to politics, its prime-of-life endeavors in industry, and its demise on the shifting ground of modernity. Ways of eating rabbit: A jugged hare CUT it into little pieces, lard them here and there with little slips of bacon, season them with a very little pepper and salt, put them into an earthen jugg, with a blade or two of mace, an onion stuck with cloves, and a bundle of sweet-herbs; cover the jugg or jar you do it in so close that nothing can get in, then set it in a pot of boiling water, keep the water boiling, and three hours will do it; then turn it out into the dish, and take out the onion and sweet-herbs, and sent it to the table hot. If you don't like it larded, leave it out) THE OLD FIELDS If a market begins with supply, a game market by necessity begins with a wildlife habitat. A century after the rabbit's heyday in the Piedmont, the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission (NCWRC) advised farmers who sought to restore the teeming populations of the past. The NCWRC characterized the rabbit's prime habitat with three aspects: 1) a low predator population; 2) extensive areas of uniformly good escape cover, including large abandoned farm fields with a uniform cover of weeds or young saplings; 3) isolated areas of cover that have not been exploited by which can include dense brambles, briars, heavy weeds or brush. The description suits the Piedmont of 1880, which then spanned some twenty-four (now twenty-seven) counties in the central uplands of the state. Dense hardwood forests and century-old farms, both active and fallow, crisscrossed the region. Farmers had spent upwards of a hundred years controlling predators, and the countryside remained remote, even from the urban centers it enveloped. …

A first step in bringing typhoid fever out of the closet

A first step in bringing typhoid fever out of the closet

Arboreal Politics in the Knight's Tale

Arboreal Politics in the <i>Knight's Tale</i>

Browsing damage by moose in Swedish forests: assessments by hunters and foresters

In Sweden, there is a longstanding conflict between the use of forests for timber production and game for hunting due to browsing damages on young forests. This study examines the assessments of two stakeholder groups regarding browsing damage by moose. The data originated from a mail survey that involved hunters and forest owners in Sweden. The samples were randomly selected from two national registers of hunters and forest owners, respectively. An ordered logit model was used to account for the assessments of severity of moose browsing damage. The results showed that on average, non-forest owning hunters rated the browsing damage on their main hunting ground lower than non-hunting forest owners rated the browsing damage on their forest estate. The respondents who both hunt and own forest had a rating that was intermediate between the former two groups. The ratings were mainly influenced by level of activity in improving game habitat, quantity of moose meat obtained, level of moose on forest estate and the importance of bagging game as well as forest estate size, hunting ground size, and the stakeholder group that the respondents belong. The findings can help in designing strategies for conflict resolution between forestry and hunting for moose.

Bark stripping damage by red deer (Cervus elaphus L.) in the fenced rearing centre “Lomnicka Reka“

Bark stripping damage is a serious problem in some forest hunting grounds in Serbia. This study aimed at assessing the incidence and intensity of bark stripping by red deer in the fenced rearing centre ?Lomnicka Reka? (Mt. Veliki Jastrebac, central Serbia). The data were collected by detailed surveying of the entire rearing centre over spring and autumn 2008, 2009 and 2010. Our results show that, in spring and summer, it is exclusively broadleaf tree species that are bark stripped by red deer, mainly beech (86.3% or 536 trees) and hornbeam (10.1% or 63 trees). The incidence and intensity of bark stripping were the highest in the diameter class of 20-39.9 cm. Damaged trees were identified in all parts of the rearing centre, at all aspects and at different slopes. Beech bark was stripped over the period May-August, with the focus in June or July.

Impresa agricola, valorizzazione del territorio e fornitura di servizi faunistico-venatori

The enlargement process of the farm, made with the traditional standard of connection, is characterized by the devaluation function of land, until the reform of article 2135 (civil code) that provides to the acknowledgement, among the connected activities, of those aimed to the offer of services, included the activity of valorisation of territory to which are referable the farmed wildlife hunting ground and agritourism farmed wildlife hunting ground. They are expression of the multifunctional farm that realizes, in the rural areas, the diversification of economic activity.

Structure–Bioactivity-Relationships and Crystallographic Analysis of Secondary Interactions in Pregnane-Based Steroids

A total of eighty-seven molecules of pregnane-based steroids (1–87) have been included to predict their pharmacological effects, specific mechanisms of action, known toxicities, drug likeness, etc., by using the statistics of multilevel neighbourhoods of atoms descriptors for active and inactive fragments. The probable activities are characterized by Pa and Pi values which depict that most of the molecules have high value of teratogen activity. The biological activity spectra for substances have been correlated on SAR base (structure–activity relationships data and knowledge base) which provides the different Pa (probability of activity) and Pi (probability of inactivity). The Lipinski’s rule predicts that most of pregnane derivatives have stronger preponderance for “cancer-like-drug” molecules and some of their related analogous have been entered in the American National Cancer Institute database. The CCDC survey sets out to collate existing data on pregnane derivatives and its interpretations with special emphasis on intra- and intermolecular hydrogen bonds. X–H···A intra/intermolecular hydrogen bonds in the identified molecules have been described with the standard distance and angle cut-off criteria. D–θ and d–θ scatter plots for X–H···A intra- and intermolecular interactions are presented for better understanding of packing interactions existing among these derivatives. Comparison of contacts from H(C) to O and H(O) to O, vis-a-vis their crystal structure reveals that contacts from H(O) to O predominate over H(C) to O. The hydrogen interactions between crystallographic independent molecules represent a rich hunting ground for understanding packing in the solids. Bifurcated hydrogen bonds have been identified in some molecules and most of these bonds are based on C–H···O pattern in which ‘O’ atom acts as a prototype acceptor. Solvent–solute/solute–solvent interactions have also been investigated to understand more complicated processes that occur for biomolecules in aqueous solutions. Most of the molecules show high value of drug-likeness; whereas molecule-5(87.5%), 25 (87.4%), 34 (88.6%), 45 (89.9%), 58 (81.4%), 67 (87.2%) and 83 (89.9%) exhibit low value of drug-likeness, instead of observed range of 91.2–99.4%. Biochemical processes are transformations that occur in living organisms involve a great variety of steroids, proteins, lipids, carbohydrates, etc. and these complex substances make up some portion of the total weight of biochemical systems in which main constituent is water. Steroidal molecules are held in their defined 3-D structures by hydrogen bonds. The solvent–solute/solute–solvent interactions [O5(Methanol)–H(Methanol)···O3; O17–(HO17)···O5(Methanol)] for a pregnane derivative are plotted in Figure. These interactions greatly influence the behaviour of compounds. In biological–activity the ubiquitous presence of solvent affects many macroscopic results, such as excretion. The possibility of modeling such interactions can reduce experiments and permit better understanding of compound activity.

Conformational Analyses of the Reaction Coordinate of Glycosidases

The enzymatic hydrolysis of the glycosidic bond is catalyzed by diverse enzymes generically termed glycoside hydrolases (hereafter GHs) or glycosidases. The many sequence-based families of glycosidases have served as a rich hunting ground for enzymologists for years. Not only are these enzymes of fundamental interest, providing paradigms for enzymatic catalysis that extend beyond the bounds of carbohydrate chemistry, but the enzymes themselves play myriad essential roles in diverse biological processes. The wide utility of glycosidases, from their industrial harnessing in the hydrolysis of plant biomass to their roles in human physiology and disease, has engendered a large scientific constituency with an interest in glycosidase chemistry. A fascinating thread of this research, and one with major impact on the design of enzyme inhibitors, is the conformational analysis of reaction pathways within the diverse families. These GH families provide a large pallet of enzymes with which chemists have attempted to depict the conformational landscape of glycosidase action. In this Account, we review three-dimensional insight into the conformational changes directed by glycosidases, primarily from structural observations of the stable enzyme-ligand species adjacent to the transition state (or states) and of enzyme-inhibitor complexes. We further show how recent computational advances dovetail with structural insight to provide a quantum mechanical basis for glycosidase action. The glycosidase-mediated hydrolysis of the acetal or ketal bond in a glycoside may occur with either inversion or retention of the configuration of the anomeric carbon. Inversion involves a single step and transition state, whereas retention, often referred to as the double displacement, is a two-step process with two transition states. The single transition state for the inverting enzymes and the two transition states (those flanking the covalent intermediate) in the double displacement have been shown to have substantial oxocarbenium ion character. The dissociative nature of these transition states results in significant relative positive charge accumulation on the pyranose ring. The delocalization of lone-pair electrons from the ring oxygen that stabilizes the cationic transition state implies that at, or close to, the transition states the pyranose will be distorted away from its lowest energy conformation to one that favors orbital overlap. Over the preceding decade, research has highlighted the harnessing of noncovalent interactions to aid this distortion of the sugar substrates from their lowest energy chair conformation to a variety of different boat, skew boat, and half-chair forms, each of which favors catalysis with a given enzyme and substrate. Crystallographic observation of stable species that flank the transition state (or states), of both retaining and inverting glycosidases, has allowed a description of their conformational itineraries, illustrating how enzymes facilitate the "electrophilic migration" of the anomeric center along the reaction coordinate. The blossoming of computational approaches, such as ab initio metadynamics, has underscored the quantum mechanical basis for glycoside hydrolysis. Conformational analyses highlight not only the itineraries used by enzymes, enabling their inhibition, but are also reflected in the nonenzymatic synthesis of glycosides, wherein chemists mimic strategies found in nature.

Clues to the ‘Magellanic Galaxy’ from cosmological simulations

We use cosmological simulations from the Aquarius Project to study the orbital history of the Large Magellanic Cloud (LMC) and its potential association with other satellites of the Milky Way (MW). We search for dynamical analogs to the LMC and find a subhalo that matches the LMC position and velocity at either of its two most recent pericentric passages. This suggests that the LMC is not necessarily on its first approach to the MW, provided that the virial mass of the Milky Way is M_200 ~1.8e12 M_sun. The simulation results yield specific predictions for the position and velocity of systems associated with the LMC prior to infall. If on first approach, most should lie close to the LMC because the Galactic tidal field has not yet had enough time to disperse them. If on second approach, the list of potential associates increases substantially. Interestingly, our analysis rules out an LMC association for Draco and Ursa Minor, two of the dwarf spheroidals suggested by Lynden-Bell & Lynden-Bell to form part of the "Magellanic Ghostly Stream". Our results also indicate that the direction of the orbital angular momentum is a powerful test of LMC association. This test, however, requires precise proper motions, which are unavailable for most MW satellites. Of the 4 satellites with published proper motions, only the Small Magellanic Cloud is clearly associated with the LMC. Taken at face value, the proper motions of Carina, Fornax and Sculptor rule them out as potential associates, but this conclusion should be revisited when better data become available. The dearth of satellites clearly associated with the Clouds might be solved by wide-field imaging surveys that target its surroundings, a region that may prove a fertile hunting ground for faint, previously unnoticed MW satellites.

Bodies, kinship and power(s) in the Baruya culture

The themes developed in the present text, written in 1998, appeared in conclusion to an earlier piece of work on the relationship between the sexes and the different forms of power and hierarchy among the Baruya, a population living in the interior highlands of New Guinea (Godelier 1982; 1986). This was the theme of the ―sexed‖ body, which functions as a ventriloquist‘s dummy, constantly invited to speak about and to testify for (or against) the prevailing social order. The idea was that the way the body is represented stamps each person‘s innermost subjectivity with the order or orders that prevail in his or her society and which must be respected if the society is to be reproduced. A body is made of flesh, blood, bone, breath and one or more spirits, all of which are possessed by everyone, male or female; but there are also organs – a penis, a clitoris, a vagina, breasts – and substances – semen, menstrual blood, milk – which not all people have and which make individuals different or alike. All cultures have answers to the questions of where the bones, the flesh, the blood, the breath or a person‘s spirit come from: from the father, from the mother, from both, from neither and in that case, from where? But not all cultures bother to account for every component of the body: some say nothing about semen, others pass over blood, or bone, … and these silences speak volumes. Among the many representations of the body, those having to do with the making of children – conception, intra-uterine growth, development after birth – occupy a strategic position because it seems that they usually fulfill two important functions for a society. First of all they legitimize the appropriation of each child that is born by a group of adults that regards itself as the child‘s kin. And secondly, they assign this child a future destiny and position in society according to its sex, male or female, which it has from birth. It is specifically this category of representations that we will address in the following pages.

“Big Bone Lick,” “Big Talk,” and “Flush”

“Big Bone Lick,” “Big Talk,” and “Flush” Robert Morgan (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution “. . . the Indians said the peaks were talking to each other in the idiom that mountains use. . .” Pilot Mountain, North Carolina, photographed by AnDrew McKenzie, 2003, courtesy of a GNU Free Documentation License. [End Page 116] Big Bone Lick At Big Bone Lick the first explorers found skeletons of elephants they said, found ribs of wooly mammoths, tusks. They dug out teeth the size of bricks and skulls of giant bison, beavers. In salty mud licked bare by elk and deer and buffalo and bears for ten millennia, the bones seemed wreckage from a mighty dream, a graveyard from a golden age, or killing ground of titans. Here they saw the ruins of a world survived by its diminutives, where Eden once gave way and shrank to just a regular promised land to fit our deadly, human scale. Big Talk When mountains boomed and boomed again returning echoes all along the chain, the Indians said the peaks were talking to each other in the idiom that mountains use across the mighty distances with giant syllables and rests. White hunters feared it might be guns or even cannon natives had somehow acquired to warn them from the better hunting grounds and streams, the blasts as loud as thunder on the clearest days and coldest nights. Geologists would later hold the groans and barks inside the ridge were shelves of massive, restless rock that slipped or dropped far down within the mountains’ guts, a fracture or a crashing at some fault as part [End Page 117] of the tectonic conversation among the continents as old as planet earth or starry birth, the mutter of creation’s work. Flush A common sight in graveyards in the countryside’s the sunken grave. Though times may vary in each case the average age for graves to cave is roughly half a century. To compensate old folks would curve the dirt in mounds above the site. But after several years the box below gives way and heavy earth subsides, to settle, crush the whole container of remains, the dust of the beloved, as clay unites with clay. And what is seen above in turf ’s a new depression near the stone, a pool of absence filled by rain or snow or blowing leaves until the spot is flush again, until the human is replaced, with hill and wind and planet’s curve. [End Page 118] Robert Morgan Robert Morgan is a poet, novelist, and biographer. His most recent book is Boone: A Biography (2007), winner of the Kentucky Literary Award and finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Award. He is the recipient of fellowships and awards from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, as well as an honorary degree from his alma mater, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Since 1971 he has taught at Cornell University, where he is now Kappa Alpha Professor of English. Copyright © 2011 Center for the Study of the American South

Cutaneous Squamous Cell Carcinoma: A Smoking Gun but Still No Suspects

A viral etiology for cutaneous squamous cell carcinoma (cuSCC) has long been suspected, primarily on the basis of its dramatically increased incidence in immunocompromised individuals. In this issue, Arron and colleagues report a comprehensive hunt for viral gene transcription in cuSCC. Their findings show that it is very unlikely that any currently known virus is commonly responsible for the maintenance of this cancer.

Report from the Salerooms

The Editor of The Byron Journal invited me to write this article in October 2009, and since then things Byronic have been remarkable quiet in the auction world, except for one large bang. Sotheby's sale of 'Books and Manuscripts from the English Library of Archibald, 5th Earl of Rosebery and Midlothian' in London on 29 October 2009 included a collection of 15 complete autograph letters signed 'Byron', five incomplete letters and lengthy fragments, one brief note, one separate postscript, one short fragment and one address wrapper - in total 71 pages in Byron's hand to his friend Francis Hodgson, with some other related manuscript material. The estimate for this lot was £150,000-£180,000, which seemed quite steep, even though some of the material was, apparently, unpublished. I did not go to the sale - it was a little out of the range of my pocket - but my spies tell me that it was a telephone bid that secured the manuscripts for £277,250. I do not know who bought them, and it seems that nobody yet does. On this occasion Sotheby's high estimate was justified, but in their next English Literature sale, in December 2009, their optimistic estimate of £12,000-£15,000 for a known Byron letter to Henri Beyle dated 29 May 1823 was over-eager. The lot did not sell. In November, Bonhams sold a copy of Byron's 'Ode to Napoleon Buonaparte', a first edition in its original wrapper, for £1,320, but the salerooms have been going through a fallow patch for Romantic literature, so there really is nothing else to report from that quarter. The C. R. Johnson Rare Book Collections Catalogue 52 included an interesting item of Byroniana, however: Childe Albert, or, the misanthrope, and other poems, imitative and original, published in Edinburgh and London in 1819, and priced at £750. This imitation of Childe Harold was known to Samuel C. Chew, who lists it in the bibliography of his Byron in England: His Fame and After-fame (1924) - but he makes no comment in the body of the work, although he had seen the book, which suggests that he thought it added nothing to the existing knowledge of books about or parodying Byron. Due to the lack of Byron material currently being offered by auction houses and in dealers catalogues, I thought I should write a little about what has been happening on the Net. The Internet, that double-edged sword, which makes it easier for me to sell books, and for you to find them, but which also makes it much harder for me to be able to buy books with a profit left in them - this wondrous new thing is reducing everyone's real hunting grounds, as bookshops and book fairs decrease in number. But a final word on the real, in passing. The south coast of England is one area that still has enough shops to make a foray worthwhile. Recently I saw several finely bound sets of Byron, so if you are looking for a special present it is worth trying Colin Page of Brighton or A & Y Cummings of Lewes. A quick word about book fairs, too: June is still the big month in the UK, with the Antiquarian Booksellers Association's major fair at Olympia in London and the Provincial Booksellers Fairs Association at the Novotel, Hammersmith. As with all organisations, both these Associations have websites that will tell you about their members, list fairs they organise internationally and across the UK, and link you to further sites selling books. …