It’s the season in California when one is likely to encounter wildfire smoke blowing in from somewhere, hopefully distant. It happened to us this week when I was up at my daughter “Pippin’s” in the way north part of the state, but it wasn’t thick enough to keep us indoors, or prevent us from going on a wildflower walk.

Are you familiar with the custom of the traditional walking tours that C.S. Lewis and some of his friends would take through the English countryside, about a hundred years ago in their case? The first book of the fictional Ransom Trilogy by Lewis opens with the protagonist on a solo walking tour; it sounds like a wonderful kind of recreation. I am reading a book by Humphrey Carpenter titled The Inklings, about some members of this group, such as J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, Hugo Dyson, Owen Barfield and others. Lewis’s brother Warren (“Warnie”) was one of them, too.

Here is an excerpt about how it was on these long walks:

Tolkien ought, on the face of it, to have been an ideal companion for Lewis and Barfield on their walking tours, but when he did accompany them, he found that twenty miles or so a day carrying a heavy pack was more than he liked….  Tolkien’s own idea of a walk in the countryside involved frequent stops to examine plants or insects, and this irritated Lewis.  When Tolkien spent some time at Malvern on holiday with the Lewis brothers in 1947, Warnie remarked, “His one fault turned out be that he wouldn’t trot at our pace in harness. He will keep going all day on a walk, but to him, with his botanical and etymological interests, a walk, no matter what its length, is what we would call an extended stroll, while he calls us ‘ruthless walkers.’”

I had made a point of copying that section to read to Pippin and her family this week. The relative ruthlessness of our walking styles is a continual factor to be dealt with when we are on a walk or a hike. Not just their family, but all of my children and extended family. Pippin was remembering as an example our stay in Greece last summer, when three of our group were on the ruthless side of the scale, while Pippin and I as usual lagged behind, looking at one more flower or leaf.

On this recent walk, however, it was just Us Girls. No one was in a hurry, but only two of us were paying much attention to the flora and fauna. Ivy was reading aloud to me from the book at right, Pembrick’s Creaturepedia, and trying not to stumble on the path that wound uphill through a meadow with mossy streams flowing alongside.

She’s been telling me for years about her favorite series of books, The Wingfeather Saga or Tales, by Andrew Peterson. This little encyclopedia of creatures illustrated by Peterson goes along with those stories, and the word descriptions and illustrations are all clever, well written and drawn, and often very amusing. Online I found one page from the book to show you as an example, a more poignant entry that Ivy didn’t read to us.

The narrator tells a story from his youth: While on a campout with a friend, he had foolishly eaten all the available food too soon, and was quite famished. Just then, “I spotted a bright yellow sweeft, aperched on the branch of an apple tree, and though hardly believing myself able to hit such a tiny target [with his slingshot], I knocked it from the tree with a single blow. It landed in a swump of sweefty feathers, dead. I held it in my hands and wept for shame. My father commanded me to honor the bird’s death by eating it, and thus I did….”

In each Creaturepedia entry is a description of how the animal tastes. For the sweeft, it is “Like sorrow.”

We strollers were neither hungry nor hunting that day; Pippin and I were admiring what wildflowers had not faded already, and I saw several that were new to me, including two types of yellow monkeyflowers. (Monkeyflower makes me think of the Creaturepedia again, though there is no animal in there that is named anything like monkey. I found a listing for gunkees, though…)

Though the larger landscape was blurry with smoke, we gave our attention elsewhere, to Ivy’s introduction to fantastical beasts, and making friends with the bright flowers at our feet.