OL' SHOOG

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY SCHOOL OF FORESTRY ... an environment-oriented curriculum

Their classroom spans several thousand acres of green timberland across Arizona's northern mountains. And after four years of intensive study they'll be responsible for managing and putting to good use a considerable share of the valuable forest treasury in this country. These future land managers are the students at Northern Arizona University's School of Forestry the only school in the Southwest offering a fouryear degree program in forestry and the only one in the region accredited by the Society of American Foresters. Since its birth more than a decade ago, the school has moved forward at a dramatic pace and has become a forerunner in advancing vital, effective ideas in forestry education. The total enrollment of young men and women in its professional academic program has soared from 44 in the fall of 1958 to more than 250 for the current academic year.The faculty has grown too, in experience as well as number. All 11 instructors hold advanced degrees and seven (six more than the entire original faculty) have either a Ph.D. or Doctor of Forestry degree. Their practical experience is the sum of many years work in the specialized areas of forestry. But where the school has been everchanging through the past years, one thing has remained the same: Frier Hall, home of the forestry school. This rustic sand-colored university landmark contains nearly 22,000 square feet of classroom, laboratory and office space. The building houses special labs for studying forest soils, mapping, photo interpretation, wood technology and a host of other forest sciences. Also available is a range herbarium collection, wood working and testing equipment, and materials for microtechnique and micrography. The real classroom-laboratories, however, are the 4,000 acre School Forest five miles from campus, and a specially-selected 55,000 acre tract on the Coconino National Forest that extends southward from Lake Mary to Mormon Lake. These outdoor study areas are ideal for research work and field training. It is here that textbook theory is put into practice and here that the student can apply his knowledge.

The 80 sections of land on the Coconino Forest are being utilized under a remarkable new method of resource instruction initiated by the school and launched this fall. In this program, forestry seniors have the opportunity to develop an actual management plan for the 86 square mile area. The whole idea is based on systems analysis, allowing the student to study ecosystems in a real situation rather than in the classroom.

Another dynamic concept introduced by this innovative new curriculum is the deletion of regular courses for the entire junior year and half of the senior year. Replacing the standard offering of classes during these three semesters is an integrated (course-free) system of instruction employing team teaching techniques.

The pilot forestry program was implemented after two years of exploration and groundwork by a committee of five faculty members and two forestry majors. This use of an integrated curriculum, plus the assigning of a complete forest management plan for the student to compile on his own, marks a first for any forestry school in the nation. The faculty of NAU's School of Forestry feel their newly-adopted method is superior to the traditional formula of presenting forestry courses "cafeteria style," with the hope that the student can apply all the facts he learned to the problems of systems he will manage after graduation.

"What we've done is to create a more environment-oriented curriculum" pointed out Dr. Charles O. Minor, dean of the school. "We must develop a forester with an awareness of people's needs in the setting of our society so he utilizes his best talents. In the past, every forester was a carbon copy of every other forester they were taught the same things in the same way. Now we have more flexibility."

The student of forestry enters the novel scope of study after completing a broad, general background during his first two years at NAU. In the fall of his junior year, the student will learn important technical aspects of forestry through detailed field examination of forest and range ecosystems. This includes plant identification, wood characteristics, use of forestry tools, ecological principles, and inventory methods. During the second semester of integrated instruction, the student learns more advanced forestry concepts through various case studies of resource management situation. He will explore the administration and operation of a national forest, state park, a ranch and an industrial forest.

It's during the first 10 weeks in the fall of the senior year that the student writes the multiple use management plan. The selected Coconino National Forest acreage includes examples of all major types of wildland use, so the first task is to conduct a comprehensive inventory of the area. From this data, the student draws up a detailed program of how he would best manage the area to obtain maximum benefits from all the resources at hand.

After the complex project is completed, the student spends the last eight weeks of the semester conducting directed studies in specialized fields of interest to him. All work in the integrated curriculum is concluded, so the student now has a free choice of elective courses from which to pattern the subject matter for his final semester before graduation.

The positive results and rapid progress achieved through the program thus far has pleased the enthusiastic forestry faculty. Dr. Minor emphasized this by saying, “Forestry concepts can now be presented in a more meaningful and realistic manner by way of our new curriculum.

“For the forestry graduate, this means he'll be better prepared to unravel management problems, because he will have learned more than just facts but will have actually encountered an environmental situation and acted on it. We feel the students will reach the greatest overall understanding of the whole natural resource picture.” where learning is more than reading and thinking. Here - living with, and living into the ecological problems and analyses the scholar is confronted with the emerging and significant “whats, whys... and hows” of what in Thoreau's time were thought of as mysteries of nature.

It takes a good man to write a human story about a wonderful dog. OL' SHOOG By Don Dedera ANIMAL SCULPTURES BY FRED W. KAYE

Old Shoog jerked his nose off a rabbit track and bristled. He retreated stifflegged, growling primitively.

Maybe he got a whiff of coyote. Or cougar.

I cranked the lever of the Winchester, though the Lord knows why. I don't shoot coyotes, and if it were a lion, it would be skedaddling.

The scent blew off, and Shoog went back to trailing his does, cottontails and terrapins. He is a marvel. In the city he sleeps with his head thrown back on a pink pleated pillow, with all four feet up, with a breeze of the refrigeration wafting the fur on his well-filled belly. Yet he can immediately adapt to a rough piece of Arizona outdoors.

He furiously excavates badger holes. He endures the insults of crows and squirrels. He braves flooded creeks and bounds through snow and laps at gushing springs. He busts salt cedar thickets and wait-aminute patches. He waters the turkey roosts. He barks at baldface cows. He is reborn.

Much has been said about the joys of being a human in Arizona. But I think, after observing Ol' Shoog for so many years that it must be better to be a dog, anywhere. And to be a dog in Arizona must be canine heaven.

He is 11, which by one formula, would make him equivalent to a 77-year-old man. True enough, his white mask is spreading from chin to muzzle, and now and then he walks, clunk, into a chair. He can't hear thunder, he leaves a wake of dandruff, his eyes weep, and pesky warts prosper on his back.

He was born in Bagdad, a big-size black hunting cocker of good breeding.

It never occurred to me to write for the papers, and, well, Shoog never mentioned it. We seem to share a vast disinterest in bloodlines. People ask me what he is, and I say he is an intestine that haired over. Occasionally we engage in conversations, somewhat one-sided, but revealing of our opinion of dog show folderal.

"You ever hear of Lhasa Apso?" once I asked Ol' Shoog. He was lightly dozing on his pink pillow.

"You should be impressed," I chided him. "A story in today's paper says the Sahuaro State Kennel Club will have a Lhaso Apso at its show this weekend. The Lhaso Apso was bred to guard temples in Tibet."

The snores from the pillow increased. "It says that dogs of 300 different breeds will be shown. The Lhaso Apso, by the way, is a non-sporting dog."

As a spaniel my dog is classified a sporting dog. Ol' Shoog is sporting, all right, all right. He came within a swat of a neighbor lady's broom of deflowering a prize $300 silky toy terrier, and once he asked for, and very nearly received, a date with a great dane. Litters of black, warty pups populate his range. Seventyseven years old indeed!

"There are other rare breeds," I continued. "A Papillon. A Basenji. A Dandie Dinmot.

"The latter is a terrier, unequaled at hunting otter. You may recall Sir Walter Scott's description in 'Guy Mannering': "I have them a regularly entered, first wi' rottens, then w' stots or weasels, and then w' the tods and brocks, and now they fear naething that ever cam' wi' a hairy skin on't.'"

From the pillow - rattles and wheezes. "Chow time!" I yelled.

Ol' Shoog leaped off the couch into a perfect show stance: the chest deep. The face alert. The neck arched. Forelegs straight. Coat shiny. Tail carried in a line with the spine. The bright eyes fastened on his dish But I libel the dog. Shoog from the first exhibited instincts to find and retrieve birds. Some young dogs, like boys, outgrow their bumptuous impulses and by maturity they are disillusioned and unenthusiastic. Canine cynicism is no more attractive than the human variety.

Ol' Shoog? He still covers three miles while crossing a mile-long meadow under the Tonto Rim. He will without hesitation leap off a 15-foot cliff onto rock, after a lizard. His eagerness at times is embarrassing.

Out Buckeye way one day the whitewing dove were so thick you could get your limit with a long-handled dip net. But I had only a shotgun for me a handicap. My Aunt Bess says I'm the kind of wingshot that scores one-for-one. One bird for one box of shells.

Anyway, I had fired only a few times when I looked at the ground and I was over-limit by ten birds! Ol' Shoog had been pilfering the bag of several nearby hunters. I threw some mud on my license plate and fled to Phoenix.

What that dog hasn't done! He earned a tomato juice bath by tangling with a skunk. His raids on the bait boxes of trout fishermen who resort to cheese, marshmallows and doughballs are legendary. (If you do that kind of fishing, you've got to look out for that kind of dog.) Once, convinced his master was threatened, he flung himself at a coyote, and the little wild wolf gave ground. Camping in Bear Canyon on the Mexican border, he growled all night at the dogs baying in Spanish, and at the other end of the state, he shared his water can with a thirsting Hopi pup. Ol' Shoog has hunted the Pima Reservation when the silt of the Gila bottom was so gluey it gathered on his pads like a prisoner's shackle. He tangled just one time with cholla cactus, and he got kicked backside over vaccination by a mare he mistook for a canine Amazon. Something of a history buff, Shoog has signed the register of dogdom at the O.K. Corral, at the Tewksbury Ranch in Pleasant Valley, beside the First Water Trail in the Superstitions, on the melting adobe of Old Fort Bowie, by the front gate of Zane Grey Cabin, at Cochise Stronghold, at the ghost town of Oatman, and at every campground of the Conquistadores along the Coronado Trail. In a state as varied as Arizona in altitude and climate, there is a place and season for all men and all dogs. Our preference has been autumn, about a mile high. There are those who prize the gaudy promise of spring or the golden plentitude of summer. Others may revel in the alpine winters of the mountains, or more likely, relish the gentle, citrus-scented winters of the desert.

For us, fall has the most. And fall is best at the edges of the forests. The tourists are thinned out; nature retrieves its domain; a zestful, preparatory mood spices life above 5,000 feet. With mornings already aromatic of cedar, the cords of firewood grow by every home. Roundups gather cattle for market or drives to warmer ranges. District foresters, relieved of rescue missions and firefighting, return their crews to routine chores. One morning all is green, from the aquamarine of willow to the emerald of oak; then, next morning, the sumac has turned cardinal red and the walnut, flaxen yellow. Maple, sycamore, alder join with browns and oranges, until no one type of color film can bracket the spectrum. Nature adjusts. Baby squirrels frolic like kittens across the ponderosa crowns. Hatches of poults fatten on the seedheads along the draws. But the adult squirrels, the red ants, the birds intensify their harvests. Never busier are the nuthatches, the woodpeckers, the jays, the ravens, the cardinals, the bluebirds, the flycatchers, the swallows, the thrashers. Arizona's hardwood canyons teem with autumn birdlife. Arizona's fall is rarely unpleasant, a mild Indian summer between the Mexican monsoons and the Pacific storms. Crisp mornings. Warm afternoons. Shirtsleeve evenings. It is sit-outside, weekend-picnic, look-at-the-stars, sleep-on-the-ground weather. The planet itself seems to turn more deliberately. Easy times are past. A rough passage lies ahead. There is more vital work to be accomplished in fewer minutes every day, as long shadows frown across the brow of the Tonto Rim. That a man or dog should forsake a city house and steady meals to go hiking in 10 square miles of unpeopled, undogged rimrock wilderness does imply irrationalities. A dog could be struck by a timber rattler. A man ascending hardscrabble could slip and perish. And what good is that? But Ol' Shoog and I responded to the dash of danger. On a treacherous slope a man has no need of pride or ambition or greed or revenge. For a little while, all he needs is an adoring dog, glancing backward as if to say, "C'mon, pal. I made it. So can you."

It probably was Ol' Shoog's last good hunt. He slept through the alarm clock, but the rattle of the shotgun action snapped his head off his pillow, and launched him into a point off the cabin porch. The black stump of tail ticked like a metronome as I slipped into the bird vest. He watched each shell go into the pockets. He snapped at the feathers shook from our decrepit World War II musette. We set out into the gloom through the dark pine boles, crunching the granite of the road and savoring the first shock of frost. High, high were buttermilk clouds, but tattered shreds of last night's thunderstorm rode a brisk breeze through the jagged spikes of an old burn. As the sky began to lighten, we passed into the meadow. The musical twang of fur and khaki snagging on barbed wire echoed down the fence line, startling two whitetail does feasting on the hard green apples of a vanishing pioneer. The deer bounded through the abandoned homestead, flags flying, through the litter of gray roof shakes and bean cans. Shoog had to be whistled off the deer. He has been bad about trailing them, ever since that time we were after whitewing near Gila Bend, when a six-point muley buck burst out of a mesquite grove and dived into our cotton field, and Shoog looked to me for advice, and I could not resist the idiocy, "Fetch!" This day, our meadow was a crazyquilt of blue and yellow, stained by poisoned cedars. A rancher had sown weeping lovegrass, which didn't much catch, but the