Tag: Old Norse

A slope of small, loose, broken rock fragments accumulated at the base of a cliff or steep slope — finer than talus, typically ankle-deep, and miserable to ascend. Every step slides backward. Scree slopes are the debris fields of mountains slowly breaking apart.

A linear zone where the earth's crust is being pulled apart — a tear in the planet's surface, widening slowly over millions of years. Where rifting succeeds, continents split and new ocean basins form: the Red Sea is a young rift that has filled with water, and the East African Rift is an active tear that will eventually split the continent. Where rifting fails, it leaves behind a sunken valley called an aulacogen — a scar from a wound that didn't open all the way.

Any area of soft, wet, yielding ground — a general term encompassing bogs, fens, marshes, and swamps. To be mired is to be stuck — the word carries the physical experience of sinking into ground that will not hold you. A mire can be a landscape or a condition, a place or a predicament.

A long, narrow, deep inlet of the sea between steep cliffs, carved by a glacier that once flowed to the coast and scoured a valley well below sea level. When the glacier retreated and the sea flooded in, the valley became a fjord. Fjords are among the most dramatic coastal landforms on earth — sheer walls rising thousands of feet from dark water hundreds of fathoms deep. Norway's Sognefjord is over 4,000 feet deep and 125 miles long.

The pattern of an animal's movement — walk, trot, lope, gallop, bound, hop — as recorded in the spacing and arrangement of its tracks. Gait tells you what the animal was doing: a walking deer leaves evenly spaced prints in a straight line; a bounding rabbit leaves clusters of four with the hind feet landing ahead of the front. Speed, alertness, confidence, and fear all write themselves into gait. A tracker who can read gait doesn't just know what passed — they know its state of mind.