Opening Day 2008 for the Timber Rattlers is April 3. That is 165 days from today. This off-season, the countdown will be based on books. Each day between now and Opening Day 2008, I will pick a random book out of my library and excerpt a passage off the page number corresponding with the number of days remaining to the first pitch of the new season. I will try not to repeat a book during the countdown.
Today’s book is The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper, a book that makes a terrific movie.
The excerpt from page 165 describes the scenery as Natty Bumpo leads his small band of survivors away from the capture of
A frightful change had also occurred in the season. The sun had hid its warmth behind an impenetrable mass of vapour, and hundreds of human forms, which had blackened beneath the fierce heats of August were stiffening in their deformity before the blasts of a premature November. The curling and spotless mists, which had been sailing above the hills towards the north, were now returning in an interminable dusky sheet that was urged along by the fury of a tempest. The crowded mirror of the Horican was gone, and in its place the green and angry waters lashed the shores as if indignantly casting back its impurities to the polluted strand. Still the clear fountain retained a portion of its charmed influence, but it reflected only the sombre gloom that fell from the impending heavens. That humid and congenial atmosphere which commonly adorned the view, veiling its harshness and softening its asperities, had disappeared, and the northern air poured across the waste of water so harsh and unmingled that nothing was left to be conjectured by the eye or fashioned by the fancy.
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