As those among you with solid elementary school educations know, the Dutch were a water-oriented culture—inclined to reclaim land from the sea and ship goods by canals.

Typically, the great natural historians have had their classic fieldwork texts illustrated far after the fact by inspired artists who used these texts, I’ll go ahead and say merely, as a launching pad for their own dreaming, their imaginative reconstruction of the flavor, pace and looming presence
of those bizarre and often dangerous plains animal encounters.