ANYBODY WHO can write that buffalo trails are "braided hairlines across die palm of the land" is m love. And why not? Don Gayton underwrites his reports with the Passion of the lover. The prairie figures in this book as the waiting body of the beloved. We read of how farmers secretly gather the stone hammers they stumble on in the darkness of their work, stunned into a kind of awe, a love they hardly dare admit. Ranchers, Gayton lets us know, find the old aboriginal dream beds "come to them secretly, to lie down and imagine." There, under the worry of living - and Gayton is understanding of that need - prairie folk dream themselves into a land they barely fathom. Furtively, they meet and urgently embrace a world they suddenly see in all its fineness. (This, Gayton sees, against the misogyny that fuels other dreams on the prairies.) Small wonder Gayton speaks, reverently, of times when he sees well and finds peace, finds home in the prairies. One comes across magic, too, "charmed" places, and, sometimes, in that perfect term, what he calls "fulfillment." Gayton brings us wonderfully to his romance. He proceeds by anecdote, by image, by metaphor, folksy talk. In his configuration, knowledge is no impediment to love, no prevention of poetry He brings, unassumingly, an enormous knowledge to bear in these brief meditations on the prairie grasslands. He lays his thoughts before us, puts them lovingly there with his predecessors`- all those who moved through the place before him and who were moved to speak of what they found or thought they found. Gayton, then, works within a long tradition of writing on the prairies. He is so aware of how we dream our world that he speaks of "nature!` as something based in language. It speaks, writes, invites our reading. We need to learn how to read it, need to know what names to call it. We seek this consonance because for Gayton we are fellow creatures. Gayton~ empathy figures in frequent personification. The trope has gotten a bad rap in our time, but it is in Gayton especially apt and attractive. Beavers, the little buggers, gossip. Aphids are lazy, yet they figure things out. Blue spruce dream over the sands, at times feel intimate, die horrible deaths in other soils. Roots stumble into moisture, creeks talk to themselves, some plants count on fast growth, others wait patiently. In these moments Gayton`s affection endows plants and animals with endearing qualities. Gayton is so at ease with himself he shows no sense of having to watch over his shoulder. He seems in no way constrained by what colleagues might say, he simply makes his claims: `A slight excess of evaporation over precipitation creates grassland" Can it be that easy - the simple, folksy language? What courage in that, what freshness. Are expert doubters poised to scoff? No matter: Gayton wants to speculate, to speak vividly, to reach us. He takes us in with his splendid stories, becomes one of the latest in a long series of lovers to dream the prairies. It can come as no surprise, then, to find how Gayton discerns his subject in aesthetic focus. For him good science is elegant. Research, imaginative research driven by "desire` (there it is again, this talk of love), will find "incredible pattern" and favoured moments will emerge "pure" and "clean" and “lean” Page after page, Gayton writes of damaged environments and lost lives. The story clearly troubles him, yet he writes always with amazing patience, seeing the difficulties people have in trying to get on with their lives. And so his didactic moments are modest, gentle even, more meditations than admonitions. Perhaps naturalist writing is more given than standard ``scientific" writing is to supposition and speculation. Certainly Gayton is prepared to address us, winningly, as maker of stories. There he is in his active voice and personal confession. At every turn he shows a flair for tropes, for narrative, for folksy speech. Whatever it is we are reading here - and it is many things - The Wheatgrass Mechanism is joy. Its a lover`s book, you will love it.