It is one of the rituals of autumn, like Halloween, the crop harvest, deer hunting, cider, or a trip to the mountains to savor the colors of the leaves. It just wouldn't be the fall of the year here in New Mexico without thoughts of firewood and some time spent afield, cutting, loading, and splitting a load of wood.

About 15 years ago, I became the editor of Basin & Range, a short-lived magazine (three issues) based in Silver City. The demise of this periodical is a story unto itself, and not a particularly pleasant one, but the inspiration for the journal is still out there, albeit in somewhat tattered form: the mountain ranges and desert basins of Southwest New Mexico and Southeast Arizona.

What most people know about Whitewater Creek is The Catwalk. Go there most any day in good weather and there will be a half dozen cars or more in the parking lot, and a commensurate number of people hiking The Catwalk over the water as the creek comes down the canyon.

First of all, despite the name, jackrabbits aren't rabbits at all, they're hares. The gestation period of a rabbit is about 30 days. Hares hold their young seven to ten days longer. And where rabbit young are born bald, blind, and helpless, a just-born hare is already in fur, with eyes open, and the little leveret can hop around. Rabbits, such as the cottontail, like cover; they live in burrows or brush piles and when pursued hard they look for cover or a hole to provide an escape. Hares spend their entire lives on top of the ground, hooding up in a "form" - a mere depression in the grass - when they're not out feeding or moving about. Flushed by a coyote, fox, greyhound, or eagle, a hare will attempt to outrun rather than hide from a predator.

You sit around enough campfires or barrooms with enough fisherman and you realize that every one of us is pleased to argue for our favorite fish, favorite fishing spot, and favorite method of pursuing fish. Like the endless debates over guns, game animals, and calibers, these are arguments that won't go away, and that outdoor writers will forever milk for copy.

The Smallmouth Bass may well be our finest freshwater gamefish; I think he is. Clearly, he is superior to his bass cousins. The White Bass is a small, staid, tasteless fish compared to the Smallmouth, a school fish given to running, en masse, in man-made lakes. The White Bass is a common fish. The Largemouth Bass has too large a following to be as easily dismissed as the White Bass. It is likely that the Largemouth is the single most sought after species in North America. I think this is because the Largemouth is ubiquitous, at least in the nation's lakes and reservoirs, strikes viciously on artificials, and is a great leaper. The Largemouth is a better eating fish than the White Bass and, all said, is a very good fish; but not even the Largemouth tournament winners and aficionados will claim their fish has the speed, élan or strength per pound of the Smallmouth.

In his grip on the imagination, psyche and national character, the mountain man rivals the cowboy as the archetypal American Hero. In the Southwest the mountain man reached his zenith, and held his lifestyle longest, in the region's last great wilderness - the Gila country of southwest New Mexico. Here within the mountains and canyons of the Gila, San Francisco and Mimbres Rivers, the mountain man era lasted well into the 20th century.

The Gila National Forest of Southwest New Mexico encompasses more than three million acres in a contiguous block of largely untrammeled terrain, an area larger than some Eastern states. Near the center of this last great wilderness in the Southwest, in a cave a few miles downstream from where Sapillo Creek meets the main branch of the Gila River in northern Grant County, Martin Price made his new home in June of 1983. He brought with him a subsistence lifestyle and the myth of the mountain man.

In the realm of travel, nothing can approach a successful river run on good water, with the opportunity for some gamefish along the way. Okay, maybe if we could work some hunting into that river run, too. That should be next.