What it comes down to is a delight in creation. Or the glimmer of trout in a river pool. Or pintail ducks swirling to corn stubble.

Definitely, it's in the imperious bugle of a bull elk. Sometimes, the meaning of life distills down to the flare of the tail of the skunk on the trail ahead of you.

OK, what it really comes down to is deadlines. All that blather in those two paragraphs up there was just puffing up while the saddler tightened the cinch.

The deadline comes with spurs. Now we can plod along.

Usually I know what I'm going to write before I write it. This time, I'm shaking my cranium to see what falls out.

Cutthroat trout, mud puppies, wild asparagus, mule deer, catfish, wild mushrooms, mountain goats, bighorn sheep, marmots, ravens, red ponderosas, sagebrush, cholla cactus, bird dogs, sharp-shinned hawks, stoneflies, porcupine quills, rattlesnakes, lightning.

And people. Lots of people - selling stuff, selling adventure or ideas or tricks for tracking critters. Some selling cynicism, greed and human primacy.

The best have come along for the ride and to absorb the sound of the river.

It's a mess up there in the brain pan, but rich as forest humus, and I'm taking it all with me. Well, you can keep the spurs.

So I'm retiring. I'm leaving the greatest job on Earth and the newspaper that let me do it for 21 years. You might say I'm going fishing, and you might be right.

Much of the trek has been sad. Human nature renders every generation so shortsighted as to overlook the great loss while squirming a bit over some immediate losses. In the short haul, we fight to keep a trail open or closed, to save a scrap of wilderness or change a trout limit or preserve sage grouse.

In the long haul, the natural Earth is stripped bare. Growth and progress are considered inevitable and worthy of exemption from any goal or objective.

I admire folks whose attachment to the Earth is strong in the face of the invasion. The good news is that a powerful conservation movement is being reborn among hunters, fishermen and nonsportsmen who see the big picture.

When I started at the Rocky in 1987, the Two Forks Dam imbroglio was the hot item. The threat of losing a precious trout fishery and landscape was enough to bring hook-and-bullet people together with environmentalists.

They killed the dam, and I was privileged to write about it.

In those days, "wacko animal-rights activists," "anti-gun people" and "tree huggers" were considered to be the only enemies of hunting and fishing.

That was a huge propaganda victory for the cynical forces of progress who couldn't care less about public lands or hunters or tree huggers or cutthroat trout or jumping mice.

Divide and conquer.

Then motorize the backcountry to pit "hunters" against hunters and "recreationalists" against solitude.

Drape the flag of patriotism over the drilling rigs, but not this land.

It's been some potent snake oil, and many of us bought into it. Now the movement is coming together. Sportsmen have joined environmentalists. As conservationists, they are sticking up for the land.

The Rocky Mountains are my home, and here is where I'll stay, at the front line. Just don't expect me to do anything useful until after the archery season.

I'll miss those of you who've been readers, as some have said, "since forever." I'll especially miss the ones who send photos and greetings from their Brittanies and Labs and wire-haired pointers and fishing terriers.

I'm really going to miss my friends at the Rocky. There's no business like the news business.

It's been quite a party. I think I'll stop working it and take a bite.

"For nowadays the pride of man denies in vain his kinship with the original dust." - Robert Louis Stevenson in the essay, Pulvis et Umbra.