Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

At the edge of a Virginia creek a frog goes slack and slumps in on itself, sucked dry through a pinprick by the giant water bug beneath it, until nothing floats there but skin. Annie Dillard saw that, and then spent a year refusing to look away from anything: the praying mantis fixing her egg case to a twig, the ichneumon wasp seeding her young into a living caterpillar, the muskrats at dusk, the light coming off the water.