Rounding a sharp bend, our headlights raked across a broken mess of talons and wings flapping awkwardly in the road up ahead. We slowed to a stop some distance away, and watched as a great horned owl struggled to move, launching into the air, flapping once and tumbling off the road embankment and into a ravine. Stopping the truck and crawling down into the brush along the road, I sat down some ways away from the owl, watching as it tried to fly, then tucked and sorted itself into a defensive position in the brush, its gaze never leaving mine. I spent an hour with the owl there on the side of the road, watching the yellow fire smoulder behind its darkening eyes, searching for a way to help. Only after a series of phone calls with Fish and Game (‘Yeah, with a broken wing we euthanise 99% of those’) and raptor rehab centre answering machines, did I walk away, leaving the owl to die, if not in peace, at least in its own private way. As I rose to leave, I made a photograph of the owl as it looked up at me, broken but poised, willing me to leave. To cease my human meddling. It was a look that seemed simply to say: ‘I am not yours to fix’. Though I did not know it at the time, this encounter with the owl, and the image that came from it, would continue to both haunt and guide me, serving as a totemic reminder of my place in something greater, a world where the limits of human power – both to heal and to harm – are finite.

Read the full essay (including the photograph): Edgelands