Susan Fenimore Cooper’s slow-moving nature journal, Rural Hours (1850), is an education of the senses in which both author and reader learn where to look and how to look. Her creative decision represent herself as a “gleaner” and to both use and subtly subvert the seasonal cycle (so that we may see more deeply, more intimately, more truthfully) is part of a larger critique of the paternalistic spirit that helped found the very place she writes about—Cooperstown, New York. More unobtrusively than Thoreau, Cooper develops her own sophisticated version of an “ecology of reading,” brilliantly anticipating recent attempts by ecocritics to imagine a “democracy of all life-forms” (Timothy Morton).