This is a brilliant evocation of a boyhood spent on the oldest dude ranch in Wyoming. It is a sublime but unforgiving landscape, a place of unrelenting winds, pitiless blizzards, fierce rivers, and the men who work there have to be tough to survive. The author writes lyrically of this world, its animals - horses, bears, elk - and of its people, in particular his parents and John, an old cowboy who becomes the boy's mentor.
