"The wardens climbed into their truck, ready to leave. 'You'll need about seven cords of firewood. Concentrate on that. You'll have to get it all in before the snow grounds your truck.'"
"Though I didn't want to ask, it seemed important. 'What's a cord?'"
So begins Pete Fromm's seven winter months alone in a tent in the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness guarding salmon eggs. After blundering into this forbidding errand as a college lark, Fromm gradually come face to face with the blunt realities of life as a contemporary mountain man. Brutal cold, isolation, and fearful risks balance against the satisfaction of living a unique existence in modern America.
This award-winning narrative is a gripping story of adventure, a rousing tale of self-sufficiency, and modern-day Walden. From either perspective, Fromm lives up to his reputation as one of the West's strongest new voices.
Peter Fromm is a contributing editor of Gray's Sporting Journal and winner of The Traver Award, a Pacific Northwest Booksellers Book of the Year Award, and Sierra Magazine's Annual Nature-Writing Contest. He lives in Great Falls, Montana.
"This is a lovely book about honesty, about clear-eyed seeing, and clear-eyed feeling. Each reader will come away from reading this book with a favorite scene that he or she will remember forever." —Rick Bass, author of Platte River
"Pete Fromm is a talent to watch. His stories speak those sweetest moments of riding a river and casting a line, in a land bigger than we can ever hope to be." —Ivan Doig, author of This House of Sky
