Some years ago I blundered into a summer retreat on Gilbert Creek between the Sapphire and John Long mountains of southwestern Montana. I kept a journal of my first year there, and this story is based upon it.

I had been on a trip to my home state of Minnesota on a fall day in 1970 when, for some inexplicable reason, I got off the bus in Missoula. There I met a man who claimed to be caretaker of a millionaire's mountain wilderness retreat. Common sense went out the door, and I went up to the mountain with him.

So pristine was the environment, it almost seemed that I had slipped through a hole in the universe and landed in paradise. In retrospect, that year seems like a tightrope walk. I balanced my joy in the wilderness against the difficulties of developing a relationship with Dick Lowe. Dick was a descendant of the infamous Montana saloon keeper Rowdy Joe Lowe and carried his own strain of wild Lowe blood mixed with his western heritage.

Things were never dull as I struggled to adjust to his prickly character and his many pranks during the long cabin-bound months of deep winter.