Based on the author's own experiences as a young man, the book's two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in the author's own words, "a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by."

A river runs through it -- Logging and pimping and "Your pal, Jim" -- USFS 1919: the ranger, the cook, and a hole in the sky.