Rick Bass's dog Colter is the brown dog of the Yaak who charges through the mountain valleys following the scent of game. Bass gives a history of his years with Colter as a way of understanding what is intuitive in his quest to create art.

The author shares his memories of his favorite dog, Colter, and the diverse ways in which he transformed the author's life, in a look at the dynamic relationship between humans and dogs.

The essays in this book, written by poets, novelists, mountain-climbers and academics from all over the world, evoke the representation of mountains in the English-speaking world as artists, writers, philosophers or mountain-climbers have represented them from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries. From the Alps to the Pyrenees, from Mount Fuji to Mount Shasta, from the Himalayas to the Scottish Highlands, from Ikere in Nigeria to Devil's Tower in the United States, from Uluru in Australia to the most northern mountain of the Arctic, the shapes of the world speak the same language and tell the world its own story. This interdisciplinary book, weaving together mountaineering, literature, philosophy, painting, cinema, ecology, history, palaeontology, geography, geopolitics, toponymy, law, religion and myth, invites people to an innovative reading of mountains: it reveals the close relationship existing between the shapes of the world and all forms of writing and, at the same time, it shows how the representations of the imagination may be instrumental in protecting the natural world. The story told by the landscape inscribes a broken line in the shapes of the world, tearing the landscape like a fragile page whenever historical and political events (wars, mining or deforestation) leave scars in the landscape; but writers' and artists' representations of mountains constitute a path to awareness as they are not only a painting of beauty, but an image of our link to nature and a warning as well. For centuries the image of the mountain has conveyed a symbolism telling the story of human thought, and this book shows to what extent literature and art play an essential part in our awareness of nature.

In no other region of the United States has the notion of authenticity played such an important yet elusive role as it has in the West. Though pervasive in literature,øpopular culture, and history, assumptions about western authenticity have not received adequate critical attention. Given the ongoing economic and social transformations in this vast region, the persistent nostalgia and desire for the ?real? authentic West suggest regional and national identities at odds with themselves. True West explores the concept of authenticity as it is used to invent, test, advertise, and read the West. The fifteen essays collected here apply contemporary critical and cultural theory to western literary history, Native American literature and identities, the visual West, and the imagining of place. Ranging geographically from the Canadian Prairies to Buena Park?s Entertainment Corridor in Southern California, and chronologically from early tourist narratives to contemporary environmental writing, True West challenges many assumptions we make about western writing and opens the door to an important new chapter in western literary history and cultural criticism.

An eclectic anthology of contemporary nature writing from the Southwest, including nonfiction, fiction, field notes, and poetry, through which artists of diverse backgrounds both celebrate and illuminate the vitality and complexity of southwestern nature and literature.

Advancing for the first time the concept of "post-pastoral practice," Reconnecting with John Muir springs from Terry Gifford's understanding of the great naturalist as an exemplar of integrated, environmentally conscious knowing and writing. Just as the discourses of science and the arts were closer in Muir's day--in part, arguably, because of Muir--it is time we learned from ecology to recognize how integrated our own lives are as readers, students, scholars, teachers, and writers. When we defy the institutional separations, purposely straying from narrow career tracks, the activities of reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing can inform each other in a holistic "post-pastoral" professional practice. Healing the separations of culture and nature represents the next way forward from the current crossroads in the now established field of ecocriticism. The mountain environment provides a common ground for the diverse modes of engagement and mediation Gifford discusses. By attempting to understand the meaning of Muir's assertion that "going to the mountains is going home," Gifford points us toward a practice of integrated reading, scholarship, teaching, and writing that is adequate to our environmental crisis.