Central Kansas Library System

Eleven-year-old Eldon, growing up on a northern Minnesota farm describes the scenes around him and recounts his old Norwegian uncle's tales of an almost mythological logging past.

A town boy sent to live on a remote wilderness farm forms a friendship with an elderly, disfigured man who teaches him many things.

Things get out of hand when a stockbroker neighbor convinces a twelve-year-old boy to expand his summer lawn mowing business.

Carley recalls the extraordinary summer when, as a troubled fourteen-year-old, he first came to northern Minnesota to stay with his blacksmith Uncle David and gained not only new skills but also a new sense of himself.

Takes you through the seasons, from the incredible taste of a spring fish fresh from the smokehouse, to the first sight of the first deer, to the peace of winter days spent dreaming by the stove in a fishhouse on the ice. Shows fishing and hunting as pleasure, art, companionship, and as sources of life's deepest lessons.

As winter progresses, the strange man in the worn flight jacket dances frequently on the ice of the rink, expressing more with his movements than most people do with words.