Veteran outdoorsman Slim Randles shares some forty years of amazing experiences in this collection of articles, stories, and even some poems about backcountry encounters between man and nature. Randles has been a guide and a mule packer, a fisherman and a newspaperman, in California, Alaska, and New Mexico, places whose breathtaking beauty is everywhere in his writings. Sometimes Slim and his various companions encounter animals most of us would just as soon avoid: moose, bears, cougars, skunks, and worst of all, wolverines. Sometimes he helps the reader sense the ghosts of history in the Wild West, and sometimes he recounts tall tales, like the story of the Alaska trapper who ate a bear with its own teeth.Always he blends reverence for nature with a highly developed sense of humor, usually poking fun at his own misadventures with horses, fish, and women. His tales are impossible not to enjoy.