John Holt tells us, "It's now been more than fifty years that I've been fishing, and roaming and loving Montana and the rest of the northern high plains. Lines on maps don't mean a damn thing to good country or to me. Montana flows into Alberta and British Columbia and Wyoming. The western Dakotas are the same place as Eastern Montana only with different names. Land is connected, not defined by human limitations. I first thought of writing and compiling this book while working a stream that wound through a brushy, tall-grass valley at the base of the Pryor Mountains last summer. Wild rainbows fought for the chance to engulf the Elk Hair caddis I was using. Beautiful healthy, small, colorful fish. Early afternoon was now sunset, the hours passing in an instant. And this made me remember the first trip to Montana in the sixties and the intervening hundreds of thousands (come to think of it. maybe more than a million) of miles I've wandered checking good, bad and indifferent water hanging out in serene isolation all over the place during the past half century. That time also passing in an instant that also at times seemed eternal." Edward Squires (Not Quite Novellas) calls it, "The best book about fly fishing since A River Runs Through It. Makes me dream of rainbow trout and cold streams and remote wilderness landscapes …"
