One day I left the South, fled my job, and ran to the heart of snow, the far Northwest. I live in a cabin with no electricity, and I’m never leaving.

These words that open “The Valley”—one of ten short stories that make up Rick Bass’s new collection entitled In the Loyal Mountains—also trace the broad outline of the author’s own relationships with place. Born in Fort Worth, Texas, he grew up in Houston, spent time with his family in the hill country of central Texas, and attended college at Utah State University. He then worked and lived in the South before his 1987 move, with the artist Elizabeth Hughes, to a large ranch in the Yaak Valley in northwestern Montana. Bass’s literary exploration of these places begins with The Deer Pasture (1984), a memoir of his family’s deer lease in the Texas hill country, and continues through a rich variety of literary nonfiction that includes Wild to the Heart (1987), Oil Notes (1989), Winter: Notes from Montana (1991), and The Ninemile Wolves (1992), and through the ten short stories collected in The Watch (1989) and the three novellas in Platte River (1994).

The move to the Rocky Mountain West is a point of fulcrum for Bass’ literary nonfiction. Winter, The Ninemile Wolves, a forthcoming book about grizzlies, and his environmental essays in recent issues of Sierra and Audubon magazines trace the depth of Bass’s engagement with the landscapes of the West, the creatures who inhabit, try to inhabit, or once inhabited them, and the need to protect both the animals and the land. It is clear that with the move, Bass’s nonfiction began to feature a tough-minded environmentalism that has made his voice one of the most important of those contemporary western writers who work to conserve the land. His recent nonfiction urges us to cherish and protect what remains of our western wilderness landscapes.

His short fiction, however, ranges more widely. The Yaak Valley is featured, but so are the past and present landscapes of Houston, the Texas hill country that he knew as a young man, and the landscapes of that part of the South—the area around Jackson, Mississippi—where he lived before the move west. Even as the places features in In the Loyal Mountains vary, we can see that Bass’s interest in depicting and protecting the wilderness of the Rocky Mountain West is paralleled by the way his imagination works with places in other parts of the West and in the South. The result is a significant contribution to the growing body of ecofiction. As these original and powerful stories come together to make an important book, they provide us with a complex and moving look at how Rick Bass envisions the power(s) of place.

Two of these stories express Bass’s love for and his fears for the Yaak Valley. “The Valley” celebrates the remote beauty of the northern Montana landscape, the idiosyncrasies of the individuals who survive there, the folklore of the valley, and the fragile, rough-hewn sense of community put together by people struggling to survive in rough country. The narrator tells about the need to rope one’s waist to the cabin door for guidance during snowstorms because: “There is some compass in all of us that does not want to walk a straight line.” He celebrates the eccentricities of residents like Jody Micheals who has her own way of deciding which of the runaway dogs that come there will survive, like Joe, owner of the Dirty Shame saloon, who sounds a World War Two air raid siren whenever a road kill barbeque is ready, and like Mr. Tenjaney who electrocuted himself with his electric accordion while trying to balance an open beer can on it as he also tried to play it and dance at the same time.

This sketch also includes a rendition of the area’s two separate cemeteries, one for characters, presumably all male, like “the hermit” and like “Piss-Fir Jim, Windy Joe Griff and Solo Dog Thompson” who settled in this area in the early days, and another, more mysterious one with women’s pictures inset in the gravestones and with no indication of how the women or their gravestones got there. This tribute to the valley ends with the Rick Bass-like narrator expressing his own joy in this “beautiful valley,” his expectation that he has “all my days left to live in this place,” and his comfort in that moment at dusk when felt community becomes visible in the lights of his friends’ cabins.

“Days of Heaven,” the most overtly environmental piece in this book, focuses on the threats to this valley’s future. It features the caretaker of a large ranch in northwestern Montana who wants to resist the development impulses of a new owner and his realtor friend, and it plunges into the development issue in its opening sentence: “Their plans were to develop the valley, and my plans were to stop them.” The would-be developers are Quentin, a stock analyst from New York, and Zim, a realtor from Billings. Their schemes for bulldozing the meadow, putting in the lake, damming the lake for electric power, erecting pre-fab cabins around the lake, bringing in cattle, and setting up a gold-mine operation read like a compendium of developers’ vices.

The inability of these men to conceive of any, even a rudimentary, ethos of place is clear. The caretaker’s attempts to halt them are limited, however. When Zim rushes into the meadow to kill a baby coyote with a stick of firewood, the narrator worries about “how narrow the boundary is between invisibility and collusion,” but he never finds an effective way to resist. By the end of the story, he feels that all he can do is wait. “Maybe, I thought, if I sit very still, they will just go away.”

When the stories shift to the landscapes of Texas, the concern with wild places remains, but it often unfolds in the context of urbanization and its effect on the power of place. These stories explore relationships between the city and nature, looking at the prospects for co-existence and at the ways in which urban dwellers can connect with place and with the wild. In “Swamp Boy,” the most intensely urban of these Houston city stories, the plot framework is familiar and basic: a now older narrator begins by looking back on “a kid we used to beat up in elementary school.” Rick Bass’s development of this basic idea, however, creates a highly original story. Like “In the Loyal Mountains” and “The History of Rodney,’ “Swamp Boy” is one of the showcase stories in this collection, an example of just how good Rick Bass’s short fiction has become.

The Swamp Boy is a fat boy who has no friends and thick glasses, but who does have strong ties to the bayou and the old woods that are still present in his family’s Houston neighborhood. His story occurs “there in the sixties at the edge of that throbbing, expanding city, Houston” at a time when his neighborhood still had “a broad band of tall grass prairie—waist high, bending gently.” Swamp Boy walks into the woods each day searching out berries and picking blossoms that he tosses out on the pond called Hidden Lake. These walks are far from idyllic, however. The neighborhood bullies follow him every day, and about once a week they attack him “like jackals, like soul scavengers,” stringing him upside down from trees and letting him hang there until his weight pulls him free. Swamp Boy refuses to stop his walks. He goes into the woods to study the wriggling life of the swamp, and it becomes clear that he gains a strength from nature that helps him wear down the bullies.

Interwoven with this narrative are references to the narrator’s developing distance from the bullies and growing identification with Swamp Boy and with nature. His own heart beats stronger than ever before. “Not faster, just stronger. … It was as if I had stopped living and breathing and it was the beat of the earth’s heart in my chest [as] I lay very still, as if pinned to the earth by a magnet.” This powerful connection enables the narrator to reconstruct imaginatively the natural history of this place. He envisions the buffaloes that once inhabited this spot, and he can see the wolves at work trying to cut the weak ones out of the herd.

By the end of the story, the storyteller has revealed that he was not, after all, just one of the bullies: he was also the Swamp Boy who could feel “lives and stories, meaningful things, stirring in the soil beneath my feet.” Now, the woods are gone, “buried by so many tons of houses and roads,” and he works in advertising at the top of a steel and glass city skyscraper where he sometimes “feels as if I’ve become the giant building in which I work—that it is my shell, my exoskeleton, like the sea shell in which a fiddler crab lives, hauling it around for the rest of his days.” It is a bleak picture, but finally not a hopeless one. Swamp Boy’s story testifies to the power of place to persist in memory and to the power of nature to flourish even in the face of massive urbanization.

Bass’s exploration of the “high rise jails” of the city takes a different form in “The Wait.” In this story, the narrator returns from Montana to fish Galveston Bay with his old friend Kirby and Kirby’s buddy Jack. As these three men in a boat find fish and scorn those other fishermen who trail them, they also voice their fears that domesticity brings an end to wildness. Kirby, for example, protests that even though he is now married and a father, he is “still a wild sonofabitch,” as much an outlaw as his unmarried friend from Montana. His friend, meanwhile, is sad about his separation from his girlfriend. In a conclusion that captures perfectly these tensions between wildness and domesticity, nature and urbanity, Jack opens a small metal box that he has brought from home, and “A small coyote about the size of a collie shoots out without looking back and begins running … directly toward the condominiums and townhouses … as if it knows exactly where it is going.”

“In the Loyal Mountains,” the concluding story, wrestles with similar questions about domesticity and wildness in the land and in people, but it does so by juxtaposing the golf course greenery of the city with the wildness of the hill country. It is a powerful story, one where Bass’s mastery of the short story form intertwines with his passionate, and increasingly complex, presentation of place and people. This is also a family story, one where the narrator—now looking back on events that happened some twenty years ago when he was about seventeen—examines the formation of his own family loyalties. He does this by looking at how he has been educated by his father and his uncle, men who have in turn been shaped by their own loyalties to very different landscapes.

His father is a golfer, a man at home with what the young narrator worried was “a sissy’s game” with “the manicured greens, the caddies, the little electric golf carts, and the natty way of dressing.” His Uncle Zorey’s place, however, is the still wild areas of the Texas hill country. His uncle is an outdoorsman who has never been married and who hunts and fishes alone, supplying pheasant and grouse and fresh fish for the family feasts. Zorey is known in the family for “an enormous appetite and a brute strength; his father’s nickname for him was ‘Animal’.”

What Zorey teaches his young nephew while the parents are gone is a kind of wildness, an outlaw existence rooted in the most remote parts of the hill country. Zorey sets him up with Spanda, a young employee of his. The three of them travel the hill country, taking a truck up “twisting white caliche roads into mountains of cedar and rock and cactus.” As they see roadrunners, deer, hawks, and buzzards, they head “for an obscure range that we knew about, a small chain of mountains in the central part of the state that was not even on the map: the Loyal Mountains.” They drive as far as they can, then walk into a canyon where they all get drunk on Jim Beam; the narrator and Spanda swim naked in a pool underneath a waterfall while Zorey sings and shoots at the boulders.

When news comes to the family that Zorey, the embodiment of the outdoorsman and the wild outlaw life, has committed suicide, the narrator feels that his affiliation with his uncle has betrayed his father. Years later, by the time that he tells this family history, it is clear that his loyalties have shifted away from Zorey. Although he worries because his young son Sam seems to have the strength of Uncle Zorey and is prone to tempers, a tame domesticity seems destined to reign. Whenever the narrator panics about their son’s potential wildness, his wife calms them both by showing him how his son can be soothed: “‘Hold him like this,’ she says, rocking and smiling at me. ‘Like this’.”

“The History of Rodney,” set in the South, is a story profoundly preoccupied with the power of the land. To understand this story and its relation to the multiple explorations of place in In the Loyal Mountains, it is helpful to look at “Crossing Over,” an essay about place and personhood that has not yet been reprinted in book form. In it, Rick Bass provides another perspective on how his story with the land has developed. Where the essays in Wild to the Heart and the story “The Valley” testify to the pull of the mountain wilderness, this speaks to what pushed him away, the absence of wilderness in Texas and in the South. Acknowledging the many landscapes that he loves, “too many homes, and loving all of them,” he speculates on the Texas myths and the nature of Texas that he and his friends learned from the movies; how they expected but did not find: “Space, lack of restraints and borders, possibly Life.”

It took me nearly thirty years to figure out where that place I’d been told was my heritage had really gone—where the last part of it remained—and in so doing, to discover a new heritage, not the cowboy West, but the wilderness West—and I find it no coincidence at all that over sixty percent of my small valley’s population … is also from Texas and Oklahoma.

Much of Bass’s fiction features those who have “been disappointed, back East and in the South.” “The History of Rodney,” however, explores a new possibility for these people and that land: the hope for restoration, for the return of wilderness. The town of Rodney was once a big town, a port town, but all its human activity was changed by a monumental act of nature. When the oxbow broke, the course of the Mississippi River suddenly moved seven miles away. Now, Rodney’s population numbers only a dozen people, some descendants of former slaves, Elizabeth, and the man who lives with her and tells this story.

The landscape testifies to nature’s return. The mud from the old riverbed has given way to lush tall grass and to trees that are “like a jungle” where “loose peafowl scream in the night.” Wild turkeys court on the dusty road, and a wild mother pig, “the size of a small Volkswagen,” sometimes lures dogs into the swamp to kill them. The small settlement is now so far from civilization that the mail from Natchez comes only once a week, and even then the wild pigs chase the mailman’s jeep.

The young couple, who have not done well in cities, flourish in this place, drawing sustenance from a land returning to the wild. A tree grows through the house floor, and the wild pigs root beneath it. A big owl lives part-time in their attic and at night zooms through all three floors of their house, catching mice. Also at night they ride horses into the swamp until they get lost, and they catch fireflies to put in jars around the bed while they make love, then release them unharmed into the night.

The young couple looks to the future, hoping “to make a thing that will last.” By making plans and living them on a land returning to wilderness, they depart substantially from the perspectives on the South and wildness that characterized Bass’s earlier fiction in The Watch. In “The Government Bears” from that collection, for example, the disappointing, diminished wildness of the South is symbolized by the stunted bears that roam the area.

““The History of Rodney” suggests a much more positive perspective. It offers, first of all, the possibility of a place with the power to return to the wild, and thus an important counterbalance to the encroaching development of the West. This also suggests a kind of reversal of the historical process outlines in “Crossing Over,” the possibility that wilderness can be restored. By presenting us with a young couple living comfortably within the context of that restoration, “The History of Rodney”” also suggests that wild country can engender and foster something in people other than a renegade wildness, that wilderness and domesticity can be brought together. This couple, with the tree growing in their house and the owl flying through it, make it clear that what they build will not be achieved through the subjugation of nature, but will be grounded in a different kind of relationship with place. Their choice to inhabit a viable border country, a place that partakes of both the tame and the wild, offers hope that the restoration of wilderness depicted in this story can be supported and sustained.

As the introduction to these stories, “The History of Rodney” also helps to emphasize that there is throughout this collection, despite all of the development threats to the far Northwest and all of the urbanization of Texas, still some larger hope in the power of place. In the Loyal Mountains conveys this hope through its depiction of the powerful beauty and pull of the remote country of the Yaak Valley, the ability of natural places like the swamps and bayous of Houston to persist in memory and to sustain life in spite of intensive urbanization, the power of settled places in the South to return themselves to wildness, and finally from the power of Rick Bass’s stories to embody his loyalty to and invoke our respect for these places.