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Rick Bass, a Texas native, lived in Arkansas and Mississippi before moving to northwest Montana’s Yaak Valley. A former petroleum geologist and wildlife biologist, he is the author of more than thirty books, including the short story collections The Watch and For a Little While; the memoir Colter: The True Story of the Best Dog I Ever Had; and the novel All the Land to Hold Us. An active environmentalist, Bass is a member of the Yaak Valley Forest Council, working to protect as wilderness the last roadless lands in the Yaak Valley.

Writing in October

An Essay

by Rick Bass

The snow will be here any day now. One year eight inches of it fell on the sixteenth of October, and we didn’t see bare ground again until May. Another year, on the opening day of deer season—the twenty-sixth—it was twenty-six degrees below zero.

Usually it comes slowly, though, in the form of valley rain and fog and mist, the blue-sky days ebbing, and with the highest tops of the mountains receiving an inch or two of rain, rain, rain, soaking and then saturating the summer- and autumn-parched soil so that in the spring, water will be available to newly emergent plants even before all the snow has melted. Tucking the earth into bed for the long sleep, is how I think of it: taking care of everything.

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