“The Clark’s Fork Valley, Wyoming” by Ernest Hemingway

 

Then there was the winter; the trees bare now, the snow blowing so you could not see, the saddle wet, then frozen as you came downhill, breaking a trail through the snow, trying to keep your legs moving, and the sharp, warming taste of whiskey when you hit the ranch and changed your clothes in front of the big open fireplace. It's a good country.

Here we have something a little different. Not a novel or short-story, or even fiction for that matter.

We have an essay by the inestimable Hemingway that he offered for a 1939 issue of Vogue magazine. [Clearly a different periodical in his day.]

The essay is short but vivid with his telegraph-brief style.

It shows a true love of place.

A love that abides in many of the best works of Westerners.

Brief but beautiful.