High Country
by Willard Wyman, 160 Pages, hardcover $24.95: University of Oklahoma Press, September 2005.

If by now you've tired of the summer-reading crop of spy thrillers and cheesy romances, try this Depression-era novel about a boy, Ty Hardin, who leaves the family ranch in Montana to become a mulepacker. After being wounded in World War II, Hardin finds healing in the Sierra Nevada. The author has spent more than 40 years wrangling, guiding and packing -- and you just may catch a whiff of sage and leather amid summertime's Coppertone and chlorine.