Books: What Mountains Are Good For

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As casually as a campfire tale, Of Men and Mountains rambles through the experiences of scores of camping trips, lingering longest where the trout are thickest. Author Douglas is a passionate advocate of dry-fly fishing, but he knows a quicker way to catch his supper if the trout is lying in moss or under a bank. Procedure: tread softly, bring the hand up cautiously under the fish, stroke him gently, hoist him from the water. "A trout," declares Douglas, "loves to have his belly rubbed."

Bear Oil & Snow Caps. Bear oil is best for frying trout. Better still, boil the fish for a couple of minutes, remove the skin, head and bones, season and butter it, then broil. But Douglas saves his warmest eulogies for blue jays fried in butter: "The best meat I ever had in the hills." He was in a more philosophical mood the day he stood on top of Darling Mountain and felt "a challenge to explore each ridge and valley, to climb each snow-capped peak, to sleep in each high basin, to sample the berries and fish and all the other rich produce of the wilderness."

Of Men and Mountains is laced with a barky hillman's wit and mellowed with one man's humility before mountain grandeur. Mr. Justice Douglas emerges from his chambers as a man who can take the measure of his mountains and write of them with a Thoreau-like freshness.

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TOMMY WARD, whose family has been harvesting oysters from the Gulf of Mexico since the 1920s, on the FDA's plan to ban the sale of raw oysters that are harvested in warm months; about 15 people die each year due to raw-oyster contamination

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