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.