INDIAN CREEK CHRONICLES: A Winter Alone in...

INDIAN CREEK CHRONICLES: A Winter Alone in the Wilderness by Pete Fromm (St. Martin’s Press: $10.95; 184 pp.). Fromm took a leave from college to guard 2.5 million salmon eggs in Idaho because the job offered him a chance to live out his fantasy of being a 19th-Century mountain man. This expanded journal recounts his often painful efforts to hone his skills as an outdoorsman. Subzero weather provided valuable lessons in survival tactics, but the days spent alone provided more valuable insights into his beliefs about nature. (Four years later, he learned that fewer than 20 fish from those 2.5 million eggs returned to Indian Creek to spawn.) Also the author of the short-story collection “The Tall Uncut,” Fromm takes his place among the most promising young writers chronicling the changing perceptions and realities of the American West.