About the Author

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     I grew up in a small town in the middle of the Colorado Rockies. I fished and hunted and rode horses over Saddleback Pass to fish the upper Frying Pan River.  Up there, Colorado was Colorado, then.  You could catch a hundred fish a day, if you wanted to.  The deer would walk into camp, look around, shrug their shoulders, and walk on down to the lake.  The Coloradoans were Coloradoans in those days, too.  We took this sheepherder and his dogs along once. We were drinking coffee around the campfire and one of his dogs came up and put his foot in the sheepherder's coffee cup.  The sheepherder reached down, grabbed the dogs foot took it out of his coffee, set the foot down, then picked up his coffee and drank it.   Loaned us some good horses, though.

      I remember being a real little kid riding with Daddy when he was feeding his cows on the Hayden ranch.   He would open one corner of the bag of oats, half-open open the pickup door, hang the bag outside, and drive along scattering oats with one hand and steering with the other. One time he got stuck and couldn't dig out.  He told me to wait there and, in a little while, here came Mommy in the other car.  What excitement!

      I graduated from a couple colleges, Reed and the University of Oregon, and got a job as a professional diver, a marine biologist. We counted things or caught them:  fish, sea fans, kelp, rocks, and mud.  I learned about attending to business when the claw of the sea puss was hovering around my hind end.  We used to put lines of 50 shark hooks inside the surf line to catch shovelnose sharks for research.  You had to sit in the skiff and wait for a chance, then run in and set the lines before a big wave threw the boat, together with a tangle of shark hooks, shark lines, anchors, and weights, on top of us.  Once I was about to pull the line and looked up and saw a huge wall of water coming.  I remained calm and said calmly to the kid running the motor, "Point the boat toward the open sea and go that way." 

     And he said, "Hunh?"

     Then I realized that calm had its drawbacks and did my D. Duck impression, "Go that way, go that way, go that way fast.  Wak, wak, wak, wak !!!!!!!"

Just before a wave breaks, it throws up a little spray.  We went over three of them before we got outside.  After a while, we went back in and pulled the lines.  Got enough sharks to go on with. 

     I taught college for a while because when a diver gets old and decrepit and can't do his job any more, they fire him.  The very reverse is true for a teacher. Recently, I decided to take a break from teaching for a while and write a book or two. I have had an awful lot of fun looking up things that were said and done in the Old West and working them into my story. I hope and expect you will have fun reading it.