Hemingway Adventure

Big Sky, Montana

An hour later, having tapped in to the Great American Breakfast, we start back to Bozeman. The hunting party has forded the white waters of the Gallatin River and is clambering slowly up the steep, snow-slippery hill on the far bank. I feel a nagging envy. I’d go with them like a shot if I didn’t have to kill an elk.

Back at the motel, where meat we haven’t killed is being prepared for our dinner, I pick up a copy of a local Sunday paper - the Billings Gazette. The ghost of Ernest flutters out of its pages. Inside the paper is a long feature on Dr Louis Allard, one of Billings’ greatest medical men, and the doctor who operated on Hemingway’s broken arm sixty-eight years ago, after the accident that brought Archie MacLeish out to Montana to see him. There is Ernest, arm in plaster and a big bandage around him, looking bashful and, as he tended to do when injured, a little pleased with himself.

Later, as I’m about to settle down to sleep, I hear a sound which conveys better than anything in nature the sense of these wide, wild spaces. It’s the long, low wail of a passing freight train. As the mournful sound dies away, I pick up a collection of stories about Montana. It’s called The Last Best Place.

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PALIN'S GUIDES

Series: Hemingway Adventure
Chapter: Big Sky, Montana
Country/sea: USA
Place: Big Sky, Montana
Book page no: 239

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Hemingway Adventure

Big Sky, Montana

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