Out front in the higgledy-piggledy collection of wooden buildings that make up Roland and Jane Cheek's home are a mountain of hay and a pick-up truck. We drive out back and spread bundles of the hay in a circle, so that no one horse can take more than its fair share. BJ and Rocky move stolidly up to the food. Cricket picks up his little hooves with the precision of a clockwork toy and just gallops, chestnut mane flying free, the snow-covered mountains of the Rockies behind him.
Jane and Roland are self-publishers, who have now printed and distributed four of Roland's books about the outdoor life. They live on a farm off the highway between Kalispell and Columbia Falls in the Flathead Valley of Montana. In the valley itself, the land is dead flat and famous for its fruit trees and for its mint. In the summer, herds of tourists invade the area, flocking around Flathead Lake for sailing and fishing.
But the real pull of this place is beyond the valley, in the mountains of the Bob Marshall Wilderness and Glacier National Park. Here, there are huge stretches of the sort of scenery that calendar photographers sabotage each other's equipment for. Here there is space and crashing water and the smell of the forest and clear Montana skies.
I first met Roland and Jane a couple of years ago. I'd been writing a story about a B24 bomber that crashed over Gairloch in Scotland in 1945. The war in Europe was over for the men in the plane and they were not joining US forces in the Pacific. They were going home for good.
Their plane crashed in Wester Ross, in a place they call the Fairy Lochs. They all died, men with funny American names from places such as Kansas and Iowa and Wisconsin. Roland Cheek was the younger brother of one of those men, Hillburn Cheek, the engineer. Hillburn was a big, tough farm boy who could turn his hand to anything mechanical.
To the eight-year-old Roland, he was an adored big brother, who gave him a love of and respect for nature that have shaped his whole life. Hillburn taught him about fishing and hunting deer and showed him bear tracks near their home in Oregon. He was more than just a sportsman. He loved the animals round them and thought about their future long before the green movement popped up.
When Roland married Jane and moved to Montana to work at the Columbia Falls timber plant, he still hankered after the outdoor life his brother had shown him. After some years, he left his well-paid job and became an outfitter. Nothing to do with gentlemen's tailoring but taking parties into the wilderness during the hunting season. The elk head in Roland's study is proof of his expertise, although he says it's years since he killed one.
They had 15 years of it, till the punishingly hard work and financial instability took its toll. By that time, Roland had begun to make a living from writing columns and doing radio broadcasts about the outdoor life. Now he and Jane travel about for several months of the year, doing signings and selling his books all over the West. They have a camper van with pink plush seats that fold down into a bed. "You never sell as many books as you'd like, but it's enough to be independent," says Roland.
We go for a walk one afternoon to a local trail near Teakettle Mountain, which you can see from the Cheeks' house. The trail leads us uphill, past clumps of creamy little pearls called snowberries and through fine woods of mountain maple, tamarack and silver birch. The tamarack is a deciduous conifer, and Roland says that when the needles drop it's like walking through a shower of golden rain.
The following morning, we go into Kalispell. Like many American small towns, Kalispell is spread out over what seems to a European to be an unnecessarily large area. "We're profligate with our space," observes Roland, a keen conservationist.
Later, we drive up to Glacier Park, stopping on the way at the Hungry Horse Dam, which sends power down through 17 smaller dams into Nevada. It was the fourth largest dam in the world when it was built. "It destroyed the scenery round here," says Roland. "There used to be meadows and valleys. It was really pretty." He shakes his head. "Just so that Las Vegas can have neon lights."
At Glacier Park, we walk through the forest to the McDonald River, a forest that has been here more than 1,000 years. There are spruces, which have a little sting when you touch the needles, and Douglas firs, which are soft. When they grow to maturity, there's only a small clump of foliage at the top, which makes them look like strange forest palms. Deeper into the forest are scores of hemlock trees, with tracery dripping from them like the cobwebs on Miss Havisham's wedding cake.
Roland points out deer tracks on the trail and lacerations on many of the tree trunks, the bark hanging off in strips. Cougars have been using the trees as scratching posts to display their sexual prowess to the females. They cover a vast amount of land, 10 miles in one direction and 10 or 15 in the other. Then, after they have finally come together with a female, they go off alone again.
We stand in the heart of the forest, listening, but there is no padded footfall behind. Everything is still, till you look up and see the tops of the trees swaying in a breeze that does not penetrate the lower reaches of the forest. There is no silence here either, with the drilling of woodpeckers and the rush of the river a few hundred yards on.
It's so cold that part of the highway has been closed off, white with frozen snow. We head back to the car and round to McDonald Lake. There, drinking coffee, Roland says there's something religious about writing, the responsibility you have to tell the truth. Looking across the waters of the lake, at the snowy hills on the other side, I think there's nothing more religious than being here.
The practicals
STA (0870 1606070) has return flights to Montana for £259 plus £51 tax with Northwest Airlines. Departures from London, Manchester and Edinburgh. Hoteldesk (0845 6021532) has 18 hotels in Montana. Days Inn, Kalispell $69; Ramada Billings $70; Ramada Butte $70; based on two sharing per night.
