In The Country He Loved

Van Guilder was also a devoted sportsman, but his love of hunting would bring him to a tragic end. Six weeks after Hemingway's arrival. Van Guilder was accidentally shot and killed while jump-shooting ducks from a canoe. He'd been in the bow, the only place from which one may safely shoot in a canoe, and there was another Sun Valley employee in the rear. When a flock of ducks ahead of the canoe took flight, both men aimed their shotguns, the canoe lurched and Van Guilder was fatally shot through the back.

Nin Van Guilder, the young widow (who would later marry the man who accidentally killed her husband), asked Hemingway to say a few words at Gene's funeral. He obliged, and what he wrote of Van Guilder—a portion of which appears at the beginning of this article—eventually came to express his own feelings for Idaho. Hemingway is buried in Ketchum, two graves away from Van Guilder's, and the inscription on the Hemingway Memorial, situated on a lovely spot overlooking Trail Creek, is taken from the eulogy he read that day. Here's how it ends:

"Best of all he loved the fall. He told me that the other night riding home in the car from pheasant hunting, the fall with the tawny and grey, the leaves yellow on the cottonwoods, leaves floating on the trout streams and above the hills the high blue windless skies. He loved to shoot, he loved to ride, and he loved to fish.

"Now those are all finished. But the hills remain. Now Gene has gotten through with that thing we all have to do. His dying in his youth was a great injustice. There are not words to describe how unjust is the death of a young man. But he has finished something that we all must do.

"And now he has come home to the hills. He has come back now to rest well in the country that he loved through all the seasons. He will be here in the winter and in the spring and in the summer, and in the fall. In all the seasons there will ever be. He has come back to the hills that he loved and now he will be a part of them forever."

Hemingway, too, came back. In the falls of 1940, '41, '46, '47, '48, then again from 1958 until he ended his life on July 2, 1961. And now, of course, for every fall that will ever be.

We had no shortage of guns that first morning. Chuck Webb, assistant manager of Sun Valley, was along, as were Lou Black, a fishing pal of Jack's from Michigan, and Dave Baldridge, a former Sun Valley ski patrolman who now works for the Professional Cowboys Association. On the way, we also stopped to pick up our guide, Fred Arbona Jr., who lives in Hailey, the birthplace of Ezra Pound. Our hunting party was rounded out by two dogs: Fred's 15-month-old black-and-white ticked Llwellin (English) setter, Rickey (full name, Cedric of Silver Creek) and Jack's 3-year-old liver-and-white Brittany spaniel, Basil of Fox Creek.

If you use a little imagination and are willing to work," Jack told us, "you can still get all the hunting and fishing in the world out here. Right behind my house you can go 100 miles in one direction and only cross one improved road."

The key phrase in all that was "willing to work." The last thing Jack had told me by phone as I made my arrangements to visit Sun Valley was to be sure to be in shape before coming out, because we'd be doing some walking. (He'd said nothing about loading up on carbohydrates.) I'd bought new hunting boots for the occasion and, while pretending to inspect the dry, desolate ranchland through which we were driving, I listened in alarm to the squabble going on between the tongue of my left Wolverine and my entrapped instep. Forty-five minutes southwest of Hailey, we turned onto a gravel road that wound up a creek bed, and halfway up the valley we pulled over. Jack split us into two groups. He, Chuck, Lou and I crossed the creek bed there and worked up it. The others drove a mile farther and worked down. We hunted a steep, sagebrush-studded slope that was broken up by a series of aspen-filled draws, each flowing down the hillside like a river of gold. It was the first week in October, and the aspen leaves were at their peak, brilliant against hillsides so barren that Ernest Hemingway had compared them to brown velvet. Forest grouse often roost in those aspens, feeding on the juniper bushes and choke-cherry trees that grow among them and on the red ants that make their mounds among the sage.

We picked our way up the slope. The ground was coarse, crumbly lava, and the sagebrush made the hillside an obstacle course. It took half an hour to reach the first stand of aspen, in which a herd of cattle grazed. The air was cool and dry and thin.