Errata

I got the softcover and hardcover printer's copies of "The Leather Man" yesterday, and that should have been a joyful occasion. It amounted to half of one.

The hardcover book and dust jacket were perfect, but there was an ink smudge on the first (title) page of the softcover book, meaning I have to call Archway today and then, presumably, wait for the publisher to fix the printing error and tack on another six business days (the shipping time for the new books) to get a perfect softcover copy to approve.

The thought bummed me out too much to work on another long post, so I'm going to implement an idea I had a week ago and give what I consider to be the best-written or otherwise most outstanding excerpt from the Prologue. After that I'll provide one excerpt daily from each of the book's 55 chapters, explaining what I like or think is important about the passage cited, and interrupting the sequence whenever I see the need to touch upon a different subject for a day.

"The Leather Man" begins along the Snake River, and ends for all intents and purposes, at a different point along the same river. Ergo, the Prologue, only a page and a half long, has to sound a note that will resound in the reader's mind at the end. That's why I consider the final sentence of the second Bullet Point and the final paragraph paramount in importance _ they shift attention from natural history to a bungalow along one of Idaho's beautiful rivers where a Canyon State football standout spent his formative years:

• ... Fish as brilliant as the birth of a galaxy and cold as the distance between stars fill the Salmon and its tributaries in a banquet of taste and vision that could not help but attractor predators, including Man.

The abundance of just such clear and icy water and the magnificent fish which find sanctuary therein brought Joseph Xavier Talty to the valley of the Lemhi, a tributary of the Salmon, when he retired as a heavy equipment operator. After years of being serenaded by diesel engines and hammered by dynamite blasts, the dam builder somewhat oddly found himself compelled to live near a free-flowing stream in the shade of aspens and cottonwoods behind a pioneer fence that kept his small herd of Black Angus cattle in and passers-by out.

                                                                      -30-