WHEN LESLIE visited Montana in 1969, he felt less a tourist from the East
than a native returning home. Ironically, he had never known that feeling of
belonging when he lived in Missoula. He was struck first by the surface famil-
iarity. Little had changed in either the natural or man-made landscape. His ob-
servations in “Montana; or the End of Jean-Jacques Rousseau” seemed as dis-
concertingly true as they had when he made them twenty years earlier: “There
were the same wooden faces under the broad-brimmed Stetsons and the bright
colored headscarves bulging over half-concealed curlers” (CE, 2:338). The only
innovation seemed to be the newly acquired fad among teenage boys to run
coyotes down with their motorcycles.

A few of the old structures were gone: “a new bridge replacing an old one
from which a friend once nearly jumped to her death; a new highway scar-
ring the side of a hill where my two oldest boys at five or six or seven used
to play among poisonous ticks for which we would search the hairline at the
back of their necks just before bedtime” (338). What Leslie would have liked
best “would have been a trip to the Buffalo Preserve at Moiese and a last en-
counter with the old albino bull, into whose unreadable blear eyes I used to
look through the wire fence, feeling myself each time I returned a little more
like that totem beast—a little shaggier, a little heavier, a little whiter” (339).
But in the critic's absence, the beast had died.

The school hadn't changed much, although it was now called the Univer-
sity of Montana. Leslie found himself “looking up at the `M' made of white-
washed stones on the side of Mount Sentinel, and wondering who had won
the five dollar prize this year for suggesting `the best new tradition' ” (339).
The house where he used to live was still owned by the Unitarian Fellowship.
He was pleased to discover that they had faithfully retained the four-toed foot
that he and his boys had painted on the fence as their family emblem. Whether
it continued to bug the neighbors as it had in his own time would have to
be a question for another day. Intent on finding the Missoula he most fondly

-192-