WEST ON WATER

IN 1934, A 14-YEAR-OLD EAGLE SCOUT NAMED LES AVERILL headed into the backcountry near the tiny Montana town of Somers on the north shore of Flathead Lake for a 30-mile wilderness adventure — alone. He carried no food, just a few provisions including a .22 pistol, fishing line, rope, blanket, frying pan, flint, and steel.

Over the course of a week, he crossed the Swan Range, feeding himself by catching trout and killing grouse with a slingshot and stones. Wary of bear, he fashioned beds high in trees, tying himself to branches so that he wouldn’t fall out while he slept.

It’s the kind of story that’s hard to imagine in our digitally managed times, one that required the kind of parental “neglect” that’d nowadays inspire anonymous calls to Family Services.

“The third day I saw more game than any other time during the trip,” he later recounted in To Build a Dream: The Story of Montana’s Les Averill by Rick and Susie Graetz. “I watched a black bear catch fish from a bank along the river and saw a herd of elk on a mountainside. Further up the trail a coyote ran in front of me. Later that afternoon a big buck deer watched me as I was hiking. And that evening I observed mountain goats at play on a ledge.”