If you want to write a novel set in the past, I have a primer for you. Ivan Doig's novel of life in Montana in 1939, “English Creek,” is a carefully crafted bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story of Jick McCaskill, 14, son of a forest ranger in north-northwest Montana, near Glacier National Park.

The story is simple. It is a summer in the life of Jick, when he learns how his father got the job as overseer of the Two Medicine National Forest, how English Creek got its name and how success in fighting a fire can come from trust.

Jick also lives part of the life of a forest ranger, checking sheep grazers within the forest with Stanley Meixell in June, and helping in late August to fight a fire that threatens to run away for several weeks unless it is stopped early.

In between, we learn that the Depression has whittled away the number of ranches, both sheep and cattle, in Two Medicine country, many gobbled up by Wendell Williamson of the Double W cattle ranch. Change has come to Two Medicine through economics and more change will come from World War II, just over the horizon.

In all of this is a marvelous evocation of the land of the Two Medicine country of Montana. We feel the climb of Jick and Stanley as they go along Roman Reef, an uplift block, into sheep country. We can read about the spacing of the ranches and realize after awhile from the narration that an inch on the inscribed map may be 10 miles or so.

The dust and pleasure from a local rodeo coats our faces. We can smell the trout frying on a campfire after being dipped in batter. The heat from the book-ending forest fire threatens us as much as it does the book's characters.

The land is large. The people are regular. Jick is young and growing up.

In the “Acknowledgements” of “English Creek,” after the story is over, we learn that the town of Gros Ventre is a fictional substitution for Dupuyer, Mont., and only the location exists. Ivan Doig also tells which characters are real, a few, and which are fictional, most.

Dupuyer's real pioneers are somewhere in “English Creek,” but English Creek does not exist. Jick's mother gives a history of and a lament for the old English Creek settlement in a Fourth of July speech, part of which Doig cribbed from an article written for the Works Progress Administration during the Depression.

This melding of the real with Doig's story is only apparent when you read the “Acknowledgements.” Until then, the story of the McCaskills is a simple story of a family trying to survive during the Great Depression and of a boy growing up.

Doig spent three years traveling through the real Two Medicines county, talking to the survivors of the Depression still there and inhabiting the libraries and historical societies for information that became his “English Creek.” It is obvious that even Doig was surprised how the novel came together from his research. He had a location; he then needed a family and story to fit.

Some merit can come from a comparison of “English Creek” with a more recent book, due out in July, also set in the Pacific Northwest. “Why is Crater Lake So Blue?” by Michael LaLumiere is also a growing up story, where, in 1975, Sam Hunter has a summer job at Crater Lake and finds himself embroiled in a mystery regarding a polluted water supply at the famous national park.

Someone once said we all have a novel in us, and, I must add, it is usually an autobiography of some sort or another. “Why is Crater Lake So Blue?” is LaLumiere's semi-autobiographical tale. LaLumiere, however, has a story in a particularly scenic place, but the place is secondary. What is strangely missing from this book is a graphic realization of the beauty of Crater Lake.

Where Doig, admittedly a more famous novelist than LaLumiere, is able to describe the Two Medicines country in a way the land becomes a character within his book, LaLumiere leans on the public perception of the lake for his descriptions, and they become flat. Crater Lake is always there in the background, but sometimes it seems that the events described could have happened at any national park with rangers and a suspect water supply.

That is not the case with “English Creek.” I found myself referring again and again to the map to make sure I understood exactly where the characters were within the Two Medicines country. The country is luminescent, and we feel the pain of the characters when the forest fire threatens to scorch it bare.

Jick McCaskill is on his way to growing up after the summer on 1939. Pearl Harbor occurs after and the world changes forever. Jick can't go back again, but he later realizes that he had gained at least “one truth” that summer. That is more than most of us get.

Ralph Mohr taught English and Latin at Marshfield High School for 31 years. He welcomes comments and suggestions regarding the column at rmohr1565@charter.net.