I like to reserve at least one review each year for a classic Adirondack book. That way I play my part in preserving tradition, and perhaps stimulate a few younger readers to sample more broadly regional literature from the past.

This time I’ve chosen a book of short essays entitled “In The Wilderness,” by Charles Dudley Warner. The author comes highly recommended by any perspective, none more strongly than the knowledge Mark Twain thought of him as a peer. In fact, the two co-authored a long novel called “The Gilded Age.”

This book seems always to stay in print. I’ve read it in multiple editions. The one I used this time, published by Syracuse University Press, offers the advantage of a nice introduction by Alice Gilborn. She explained how chapters of the book were originally published as a series in Atlantic Magazine in 1878 before being collected into a volume. One edition became required reading for any high school students seeking to take the English Regents exam.

Leading off the book is the famous story, “How I Killed a Bear.” It was hearing this humorous, self-deprecatory tale read at a story-telling event years ago that first whet my appetite for information about nineteenth century Adirondack guides and how integral they were to visitors’ experience.

Begun as a blackberry hunt, “the encounter was unpremeditated on both sides. I was not hunting for a bear, and I have no reason to suppose that a bear was looking for me … to save appearances, I took a gun. It adds to the manly aspect of a person with a tin pail if he also carries a gun.” I’ve tried reading this piece aloud myself but always break down in laughter that interrupts the flow. It’s still funny, on what must be well over my twentieth time through the text.

Other tales describe being lost in the woods (“it is almost as easy for a stranger to get lost in the Adirondacks as in Boston”), fishing for trout (“Fishing is like gambling, in that failure only excites hope of a fortunate throw next time … perhaps they didn’t care for the fly. Some trout seem to be so unsophisticated as to prefer the worm.”), and the stalking of a deer from the latter’s perspective. Then there’s camping and hiking. One goal was “Nipple Top … a local name which neither the mountain nor the fastidious tourist is able to shake off,” in essence “a rough and unsocial pile of granite nearly five thousand feet high.”

“A Character Study” profiles famed Keene Valley guide Orson “Mountain” Phelps, a quintessential character who gained considerable notoriety over his career. Some guides, whose fortes were hunting and fishing, were gauged by the number of trophies their clients took home. Phelps was more philosophical in his attitudes toward the mountains and forests.

Warner calls him “not so much a lover of nature … as a part of nature himself … Old Phelps was the discoverer of the beauties and sublimities of the mountains … taken pleasure in the woods for themselves, and climbed mountains solely for the sake of the prospect. He alone understood what was meant by ‘scenery.'”

The final story has nothing to do with the Adirondacks. I have to wonder why Warner chose to include it in the book. (William H. H. “Adirondack” Murray did the same in his classic “Adventures in the Wilderness.”) If I had to fill space to meet, say, a publisher’s demand, I’d at least sandwich the extra story somewhere in the middle, so as to draw less attention!

That’s about the most negative comment I can make about this book. Most pieces are well written and amusing. Yes, there’s some overblown Victorian description, and every now and then Warner’s commentary wouldn’t pass modern political correctness tests. But the situations will resonate with anyone who’s spent time wandering North Country mountains and forest. The more famous stories are absolute musts. A devoted Adirondacker will want this on a handy shelf.