"Here are mountain men, trappers, truck drivers, yarn-spinners and grizzly attach survivors; a gallery of aromatic wilderness humanity, sketched with such deft, unsentimental directness as to be prose equivalents of black-and-white Polaroids...Early in the Season is an extraordinarily find little book, required reading for anyone who wonders what writing can do or whether it's possible to visit the same place twice."

"Hoagland writes with a keen eye for flora and fauna, and an even keener ear for rustic hyperbole: one old sourdough recounts how pioneering winters were so cold 'the smoke from the chimney had frozen into a pillar towering in the air, and they'd chopped that down and sawed it up and built a house out of the blocks, a real "smokehouse".' Nobody tells stories like that anymore...We're lucky, then, that those myths live on in this book."

"The story of a place is written not only by those who live there, but also by outsiders savvy enough to let us to see ourselves with new eyes. British Columbia could not ask for a better witness than Edward Hoagland: blunt, spontaneous, dreamy, worldly, randy, adoring, unflinching. And here his voice is as clear as could be; Early in the Season is a true journal, hot from the mind and onto the page. It will send you out into the unloved country, the wilderness that still shapes us, if only to prove him right or wrong."