I enjoyed the story mostly because it reminded me of being in the mountains which is a place I always feel very relaxed and free. On page 131 Maclean writes "ascending in triangles to the sky and descending in ovals and circles to an oval meadow and an oval lake with a moose knee-deep beside lily pads. It was triangles going up and ovals coming down, and on the divide it was springtime in August." That description sounds almost the way a painter would describe mountains and valleys, breaking everything down into shape like it would be if it were to be translated 2D.
Another part that really stuck in my head was something that I am very familiar with, Maclean says on page 148, "I don't need to tell you how a rattlesnake sounds-- you can't mistake one. Sometimes you can think that a big winged grasshopper is a rattlesnake but you never think that a rattlesnake is anything else." This is so true and once you walk up on a snake coiled up with its head up you will be amazed at how far back you will jump. Spending lots of time in the mountains and out in the desert the only things that you really have to be worried about are the few animals that pose a true threat, snakes, and bears. That seemed to be our narrators only 2 true worries through most of his stay in the woods and I thought that was kinda funny.
The story seemed to follow the pace of the woods when he was away from town but as he walked closer and the journey got more intense the story picked up a quicker pace till the fight for the pot of money in the Oxford, and just like that it seemed over too fast and without much climax, I felt like I assumed the narrator was feeling minus the pain from a beating.
Over all I was given a great sense of place that I could really relate to and it made for a pretty good connection with the story and the characters.
