A lot of the imagery for Buddy comes not from the state of Vermont, in which it's set, but from a couple of years I spent as a child in Nelson, British Columbia. For those of you with atlases, curiosity and too much time on your hands, Nelson is located in an area of B.C. called the Kootenays. It's in the southeast corner, in a mountain range called the Selkirks.
This is a picture of my younger brother, Brian, taken during the winter of 1953. The puppy was named Penny and finished up rather sadly the following summer. To say what happened would be to give away too much of the book. Another scenic point of interest is the mountain range in the background. Our bedroom was in the back on the right hand side of the house. From the bedroom window, looking east (right in the picture) we could just see a peculiar rocky canyon. Unfortunately it was out of the frame in this shot. The canyon was a place of great mystery and terror for all of us. At least until Mike Seminoff, an older brother of one of my closest friends, led an expedition to the place. Members of the famed1953 Seminoff expedition were motivated by terror. Telling Mike "hell no, we won't go" would have been suicidal. At any rate, my feelings about the place (at least before we went there and discovered it was, after all, just a little canyon) gave rise to the dreaded Sawhenny Gap of Buddy.
Here's myself and my brother with the Seminoff's collie, named Lassie, who was Penny's mother. The "Sawhenny Gap" would be outside the frame to the right. The house, still under construction in these pictures, was built by my father and, the last time I was through that way, was still standing. It's about four miles from Nelson on the north shore of the west arm of Kootenay Lake. There's a mouthful.
The area around Nelson harbors literally hundreds of white water creeks and small lakes (not Kootenay Lake, which is anything but small). One of these creeks, called Shannon's Creek, ran down from the mountains and crossed the highway about a half mile west of our house. It, coupled with a few other more opaque streams I encountered in later years around a place called Kitimat, were models for the Little Sawhenny. The trout I'm so proudly holding came from an 1953 expedition to Shannon's Creek and is a good deal more appealing than anything found in the Little Sawhenny.