I am treated occasionally to a written historical account so vivid in its details that I feel almost as though I can travel to a time so distant that it has passed from the memory of anyone alive today.

I was given such a document recently by one of my favorite regular correspondents, Steve Culley of Baker City.

Culley, who grew up there and graduated from Baker High School in 1966, is a Vietnam combat veteran.

I saw him at Community Connection, where he was having lunch and I was working on a story, and he insisted that I needed to read a copy of the report he had gotten from the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife.

Covering eight pages and written by Rolland Huff in January 1953, it combines personal experience and anecdotes into a compelling narrative that I found irresistible, not least because he wrote about many places that are familiar to me.

(As ever, an excellent way for any writer to entice a reader.)

Huff, who was like Culley a military veteran (of World War I, in Huff’s case), was born in 1892 at Kamela, a railroad station in the Blue Mountains near Meacham.

Although Huff detours occasionally into other topics, his main subject is population trends in wildlife — primarily deer, elk, game birds and predators — in Northeastern Oregon from around the 1860s through the 1940s.

Huff writes that his father, along with another man, spent the summer of 1877 working as “buckskinners” in the Blue Mountains. These hunters killed deer not for their meat but for their hides, which Huff wrote could fetch $2.50 to $3 each. This is a time when a day laborer might make a dollar for 12 hours of toil.

Huff wrote that his father and the other man started their trip on July 4 at Sumpter and continued through the mountains, killing deer along the way, finishing in September near Prairie City.

“I well remember that he said his take was 178 hides and his partner’s 176,” Huff wrote in 1953. “He often told me later in the (1890s) when deer and elk in eastern Oregon were almost extinct that it made him sick to think of all the meat that they wasted.”

In 1896, when Huff was four, his family moved to the Pine Valley in eastern Baker County, about 50 miles east of Baker City. Huff lived there until 1913, when he was started working for the Forest Service, then a fledgling agency just eight years old.

Huff wrote that game birds, and in particular pintail grouse and blue grouse, were plentiful thereabouts.

His father, swapping his the rifle he wielded as a buckskinner for a 10-gauge, muzzle-loading shotgun, shot grouse which were hauled by stagecoach to the Union Hotel. Huff’s dad was paid $3 per dozen birds.

As with many such accounts, Huff’s essay is a work of sadness as well as nostalgia. He writes that populations of grouse and other native birds “diminished each year” from 1900 to 1913.

Later, starting around 1915, Huff wrote that the state released ring-necked pheasants, which have “largely taken over where the pintail grouse used to be in numerous thousands.”

Huff writes at much greater length about deer.

During his childhood — up through 1910 or so — Huff rarely saw deer.

“I never in my youth expected to kill a deer,” he wrote. “On a fishing trip in the summer of 1910 I saw a few tracks in an area of the Wallowa Mountains and I know that a few were killed but only a very few men hunted.”

Huff acknowledges that the scarcity of deer he noticed was in stark contrast to the abundance his father, during his buckskinner days, found in the region.

Huff speculates that deer herds were depleted by a combination of subsistence hunting by white settlers, who began arriving in significant numbers during the past 25 years of the 19th century, the unusually harsh winter of 1888-89, and the type of market hunting that his father engaged in.

Although no official records exist, Huff writes that during that winter the snow was 4 feet deep at Pendleton, “something unheard of before or since.”

Huff had his first meal of venison in 1915, a deer killed by a Forest Service trail crew worker.

“That fall I had my first shot at a buck but did not connect,” he wrote.

The next year, 1916, Huff moved to the Middle Fork of the John Day River — he doesn’t specify which section of the river — where he worked as a timber scaler for the Forest Service.

Huff didn’t kill a deer that fall, either, but he knew several hunters who did.

“There was general talk about how plentiful the deer were becoming,” he wrote.

After fighting in the Great War, Huff returned to Oregon in 1919. The proliferation of deer that he noticed before he went to France had continued.

“I was amazed at the increase in deer in the area where I had worked in 1913, 1914 and 1915,” he wrote, referring to the Pine Valley and Wallowa Mountains. “Riding over the same area one would see several deer every day where I saw none in the earlier years.”

Huff doesn’t neglect elk in his recollections.

He notes that the first elk hunting season in Baker and Umatilla counties was in 1933 (a year that’s consistent with an ODFW history on the agency’s website).

“Many sportsmen and others thought that this would result in a grand slaughter of tame animals,” Huff wrote. “The number killed was considerably below the estimate of those who thought of elk as being a vanishing species.”

The next year, 1934, “larger areas were opened and later practically all eastern Oregon had an open season,” Huff wrote.

The next major event that Huff chronicles was the winter of 1931-32, which he describes as “a hard and long one all eastern Oregon.”

Huff wrote that he made a trip by horseback in February 1932 from Ukiah to Dale, about 15 miles, during which he counted 390 deer, “many were so weak they could take only a jump or two.”

An approximate survey of deer carcasses showed “probably 25,000 died or were killed by predators on an eighty-mile stretch of winter range along the North Fork of the John Day River,” Huff wrote.

Although weather records are scanty for that period, there is evidence that snow was unusually deep that winter. Moreover, significant snow fell in November. I’ve talked with multiple ODFW biologists over the decades who told me that the hardest winters are distinguished not necessarily by how cold it gets — deer and elk, particularly the latter, are not much fazed by subzero temperatures — but by how long deep snow lingers, forcing animals to exhaust themselves digging through drifts to reach forage.

An observer at Ukiah measured 14.8 inches of snow in November 1931, well above the average of 5 inches. December’s snowfall of 28.4 inches was more than triple the average, and January 1932 had 20.4 inches, almost double the average.

All three months were colder than average as well. The most notable cold snap happened in February, when the temperature plummeted to 25 below zero on Feb. 17. Record lows were set on four days in a five-day stretch from Feb. 14-18.

Weather data weren’t collected at the Baker City Airport until 1943, but a station did operate in 1931-32 at KBKR radio station in Baker City.

The snow depth reached 17 inches in February 1932 — quite a lot, as any longtime Baker City residents can attest.

As I would have expected for someone with such a keen eye, and memory, for wildlife, Huff devotes several paragraphs to predators.

“My earliest recollections are of packs of coyotes,” he wrote. “Before the farms were fenced with woven wire, the loss of sheep, pigs, and chickens was almost too heavy for the small farmer to take.”

With deer and other big game comparatively scarce, hunting coyotes during winter was “an annual sport,” Huff wrote. “There was a bounty on the coyote and some men who liked the sport of coyote hunting kept a pack of hounds with a stag or airdale to make the kill. For many years there was a bounty of $1.50 paid upon presentation of the scalp of a coyote to the County Clerk.”

Writing about the years when he lived in the Pine Valley and worked for the Forest Service, Huff wrote that “cougar were very scarce, but there was quite a number of Canada lynx and bobcats. Bear was quite plentiful. It was not at all unusual to see two or three every day while riding the range in the spring and summer.”

Bear are still relatively plentiful, and cougar, unlike in Huff’s time, are far from scarce. As for lynx, you are as likely to see a wolverine — which is to say, you almost certainly will not.

Huff’s account is a curious mixture of the familiar — we all know about the deer and elk, the coyotes and cougars, that roam the rangelands and mountains — and the jarringly anachronistic.

The idea of going to the county clerk’s office and exchanging coyote scalps for cash, for instance.

Huff also writes of a practice that was once widespread but has disappeared — ranchers running flocks of thousands of sheep in the Wallowas and other mountains each summer.

He described how bears in particular posed a threat to sheep.

“Most of the sheep men had on their summer range at least one bear trap,” Huff wrote.

I was sad to reach the final page — perhaps the best compliment I can give any writer.

I probably only needed 10 minutes or so to finish Huff’s story.

But the time, as it does while you’re reading something that seizes your attention, seemed to draw out, as a quiet afternoon at home sometimes does.

During that brief time, as I imagined Huff watching deer and coyotes, hiking mountain trails and counting winter-trapped deer, it was 2025, and the world outside my windows, that seemed distant.