01789cam a2200289 4500 121314264 TxAuBib 20070206120000.0 060511s2006||||||||||||||||||||||||eng|u 2006015934 9780786288557 alk. paper 0786288558 alk. paper 9780786288557 TxAuBib Doig, Ivan. The Whistling Season [HC] / by Ivan Doig. Waterville, Me. : Thorndike Press, 2006. 533 p. (large print) ; 22 cm. “Can't cook but doesn't bite." So begins the newspaper ad offering the services of an "A-1 housekeeper, sound morals, exceptional disposition" that draws the attention of widower Oliver Milliron in the fall of 1909. That unforgettable season deposits the ever-whistling Rose Llewellyn and her font-of-knowledge brother, Morris Morgan, in Marias Coulee along with a stampede of homesteaders drawn by the promise of the Big Ditch—a gargantuan irrigation project intended to make the Montana prairie bloom. When the schoolmarm runs off with an itinerant preacher, Morris is pressed into service, setting the stage for the "several kinds of education"—none of them of the textbook variety—Morris and Rose will bring to Oliver, his three sons, and the rambunctious students in the region's one-room schoolhouse. A paean to a way of life that has long since vanished, The Whistling Season is Ivan Doig at his evocative best. 20070206. Brothers and sisters Fiction. Irrigation projects Fiction. Housekeepers Fiction. Teachers Fiction. Widowers Fiction. Montana Fiction.