The Cowboy in Winter The resulting image of man, horse and dog was published in the January 1986 issue of National Geographic and is included among 200 pictures in The Life of a Photograph, a retrospective of Abell's field work to be published this month. It was one of 25,000 images Abell gathered during a year following in the footsteps of the late artist Charles M. Russell, who, as a teenager in the 1880s, had come to Montana from St. Louis to start life as a cowboy. To evoke Russell's time and spirit, Abell traveled to the windswept plains where Russell learned to ride and rope, where he honed his skills as a painter and where he memorialized the twilight of an era. "It looks the way it looked in Russell's day," says Abell, 63. "There are grander and more sublime landscapes—to me. There are more compelling cultures. But what appeals to me about central Montana is that the combination of landscape and lifestyle is the most compelling I've seen on this earth. Small mountain ranges and open prairie, and different weather, different light, all within a 360-degree view." The cowboy culture was still very much in evidence when Mack rode into Abell's viewfinder more than two decades ago. Men and women spent their days in the saddle, following cattle up to the high grasslands in spring and summer and down to the valleys in fall, and drove off to town for a dance and a beer only when the chores were done. That life required good horse work, an affinity for the lariat and hard labor, a stoic acceptance of blistering summers and soul-numbing winters, and the quickness and strength to chase down a calf, flip it over and apply the branding iron....