Today I'm in my pickup truck, my English springer pup beside me, headed for Montana to do a new story about the Hutterites of Surprise Creek. On the way, I stop outside Minneapolis, where Scott lives with his wife and two kids, to spend time with him.

I'm having second thoughts about the Hutterite story, and driving back to Scott's house after a Twins game, I talk to him about it. "Am I going back to the same well by doing a Hutterite story again?" Scott has melanoma; the worst kind. He turned bald early in life, but beneath his Twins cap tonight he has plenty of hair on the sides and back of his head. He still has eyebrows and looks healthy and handsome. "Dad," Scott answers, knowing how close I am to the Hutterites, "when will you ever again get a chance to do something so personal?" "Yeah," I say. "That's true." Just how true neither of us can possibly know, and I leave in the morning for Montana.

Days later in Darius and Annie Walter's tidy frame house at the colony, I feel at home. I've returned to the colony many times over the years, sometimes flying out with my dog Sarah, to bird hunt and visit. I've always stayed at the Walters'. My daughter Terri calls the Hutterites and the Walters "your other family."

Darius, 65, is sitting in his place at the kitchen table. A couple of years my junior, he's one of my best friends. Bearded, as married Hutterite men must be, Darius wears the suspenders Hutterite males of all ages wear. He's heavier than he once was, and more flushed in the face, but he has the full head of silvery hair and the twinkling eyes, warm smile, and keen sense of humor of his late father, Eli, the colony preacher when I first arrived. From his kitchen seat, Darius can look out white-curtained windows across the lawn to a bird feeder and clotheslines. Women's long dresses, skirts, and white blouses, and men's black pants, white socks, and plaid shirts—and all of that again in children's sizes—billow in the fall breeze. Just beyond the yard is a dirt road that threads past the colony's frame houses and nicely appointed trailer homes, the community kitchen and dining room, the church. Running parallel to Surprise Creek, it passes gardens, weathered wooden sheep barns, and stubble fields touched with the first green of winter wheat, then points toward the distant Little Belt Mountains, their upper reaches white with snow.