The little mountain hamlet of Bryson City, North Carolina, offers more than dazzling vistas. For Walk Larimore, a young 'flatlander' physician setting up his first practice, the town presents its peculiar challenges as well. It's a world where the family doctor is also the emergency physician, the coronier, and the obstetrician, and where wilderness medicine is part of the job, search-and- rescue calls in the national forest are a way of life, and the next patient just may be somebody's livestock or pe