The Rancher

In the autumn of 1881, Elias Harlan rides into Blackfeet country with one good horse and a bill of sale for land that has belonged to other people for ten thousand years. Two winters later, the buffalo are gone and the people who depended on them are starving in their lodges.

Between those two moments lies a country breaking. Elias learns the work of the high plains-the spring calving, the winter grass, the arithmetic of a herd that survives or doesn't. He takes a grulla mare from a Lakota man at Fort Buford and calls her Biter. He watches the Blackfeet of the agency die that winter at a rate of two and three a day, and learns that watching is also a kind of choice.

Told in the spare, unsparing prose of American literary realism, The Rancher is the story of a man who came west looking for a beginning and arrived in time for the end-and of the people whose ending it was.

For readers of Paulette Jiles, James Welch, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Kent Haruf.