By Mark Spragg
ISBN: 1573228257
Binding: Trade Paperback
Publisher: Riverhead Books
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Wyoming, land of wind and dust, of suicides, loneliness, and fierce lovemaking, of uninterrupted vistas stretching twenty miles in every direction, of hard-drinking men and fighting women, forms the backdrop to Spragg's brave and beautiful coming-of-age memoir.
Readers expecting a quaint, picturesque yarn will find instead an elemental, powerful confrontation with the naked realities of living and dying. Growing up on the high Yellowstone Plateau on the state's oldest dude ranch, a family business dating back to 1898, Spragg wrangles horses for his taciturn father, trying to win his respect and approval. At age fourteen, Spragg shoots and mercy-kills his beloved, aged, sickly steed, whose corpse will be used as bait for bears targeted by human hunters. The teenage Spragg joins his father on hunts, an experience he recalls ruefully.... From quotidian events -- communing with horses, attending a livestock auction -- he fashions existential encounters with nature, self, fear, death, God....
A piercing voice from the heartland, this resonant autobiography weds the venerable Western tradition of frontier exploration of self and nature with the masculine school of writing stretching from Hemingway to Mailer.
Western History→General
Western Life→Ranching
Nonfiction→Bios and Memoirs