Badluck Way
Subtitle: a year on the ragged edge of the West
By: Bryce Andrews
Edition: First Atria Books hardcover edition.
Publisher: Atria Books
Published: 2014
Language: eng
Number of pages: 238
ISBN-13: 9781476710839; 9781476710853
Subjects: Description and travel; Ranchers; Travel; Biography; Wolves; Ranch life; Human-wolf encounters
Description: In this memoir of a young man, a wolf, their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in southwest Montana. The Sun's twenty thousand acres of rangeland occupy a still-wild corner of southwest Montana -- a high valley surrounded by mountain ranges and steep creeks with portentous names like Grizzly, Dead Man, and Bad Luck. Just over the border from Yellowstone National Park, the Sun holds giant herds of cattle and elk amid many predators -- bears, mountain lions, and wolves. Andrews recounts marathon days and nights of building fences, riding, roping, and otherwise learning the hard business of caring for cattle, an initiation that changes him from an idealistic city kid into a skilled ranch hand. But when wolves suddenly begin killing the ranch's cattle, Andrews has to shoulder a rifle, chase the pack, and do what he'd hoped he would never have to do. Badluck Way is about transformation and complications, about living with dirty hands every day. It is about the hard choices that wake us at night and take a lifetime to reconcile. Above all, Badluck Way celebrates the beauty of wilderness and the satisfaction of hard work on some of the harshest, most beautiful land in the world.
Table of contents: title: On the Sun; title: Eastbound to the West; title: The lie of the land; title: Rolling rocks; title: The line; title: The work; title: Part II. The work; title: Badluck; title: Calluses; title: Under the postcard sky; title: Bones; title: Part III. Bones; title: Predators; title: Leaving the road behind; title: How it started; title: The brush gun; title: The silence that followed; title: The long months; title: Part IV. The long months; title: What remains; title: A hard wind; title: Drifts; title: Moving on; title: Epilogue.