Broken Country: Mountains & Memory

In the summer of 1973, Rawlins (Sky's Witness: A Year on the Wind River Range), rebelling against his Mormon family over the Vietnam War, took a job herding sheep in Wyoming's Salt River mountains. Twenty years later, he returned and--using the journal he kept in 1973--has reconstructed those two and a half months on the trail without trying to reinterpret that time from a new perspective. The vivid descriptions of the mountains are breathtaking, and his wry observations on the rigors--and the very real dangers--of a greenhorn's life with a couple thousand uncooperative sheep are refreshingly unromanticized. Rawlins's moments of philosophical introspection, however, are more of an acquired taste: ""Life is all we have. And a bear can kill so easily. I'm not a bear. It's a lonely thing to know."" He also writes poetry and liberally quotes Homer--and other classical writers--from an anthology he brought along. Rawlins has an increasingly testy time with the other herder on the job (an old friend); his brother drops by (and is chased by a bear); his girlfriend shows up (for a bit of sex and to end their relationship); a chance encounter with some Basque shepherds reveals how amateurish Rawlins's operation actually is. But he learns his job, how to cook, round up wayward sheep and load a skittish pack horse. Toward the end, he sums up this way: ""And after 47 days of... boredom, hunger, accident, storm, terror, mud, darkness, frost, fever, and snow, I felt as if the Devil himself couldn't kill me."" (Oct.)