Badluck Way - 9781476710839

The gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Badluck Way is also an ode to the satisfaction of hard work on some of the wildest and most beautiful land in the world.

Mine might have been a simple, pretty story, if not for the wolves. In late July, they emerged from the foothills...

Reminiscent of Farley Mowat’s Never Cry Wolf and Matthew Crawford’s Shop Class as Soul Craft, this vivid narrative of a year on the wild, windswept Sun Ranch in southwest Montana describes life on the range in haunting language. Just over the border from Yellowstone, the Sun holds thousands of cattle and elk amid many predators—bear, mountain lions, and wolves. Ranch hand Bryce 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 a city kid into a skilled cowboy. But when the 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 a man at night and take a lifetime to reconcile. Called, “An important meditation on what it means to share space and breathe the same air as truly wild animals,” (Tom Groneberg, author of The Secret Life of Cowboys), Badluck Way is the memorable story of one young man’s rebirth in the crucible of the West’s wild landscape, a place at the center of the heart’s geography, savage and gorgeous in equal measure.