The Bone Picker's Winter
A Western Novel

About this book:

The buffalo are gone, but their bones remain—bleaching across the northern plains, waiting for men like Jesse Finch to gather them into wagonloads of calcium and cartilage for six dollars a ton at the Minot railhead. It's 1885, the great herds have been gone fifteen years, and Jesse picks through the wreckage of a world he helped destroy, haunted by the Little Bighorn and the weight of seventy carcasses to a ton. When a cavalry cartridge case surfaces beneath a bull skull—government brass, 1876—it pulls the past into the present like a hook in deep water. Then a rider in a wolf-lined duster rides out of the blowing snow: Vance, company man for the Helena cattle barons, carrying a story about forty-two hundred dollars in lost gold and a warning that the open range has new owners.

Jesse doesn't scare. He's buried two wives, outlived the hide hunters, and survived the grinding poverty that follows the boom. But the prairie is filling up with men who buy grass by the acre and enforce deeds with Winchester rifles, and the storm rolling down from Hudson Bay doesn't care about deeds or debts. With a converted Colt at his hip, a one-eyed mule in the traces, and two tons of bone rattling behind him, Jesse has two days to reach Minot before the river freezes solid and the country closes up for the kill.

Lyrical, brutal, and steeped in the dust and blood of a vanishing frontier, *The Bone Picker's Winter* is a Western for readers who like their history unvarnished and their heroes broken but unbowed. From the "white harvest" of the bone fields to the final reckoning in the Valley of Skulls, this is the story of what remains when the thunder passes—and who gets to claim the ground.