The Last Muleteers of Aconcagua
A Novel of the Andean Crossings

About this book:

High in the Andes, the iron horse is breathing fire into the ancient stone, and with every mile of track laid, the world of the *arrieros* shrinks. Mateo Cruz has spent sixty-four years reading the mountain's moods in his aching knees and the wind's whisper through the passes, but the railroad doesn't tire, doesn't freeze, and doesn't care that a man's soul is braided into the leather of his pack saddles. When a wealthy merchant offers double wages for one final, impossible crossing—fifty mules, eighty crates of machinery, forty barrels of spirits, and a summit already tightening in winter's grip—Mateo knows this isn't just a contract. It's a funeral for a way of life.

With a one-eyed legend at his side, a nephew tempted by the easy wages of the rail camps, and a herd that doesn't yet trust the bell of the *madrina*, Mateo drives his caravan into the teeth of the cordillera. The white wind rises. A mule falls into the abyss. The phantom ridge looms. And somewhere ahead, the steel rails creep closer, indifferent to the centuries of hoofbeats they will silence.

Lyrical, visceral, and steeped in the dust and ice of a vanishing world, *The Last Muleteers of Aconcagua* is a towering novel of men and beasts balanced on the knife-edge of history—where every step upward is a defiance, and the descent may be the last anyone ever makes.