The Work of Wolves

A Novel

Kent Meyers

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780547350882
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

This story of a horse trainer and a rich man's wife is "a gorgeously written, exacting exploration of duty and retribution set in dusty rural South Dakota" ( Publishers Weekly ). When fourteen-year-old Carson Fielding bought his first horse from Magnus Yarborough, it became clear the teenager was a better judge of horses than the rich landowner was of humans. Years later, Carson—now a skilled and respected horse trainer—grudgingly agrees to train Magnus's horses and teach his wife to ride. But as Carson becomes disaffected with the power-hungry Magnus, he also grows more and more attracted to the rancher's wife, and their relationship sets off a violent chain of events that unsettles their quiet town in South Dakota. Thrown into the drama are Earl Walks Alone, a Lakota trying to study his way out of the reservation and into college, and Willi, a German exchange student confronting his family's troubled history. Described by Howard Frank Mosher as "the best western-based fiction I've read since Lonesome Dove and Plainsong, " this "compelling" story of love and hatred by the author of Twisted Tree offers "fine characterizations, crisp dialogue and fully realized sense of place" ( The Denver Post ). "Kent Meyers's new novel is the kind of book that demands and rewards fierce loyalty.... I instantly fell under its spell." — The Christian Science Monitor

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Prologue
• BEHIND LOSTMAN’S LAKE
• The Careful Indian
• A Fall
• Trespassing
• The Rememberer
• The Old House
• An Agreement
• Equilibriums
• Horses and Men
• Hers
• THE PHILOSOPHY OF BROKE
• Angle of Spin
• ROBBING AND STEALING
• Mining Blame
• The Lights of Koblenz
• The Silent Indian
• Substitutes for Speech
• Well of Life
• Stacking Hay
• Conversion
• Manifold
• How to Seduce White Girls
• Goat Man Forms
• GOAT MAN
• Sightings
• Trying to Go Blind
• Beadwork
• Gradations of Intimacy
• Ruination
• Dogs and Spirits
• Nine Hundred an Acre
• A Thing Unsaid
• A Thing Decided
• Another Option
• Abraham and Isaac
• The Badlands
• The Work of Wolves
• Fire and Ice
• The Invisible Cop
• Another Fire
• Wild, Freed
• A Moment of What Remains
• Some Set of Vectors
• Wind
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author