Description:

In frigid Montana, a boy tracks a killer wolf and learns to be a man

It is the worst winter anyone in Montana can remember. If the cold doesn’t let up soon, the Brue family farm may be done for good—and the Brues along with it. Young Nashua Brue is shivering over his breakfast one morning when his father announces that Nash will be taking the week off school. A great wolf has been savaging the local cattle, and the cattlemen’s association has offered a $500 reward for the beast’s head. Nash and his father will risk death to get that prize, for their lives depend on it.

Father and son saddle up and ride into the frozen countryside with an eccentric gang of hunters. But as they track the majestic animal, Nash begins to doubt their mission. Who is the real villain of the prairie—the men compelled by greed to kill, or the wolf that, like Nash’s family, simply does whatever it takes to survive?

**

From Publishers Weekly

In the dead of winter at the turn of the century, young Nashua Brue and his father, Uriah, head out into the Montana wilderness, hunting a wolf that has been depredating cattle on area ranches. The local stockmen's association has put a $500 bounty on the wolf, a reward that brings dozens of men together for the hunt. Nashua meets an Irishman with the gift of gab, a wise old Indian who speaks of spirits and magic, some city slickers who try to win the bounty through illicit means and several other "good" Swedes like his father. And when it's all over, Nashua finds he has grown from boy to man and learned something about life as well. Not only is this a story told many times before, but the characters are stereotypes, the dialogue is wooden and the setting, which one would expect first novelist Svee, a Montana newspaperman, to evoke particularly well, is as flat as a Hollywood backlot.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review

Kirkus ReviewsThis [is] a compelling and sometimes cruel story told in good plain English, without sentimentality or bravado. -- Review