BADLUCK WAY

BADLUCK WAY                                        BRYCE ANDREWS
Posted:  Feb. 12, 2014

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

In this gripping memoir of a young man, a wolf, their parallel lives and ultimate collision, Bryce Andrews describes life on the remote, windswept Sun Ranch in southwest Montana. The Sun’s twenty thousand acres of rangeland occupy a still-wild corner of southwest Montana—a high valley surrounded by mountain ranges and steep creeks with portentous names like Grizzly, Dead Man, and Bad Luck. Just over the border from Yellowstone National Park, the Sun holds giant herds of cattle and elk amid many predators—bears, mountain lions, and wolves. In lyrical, haunting language, 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 an idealistic city kid into a skilled ranch hand. But when 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 us at night and take a lifetime to reconcile. Above all, Badluck Way celebrates the breathtaking beauty of wilderness and the satisfaction of hard work on some of the harshest, most beautiful land in the world. 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 timeless landscape, a place at the center of the heart’s geography, savage and gorgeous in equal measure.

HUBBY'S REVIEWS:

This is a story about a young’s man time working an actual ranch in Montana through a school grant that kept the ranch open. Bryce Andrews gets the job on the ranch doing odd jobs, and big jobs. Fixing fences, branding cattle, keeping the cattle safe from wolfs. Yes this is also part of the story since the ranch backs up to Yellowstone, wolfs have been put back into the wild. Not being able to kill the wolfs causes some of the ranchers problems when he is in town listening to their stories. Bryce those feels that the wolfs belong to the space that is there and after he sees a wolf and they look at each other he almost feels connected somehow. A very interesting story that when it got to the end as was left wanting for more. It was like the story for me was not finished maybe other people will get a different take on it, but that is how I saw it. I got this book from net galley.