Chinook

About the Book

Young Tim Ethridge returns from Vietnam to find himself unwilling combatant in his father's war with Indian neighbors. Rejecting his demand to end a relationship with Amy Old Horse, daughter of his chief protagonist, the abusive and prejudiced old man sends him on a fool's errand to the mountains in search of strayed stock missed during fall roundup.

Caught in a blizzard and marooned in an abandoned cabin, he's torn by indecision: await a search party, or strike out on his own. Brooding at a cabin window day after day, and haunted by his father's life-long railing that he's "just a weaklin' with hind-end lodged between two bales of straw," his life plays over and over in his mind like a bad picture show.

Search party hopes dashed, and facing starvation, he sets out across the snow-locked high country, plagued by below-zero weather, another blizzard brewing, frostbitten leg and a wolf pack, reduced to a wandering, desperate soul on a swayback old mare in search of a light along the dark road of despair.

About the Author

Woody Laughnan, controversial, itinerant newspaperman who worked on nearly a dozen papers from California to Montana and back, was known to hop a freight train between here and there, until settling in Fresno, CA as an off-quoted columnist on McClatchy Newspapers, The Fresno Bee.