Late Spring in Absaroka County, Wyoming. Seems like a simple
enough task. Walt and his Basque deputy Sancho are doing a prisoner transfer. Raynaud
Shade, a serious sociopath and schizophrenic, and a couple other convicts have to be transported
through the county. The Marshall’s service contracts a company and
each county has to sign off on such transport. Problem is this company has had
issues with prisoners getting away so Walt won’t allow Ameri-Trans through his
county, which means he has to do the transport.
When they reach the county line, he has to hand off the
prisoners to the next sheriff who is also accompanied by reps from the US
Marshall’s service and the FBI. Raynaud, a Canadian Indian adopted way back by a Crow family, is
seriously deranged. Out in the middle of nowhere in the high prairie, the FBI
has to use GPS to determine the county line. The transfer seems to go fine. Raynaud
decides to confess to a 10 year old murder of a young Indian boy and offers to
direct this group to the grave, which sits close to the county line and at the
base of Cloud Peak Wilderness in Absaroka County. Walt sends Sancho home while
he wants to see about this murder, as it might be a death he was unable to
solve all those years ago.
A local diner brings some food out for this cop-crook party.
But it turns out our boy Raynaud had a contact on the outside who helps Raynaud
and the other convicts escape during which a number of the lawmen are shot and
a couple hostages are taken.
The smart thing would be to phone for help and wait for
backup. But given Raynaud’s predilections, he decides to go after them as they
head into the Cloud Peak Wilderness – right into a late spring blizzard.
So what started off as a routine exchange has now
degenerated into a foot chase into the wilderness made all the more difficult
with the snowstorm that gets more intense the higher they go. And now it
becomes not simply a chase, but becomes an intense and frightening survival
tale as Walt fights against what he should’ve done (waited for backup) versus his
fear for the hostages driven by his sense of duty.
Temps well below zero, gale force winds attempting to
cleanse the surrounding landscape, snow blowing so hard that it seems more like
shrapnel. Survival is not for the fastest, the strongest, or the toughest. It’s
meant for those who will make the commitment, which seems beyond human understanding when done alone. Where talking with the grandfather of the slain boy, Virgil White Buffalo (is he real or a
vision?), can make it next to impossible to
distinguish reality from Indian mystical forces that guide the living to the
Camp of the Dead or the Beyond Country, depending on your tribal tales. Walt
comes to appreciate repeated references to Dante’s Inferno as he truly
experiences that Hell really in empty because all the Devils are here on Earth
and have zeroed in on the Cloud Peak Wilderness.
I think Longmire must be a descendant of Jeremiah Johnson as
he calls on all his skills and determination to catch Raynoud Shade and resist
repeated attempts to be called to the Camp of the Dead. Longmire’s posse of
family and friends (Henry Standing Bear, daughter Cady, Vic, the Ferg, Ruby,
Lucien) are little more than onlookers as this tale, once the chase is on,
focuses almost entirely on Longmire and he straddles the fence between the
Beyond Country and reality.
I was left with the feeling that if someone randomly picked
up this book at the library, they might not come back because this really was a
dark tale that got darker with each passing page. And that would be a shame. For those
who’ve read this series from the beginning, this is a stellar character study of survival
with little of the camaraderie that makes this series so infectiously readable
and entertaining. By all means, I really hope you choose to read this book, but
do so only after you’ve developed a bit of a relationship with this engaging cast that live on the high prairie. And make sure you dress warm when you read this one as the
descriptions of the weather and the Wilderness will chill you right down to your marrow.
East Coast Don
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