Nobody else can live your life for you. You have to ride your own furies. (134)

Here’s a book that came out of left field but will most definitely make the list of my top reads in 2024. I purchased it while in Utah over the summer—Utah being Ute country, after all—and I recommended it for our Siblings Book Club this year. It didn’t make it into our final list of 10, but it was one of our five runners-up. And since I couldn’t stomach our first book this year (Jordan Peterson’s 12 Rules for Life—a humanist manifesto, if I ever read one!), I chose to cut my own trail and read this novel instead. So incredibly worth the switch!

If you’ve got to choose a genre for this book, it’d have to be “Western,” but I honestly don’t think it fits the style very well. It traces the life of an Ute boy from early childhood off the reservation in 1912 to “civilized life” perhaps in his late 20s—so likely it’s set in the 1920s and 30s. There’s no shoot-em-ups like you’d see in Louis L’Amour, though there are a few villains you sort of wish would get shot. The story’s got ranch-hands and Indians, rodeos and hunting. It’s got that Western feel, certainly, but it really ain’t a Western. Closest I can describe it is the feel you get when watching No Country for Old Men. If you’ve seen that, hopefully you get what I mean.

The plot follows a boy and his parents who’ve run off into the hills of Colorado after the father kills a fellow-Ute who’d robbed him blind one time too many. As the years progress, both parents pass while living off the land, and the eleven-year-old named Bear’s Brother continues caring for himself until some concerned residents realize he’s living all alone. Through lies and violence, they lock him into school and force him to change his old ways, which results in the boy’s eventual adaptation to civilized life, now as Thomas Black Bull. Once he takes off on his own, Thomas changes his name again to Thomas Black and finds success in the bronco-riding circuits of America. Following serious rodeo injuries, he convalesces back in his old stomping grounds of Colorado and is forced to face the past he’d been trying to flee.

What sets this book apart from other Westerns is Hal Borland’s powerful writing style. It’s raw and gritty, but it puts you there with Thomas through every hunt, every hurt, every ride. I’ve copied out this section from the middle of the book, the section I was reading when I praised it to the Siblings Book Club crowd (which I think made several of them want to give up on Jordan Peterson too). Just drink in Borland’s “sensual” description of the rodeo Thomas experiences here in this (admittedly lengthy) quote:

The dust hid the men for a moment and he saw a crowd of riders there, shouting to each other, swearing at the horse’s, laughing, arguing. He heard the horses puffing, grunting, squealing, making the planks of the shoots clatter and groan. Saddles creaked, stirrups rattled, spurs jingled. The pickup men rode into place. The crowds cheered, stamped, whistled. The ten-second horn bellowed. Hoofs drummed, batwing chaps slapped like hand claps.

His nose quivered at the smell of horse sweat, man sweat, at the smell of the corrals, fresh pine oozing pitch, fresh hay, manure, urine. The choking alkaline smell of dust turned up in the arena, and the hot, clean smell of sunlight, the cool, clean smell of a cloud shadow. The smell of hot, sweaty leather, the horse smell, the sweat-and-wool smell of saddle blankets. The smell of old boots, dirty levis, sweaty shirts. The leather-and-horse smell of your own hands, the sour smell of your own hat band.

He saw the horses, rolling their dark eyes till the whites showed, bearing their yellow teeth, laying back their angry ears, rippling a shoulder or a flank nervously, switching a tense tail. Hunching under the feel of the saddle and the chute, tensing every muscle as you let yourself down into the saddle, felt for the stirrups. The big horses, long-legged, bow-necked. The blocky ones, short-coupled, big in the barrel, hard muscle in the hips and shoulders. The bawlers, the squealers, the silent ones that saved their wind for the bucking.

He felt the tightness in his belly as he sat in the saddle, braced, just before the gate opened. The quiver in his legs, spurs hooked just ahead of the horse’s shoulders. That first lunge, the jab of the cantle in the small of his back, the thrust of the pommel in his lower guts. The feel of the horse you got through the rein, taught in your left hand. The feel of his ribs beneath your calves, his shoulders beneath your thighs. The feel of the stirrups, the rake of the spurs, the rhythm. The jolt of the ground through the horse’s stiff legs, like a hammer blow at the base of your spine. (118-119)

You’re there in the arena with Thomas when you read this, aren’t you. Of course, the whole book isn’t as choppy as this writing, but it’s just as good, and it whisps you away just as well.

I’ll be honest. At about this point halfway through the story, I wondered if I was maybe setting myself up for a letdown—if perhaps Borland didn’t have it in himself to be consistently good all the way to the end, if perhaps everything got suddenly dull in Chapter 35. But no. This book maintains its slow, engaging momentum throughout, from beginning to end. It never goes off the rails, and its wonderfully unique feel never falters.

I’ve never read Hal Borland before, but I’m sure going to look him up again. This is a great place to start if you’ve never read him either. I highly recommend it—even if you don’t like “Westerns.”

©2024 E.T.