From the Texas panhandle to the mountains of Arizona, Amy Auker has lived the cowboy lifeas wife, as mother, as cook, as ranch hand, as writer. In fine-grained detail she captures the prairie light, the traffic on small farm-to-market roads, the vacant stillness of shipping pens when fall works are over. But she also captures the unmistakable westernness of the people and animals around her: the son who must get back on the horse, the husband who gives great gifts, the horses whose names and temperaments are as recognizable as family. Auker understands those who live in the sway of natures moods far off the main roads, and she commends them to us in luminous prose backlit by her own hard-earned experience.