When We Were Wolves: Stories

by Jon Billman

Random House, $21.95 hard

In the new American West, true wilderness remains only in the hearts of a few people. Wayne Kerr, artist and bootlegger of Hams Fork, Wyoming, a small fictional town on the Utah border, is one of them. He’s a recurring character in Jon Billman’s collection of stories When We Were Wolves, one of many wandering souls who inhabit sparsely populated towns on the fringe of the fringe of society. With as strong a regional voice as you’ll find among emerging American writers, Billman writes stories that are, as he says in describing a newly built dogsled, beautiful in the way that “old saddles, bamboo fly rods, handmade cowboy boots, beavertail snowshoes, and wooden skis are beautiful.” In the West, nothing human is permanent, least of all love and home, and that creates a whole new set of options and problems for the folks up in the mountains and high deserts of When We Were Wolves.

This article appears in October 22 • 1999.

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