Winter Range

A Novel

by Claire Davis

Picador, 272 pp., $23

The characters in Claire Davis’ debut novel occupy a town on the Montana hi-line. To say that the land plays a major role in the story of Ike Parsons, the town sheriff, his wife Pattiann, and her old lover, Chad Stubblefield, would be an understatement. Ike is not a native Montanan: “Six months later, [Pattiann] left to go back home. Montana. A place, at that time, he could hardly conceive of. A place she’d talk about only reluctantly. A year later, he’d followed.” His identity as an outsider and job as the town sheriff begin to seem incompatible when Chas, who owns the land that annexes Pattiann’s father’s land, begins to starve his own cattle rather than declare bankruptcy. Ike wants to stop Chas, but Pattiann (and the rest of the community) believe that no one has the right to tell Chas what to do with his own property. Although Davis’ rough-and-tumble characters verge at times on caricature (such as when Ike thinks of women: “A Goddamned mystery. Their nature, secret as the womb”), they slowly win over a reader, and their struggles prove heartbreaking. Like the land Davis writes about, Winter Range is both irresistible and chilling.

This article appears in December 22 • 2000.

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