Cold Wind River
Publisher: Dodd Mead, 1981
Summary
In the stark beauty of Montana, Carl Murder takes on the solo task of building a cattle bridge across the river. His original motive is to spare the cattle the dangers of quicksand, but the work becomes for Murcer an epic struggle, both physical and emotional. Murcer’s wife has left him—he wants her back—but given her fragile state, can he ever make this happen? This is a novel about a man on a remote ranch dealing with the demons in his own past and trying to reach a present he can believe in. The story explores profound personal challenges in a bleak but beautiful landscape.
Critical Praise
“Only fairly recently have novelists such as Larry McMurtry, Edward Abbey, and a few others taken more than tentative steps toward exploration of what is really the last fictional frontier—the contemporary West. To this intrepid band of literary adventurers the name of Kent Nelson must, on the basis of his first novel Cold Wind River, now be added.… Nelson is blazing an unfamiliar, if not entirely unknown, trail; for his primary fictional interests are not in what happens next, but in what has happened earlier. His real concerns are not the how of adventure story but the why of psychological fiction. His fictional vehicle for exploring these concerns is brilliantly chosen—a lonely Montana ranch locked in winter, where the inescapable fact of life is not romantic peril but simple boredom. Nelson has got to rank among the best writers anywhere at evoking the emotional effects of cabin fever.”
—James Folsom, Western American Literature Journal
Quotes from Book
“Spring was the season to believe in change and to hope for things that were not possible.”
From Cold Wind River
“Murcer had taken the map and had walked from Sharon Springs, Kansas, across the state of Colorado. He had been in no hurry, crossing gullies and climbing Indian knolls and picking his way through limestone bluffs. None of the physical punishment of navy training had been as hard as what he put himself through.
“He spent days and nights in the open, baked by the sun, tortured by the cold. He walked in the times of the changing day—dawns and dusks—for those part of the day moved, and he could still see. The weather became his sustenance. He welcomes squalls that turned the sand rivers to sudden torrents. He loved to watch the lightning break the clouds, to feel the thunder shake him, and to smell the damp sage.”
From Cold Wind River
“Get away,” Dee Ann said.
“Her words ran through him, and he lifted his face, which was against her neck, and looked at her. She was terrified, crying and struggling still, but not terrified of him. She was frightened of something else completely, and in her face her saw it all. He saw everything with a scalpel clarity, as if the truth were as bright as a duck’s wing.”
From Cold Wind River