Want a hard job?

A sheriff in rural America has to deal with all the usual law enforcement problems--drugs, domestic violence, gangs, robberies, traffic, etc.

Plus a few unusual ones--modern-day cattle rustling, grave robbing of prehistoric sites, international poaching, search and rescue missions the size of military operations, etc.

Typically such a sheriff will have little money, less manpower, and an overwhelmingly large territory to patrol. Some counties in the American West are larger than eastern states. Malheur County Oregon is larger than the state of Massachusetts, for example, and has less than 35,000 people.

Now complicate matters with court decisions on environmental matters that often put the sheriff at odds with the same people who elected him or her.

The result is an impossible job and a perfect set-up for a novel.

Call It Horses! is about Sheriff Samatha Nielsen of Drinkwater County, Idaho, who is haunted by the mysterious death of her husband (some blame her) and faced with the possibility of losing the family ranch. At the same time she needs to figure out why Hollywood has come to town, a billionaire businessman is buying up land, and someone is trying to scare off some students doing research on chuckars (a species of bird). That's, more or less, a regular day in one of the most remote wildernesses on the continent--a place some call the American Serengeti.




Pawnee Grasslands of Colorado

It is a modern-day irony that the wide-open spaces of the American West are growing.
Some places are losing population at the rate of 7% a year. At that rate, in ten years, there will be nothing out there but ghost towns and interstate highways.