Bear Ground

A killer went up into grizzly country. Nobody would follow him.
She found the one man who would.

Spring, 1833. A free trapper is shot in the back of the head at his own fire on the Stinkingwater, and the man who did it takes the horses, the season's furs, and a dead man's rifle - and goes up. Not out toward the settlements. Up, into forty square miles of burned-over deadfall where the grizzlies come off the winter starving and no posse in the mountains will set foot.

The trail is six weeks cold. The widow has been told no by forty men.

And Jonas Blackwood - the man who reads sign - takes the job nobody else will, under one hard condition she will not bend on: she does not want the killer shot. She wants him brought out alive, to a court, to a clerk with a book, so her husband's name is written down somewhere that lasts.

But the country up there is wrong, and it takes Jonas weeks to understand why. Harlan Voss has not been hiding in the burns. He has been building in them - and what he has made out of hunger, patience, and a hundred pounds of stolen bacon is the most quietly monstrous thing Jonas has ever read off the ground.

Because a bear that has learned men mean food is not a bear anymore. It is a weapon nobody can prove you fired.

Bear Ground is the second novel in the Jonas Blackwood: Mountain Man series - a survival Western of grizzly country, hard tracking, and a hunt that costs its hunter more than it pays. For readers of Lonesome Dove, The Revenant, and the mountain-man classics.

One man. One rifle. A wilderness that never forgives.