Tiger Country: A Novel of the Wild Southwest

Rancher Juan Aragon has begun to revive the Pleistocene and everyone must pay the bill.In the high country of southern New Mexico home of the oldest wilderness and the biggest roadless area in the lower 48 ghosts are stirring waking shadows of things that havent been seen for a hundred years. Reports of iconic beasts and mysterious carcasses filter down from the mountains while something the newspapers call The Bosque Bigfoot is killing cows down by the Rio Grande.Soon the worlds attention will be fastened on the wildlands of New Mexico as more than the fate of a single native species is at stake. In his first novel acclaimed natural history and travel writer Stephen J Bodio whose 1988 memoir Querencia depicted the landscape and ways of southern New Mexico and gave many readers their first glimpse of this faraway country imagines the rebirth of big predators like the grizzlies and jaguar in his own back yard. All too often discussions of re-wilding are abstract with little thought for their unfolding in the real world as though the country were a park. In Tiger Country the effects are real. As viewpoints and people collide the media ranchers naturalists activists politicians and ordinary people must take their stands in the real world not just in theory. Respectful of all the actors especially the non-human ones and in debt to none Bodio shows the heartbreak of unintended consequences.At times suspenseful lyrical hair-raising and even funny it is a worthy fiction debut and Bodio is uniquely qualified to tell it. Biologist falconer dog breeder literary critic and hunter born in Boston but a rural New Mexico resident for almost forty years he knows the wildlife people and cultures of his chosen Querencia. Malcolm Brooks author of Painted Horses says: Steve Bodio brings his legendary Renaissance vision to this startling first novel a work so mammoth in scope and elegant in execution it makes me wish hed been writing fiction all along. Recalling the edgy best of Ed Abbey and Jim Harrison and reminiscent of James Carlos Blakes contemporary border noir Tiger Country throws modern heroic renegades into the gravitational pull of the ancient past to encounter the origins of the human condition.