Wallace Stegner, Wolf Willow ****

Wolf Willow's subtitle is "A History, a Story, and a Memory of the Last Frontier," which reveals the book as a hybrid. In part, it is a memoir about Stegner's childhood on a Saskatchewan homestead from 1914 to 1920, but he expands his focus to include the (natural and cultural) history of the northern Great Plains and inserts a novella set during the horrible winter of 1906. The pieces work together to paint a rounded portrait of a place that looks to most people like a huge blank area on the map.

The first few chapters, in which Stegner returns to the town and ponders the significance of his memories, are totally five-star awesome. The broader historical chapters are more conventional and somewhat less compelling, but the fictional story of the T-Down cattle outfit makes me cold just thinking about it.

P.S. I first read Wolf Willow many years ago, and my copy has chew marks from our first basset hound, Lolita, to prove it.