ANOTHER TRIP INTO ROUGH WEATHER: PATRICK DEAREN'S THE BIG DRY

Patrick Dearen won many admirers with The Big Drift. The Spur award winning novel chronicled the hard won friendship between black cowhand Zeke Bales and Will Brite, the white cowboy he saves. during one of blizzards of the tragic winter of 1884 that killed maTy cattle and ranches, It ended with Zekke arrested for a murder he didn't commit. Yp answer the demand from fans, Dearen released what he calls a stand alone sequel, The Big Dry, set in another period where the weather treated the cowboy hard.

The only hope Will has of exonerating Zeke and saving him from the hangman is to find the real killer, a man reported to have one missing finger. He leaves his wife, Jessie, to travel to Devil's River where the man may be. To support himself and not draw attention, he works a cattle drive with his verbose pal Arch Brannan during one of Texas' killer droughts. Jessie takes on a much larger role when she is blackmailed about her mixed race background that could put Will and her in prison for miscegenation. All this occurs while Zeke maneuvers to stay alive in jail even before he is sent to the gallows.

Dearen's writing is rich with authenticity. Few westerns spend as much time and finds drama in the work of a cowboy's life. He represents he harshness of the land and how it shapes those interacting with it. You feel the heat and dominating brightness of the sun and smell the rotting corpses of dead cows.

His look at race proves just as unflinching. He avoids preachy statements and simply sets his characters in believable confrontation with the issue in that time. Will, who was much more bigoted at the start of The Big Drift. deals with his racist past and habits and the guilt from that as his mind broadens. Jesse, passing for white, has the most direct conflict with the subject, fighting off her blackmailer and and to have her identity on her terms. Systemic racism has affected Zeke so much, he sometimes questions himself as a man, since society has. Dearen avoids what Elmer Kelton referred to as "generational snobbery" where you look down at your "ignorant predecessors" to praise your progressed values. If anything, his direct and authentic view of racial relations in this period shows the links to ours.

As in The Big Drift, Dearen uses the western to its fullest inThe Big Dry. Like John Ford's The Searchers, he travels the harshest country, loking for humanity. When discovered, we learn to appreciate it for being finite, delicate, and powerful.