In the Moon of the Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke (New York : Simon and Schuster, 2004)
James Lee Burke's In the Moon of the Red Ponies offers readers a compelling plot, characters that make the book hard to put down, and a captivating sense of place. Missoula is at the center of the mystery's landscape, but the story ranges beyond, reaching north into the Flathead Indian Reservation, south to the Bitterroot Valley, and east along the Blackfoot River. Rivers, mountains, lakes, valleys, give readers a sense of the expanse and beauty of this place. In the Moon of the Red Ponies is a surprising read; it's a mystery with a political conscience, social awareness, a spiritual thread, and a love of the land.
If you're in Missoula, you can tour the book's landscape, beginning with a walk in downtown Missoula where fiction and place interweave. In In the Moon of the Red Ponies, Billy Bob Holland's law office is in Courthouse Square; his son, Lucas, attends the University of Montana; and locals gather beside the Clark's Fork River. If you're hungry, you may want to stop in at The Oxford Bar, "whose doors," according to Holland, "have stayed open since 1891." You can climb to the "M" on Mt. Sentinel or follow a trail along Rattlesnake Creek where "Amber lived with her widowed father, the senator...."
Just north of Missoula is political activist and murder suspect Johnny American Horse's Jocko Valley in the Flathead Indian Reservation. You can imagine his house along the Jocko River, "tea-colored in the early spring, later boiling with snowmelt, in the summer undulating like satin over beaver-cut cottonwoods and heavy pink and gray boulders."
Travel south into the Bitterroot Valley at least as far as Stevensville, the fictional site for Karsten Mabus's shady doings at Global Research. Along the way, you'll pass through "the little town of Lolo" and enjoy the beauty of the "crest of the Bitterroots," the Bitterroot River, and the valley itself. Both the fictional Billy Bob Holland, along with his wife, Temple, and the author, James Lee Burke, call the valley home.
Heading back to Missoula, you may want to take a detour along Highway 12, following it as far as Lolo Pass at the Montana-Idaho border. Holland takes this drive in In the Moon of the Red Ponies, "along Lolo Creek through mountains and patches of meadowland that were a dark green from evening shade and the wheel lines spraying creekwater above the alfalfa. It was the same route Meriwether Lewis, William Rogers Clark, and the young Indian woman Sacagawea had taken to Oregon...." You'll see Lolo Peak, "massive and snowcapped against the sky." At the border, where fires cause for hazy Missoula skies in the mystery, turn around and backtrack to Missoula.
East of Missoula, Highway 200 follows the Blackfoot River out of town. The self-proclaimed "changed" Wyatt Dixon's house, set "on a grassy bench north of a sawmill and an unused railroad trestle," is easily pictured from the book's description. "Several years back," we read, "an ice jam had crashed through the cottonwoods, sweeping away the owner's truck, automobile, and machine shop, depositing great chunks of frozen flotsam inside the downstairs of the main house," but Wyatt moved in, stringing "canvass over the holes" and "mov[ing] into the upstairs." At the end of In the Moon of the Red Ponies, The Blackfoot is the place to fish "for German browns."
Travel a little farther on Highway 200, turn north onto Highway 83, and you'll pass other places important to the book's landscape, including Seeley Lake, the Swan Mountains, where Johnny American Horse had "built a sweat lodge...and fasted and prayed on the banks of a creek," and the Swan River. If time allows, plan to hike into The Bob Marshall Wilderness, where Johnny American Horse "wandered deeper..., climbing to the top of the Grand Divide, from which he could see Marias Pass and the ancient home of the Blackfoot Indians. Farther East, beyond the roll of the plains, was the home of the Crow, the Northern Cheyenne, and the Oglala Sioux...." And other destinations from the book's pages may pull you to sites I haven't mentioned.
In the Moon of the Red Ponies is a perfect summer read and bookpath. The book's sense of place alerts us to the landscape, while traveling through the book's setting helps bring the book alive.
So maybe this story is actually about the presence of courage, self-sacrifice, and humility in people from whom we don't expect those qualities. -- from In the Moon of the Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke
The river was low, the coppery color of tarnished pennies, the scales of hellgrammites wrapped like spiderweb on the great round boulders that jutted out of the current. Right at sunset the browns would take an elk-hair caddis or blond wolf with such hunger and force they would slap water up on the bank. But German browns begin spawning not long after Labor Day, so we kept none of the fish we caught and instead replaced them in the river, holding their fat bellies cupped in our palms, while they rested bursting with roe, their gills pulsing, waiting to reenter the current and disappear beneath the reflections of sky, trees, and human faces that can appear and dissolve more quickly than the blink of an eye." -- from In the Moon of the Red Ponies, by James Lee Burke
(Thanks to Jim for recommending this one.)