Ease yourself out of the saddle, set yourself down by the campfire, and prepare for as fresh and sassy, funny and sad a yarn as you are likely to hear. It's Andrew Garcia telling it, up from the Mexican Border in 1876, out to trap and trade on the Musselshell in Montana two years later, with a drunken partner in tow and a bunch of horse thieves latching on. Garcia manages to ditch them all after a rousing time, but he finds the Pend d'Oreille squaws harder to escape. They have a good case of bull fever and the forest is their happy hunting ground, he their game. But Garcia manages to outsmart them and marry the Nez Perce In-Who-Lise, a survivor from Chief Joseph's band, and travels with her to her father's desecrated grave. Garcia and In-Who-Lise talk down a posse, but Garcia's involvement with horse thieves leads to tragedy--In-Who-Lise's death. It is a quiet, close-mouthed ending to a rampageous, high-spirited story which if tall is true. Garcia was a living historical link to 1943; his retelling Of In-Who-Lise's account of the Nez Perce disaster has particular point and poignancy. If Mark Twain had hit the Musselshell and been a Squaw Man, he might well have told a tale like this. It's much too good to miss.