The Moon When Water Freezes

by Gaylord Dold

Overview

Living alone with his state-ranger mother in Thermopolis, Wyoming, young Nick yearns to know what's become of his father who abandoned the family for the oil fields of Alaska. Not far away on the Shoshone Reservation in the Wind River Mountains, an equally youthful Robert Toy too lives alone with his mother in a tarpaper shack; he too wonders and worries about his rodeo-riding father who left the family for the gas fields of Rock Springs and never returned. A chance encounter at a basketball game brings serious trouble for both boys, and soon they find themselves running from the law into the high mountains in late fall, a time the Cheyenne call the moon when water freezes.

Pursued by the county Sheriff, one lonely white boy and one angry Indian youth set off to Alaska on a desperate search for self-knowledge. Little do they know that a dangerous car accident and a major fall snowstorm will conspire to bring them face to face with the phantom figure of Parker Wise, an "old ways" Shoshone Indian who hunts elk from horseback. This small group in near white-out conditions---an old ways Indian, two lonely teenage boys, a big riding horse named Mystery Dog, and two mules, Crooke and Custer, head off to "above the tree line", where their intertwined lives collide with the necessity to survive, a confrontation with death, and the possibility of love and companionship.

Product Details

BN ID:	2940151590570
Publisher:	Gaylord Dold
Publication date:	05/13/2015
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
File size:	571 KB

About the Author

Gaylord Dold was born in Kansas and raised in southern California during the good old days. He was educated at the University of Kansas, the University of California, and the London School of Economics, where he took an advanced degree in international law. Before becoming a professional writer, he worked as a chauffeur, theater usher, legal services attorney, law professor and volunteer mentor. He is the co-founder and managing editor of Watermark Press which published works like Leaving Las Vegas by John O'Brien, which later became a film directed by Mike Figgis, starring Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue. Dold has published eighteen crime novels and five travel guides. Many of his crime novels have received starred reviews in Publisher's Weekly, Library Journal and Booklist; many have been praised by Marilyn Stasio and others in the New York Times Book Review and in newspapers like the Portland Oregonian, The Washington Post and Boston Herald. His novel Schedule Two was picked as the best crime novel of 1996 by the Portland Oregonian, while his legal thriller The Devil to Pay was picked as one the best ten crime novels of 1998. His novels have been published in Japan, England, and Brazil. Dold has read his work throughout the United States and has conducted numerous writing workshops. He published The Last Man in Berlin in 2004, a novel set in pre-Nazi Germany during the early 1930s.

After twenty-five years of non-stop work, Dold has, since 2006, taken time off to travel and write five books, including novels, a memoir, and a YA that takes place in Wyoming. At present he continues researching non-fiction books about fly fishing on the old Mountain Man rendezvous sites and along the Continental Divide, writing science fiction, and is busy on a new fiction suspense novel about dream research

These days, Dold is at home on the southern prairie. He is an adept fly fisherman, an ardent gardener and an amateur pianist and guitarist. He rides horses poorly and loves dogs. He continues to travel widely in the Caribbean, the south Pacific and the western Rockies.