Holding Fire

<p><strong>Beautifully observed. . . This jewel of a book belongs on the shelf with our best Western writers--Norman MacLean Pam Houston and Annie Proulx.--John Vaillant bestselling author of <em>The Tiger</em> and <em>The Golden Spruce</em></strong></p><p><strong>From the award-winning author of <em>Down from the Mountain</em> a memoir of inheritance history and one gun's role in the violence that shaped the American West--and an impassioned call to forge a new way forward</strong></p><p>Bryce Andrews was raised to do no harm. The son of a pacifist and conscientious objector he moved from Seattle to Montana to tend livestock and the land as a cowboy. For a decade he was happy. Yet when Andrews inherited his grandfather's Smith & Wesson revolver he felt the weight of the violence braided into his chosen life. Other white men who'd come before him had turned firearms like this one against wildlife wilderness and the Indigenous peoples who had lived in these landscapes for millennia. This was how the West was won. Now the losses were all around him and a weapon was in his hand.</p><p>In precise elegiac prose Andrews chronicles his journey to forge a new path for himself and to reshape one handgun into a tool for good work. As waves of gun violence swept the country and wildfires burned across his beloved valley he began asking questions--of ranchers his Native neighbors his family and a blacksmith who taught him to shape steel--in search of a new way to live with the land and with one another. In laying down his arms he transformed an inherited weapon his ranch and the arc of his life.</p><p><em>Holding Fire</em> is a deeply felt memoir of one Western heart's wild growth and a personal testament to how things that seem permanent--inheritance legacies of violence forged steel--can change.</p>