BUFFALO DREAMERS

A psychologically scarred Iraq War veteran casts his lot with a diverse group of Native Americans desperately trying to save a band of bison from slaughter in Newman’s modern Western novel.

Sam Comstock is under contract with the Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks department to use his skills as a former U.S. Marine sniper to individually cull old and infirm wild buffalo. But Bob Smith, the president of the Montana Livestock Association and owner of a slaughterhouse, has something more radical in mind: an indiscriminate massacre of an entire group of buffalo, healthy or not, due to fear that a diseased animal could infect his healthy cattle; he doubles down on his assertion when a dozen strays escape the carnage. One of the surviving animals is a healthy, “pure white”calf; Sam rescues the animal from Smith’s group of buffalo killers, but during the battle, he’s taken captive by a group of Native Americans of various nations that hold “only a loose allegiance, if at all, to one another.” They’re united only in their quest to bring the remaining buffalo home and protect the calf, which all the Native Americans consider sacred. At first, Sam is combative with his captors, but they recognize his inner pain and need for healing. Over the course of this novel, Newman writes with a vivid sense of place (“The snow fell all night, cleansing the blood-stained ground and creating a white canvas upon which creatures large and small could paint the tracks of the new day”) and a palpable respect for Montana’s land and its many denizens. Smith is something of a one-dimensional villain that would have benefited from deeper character development. However, Sam’s captors are depicted with a sense of depth and great sensitivity. The scenes involving the slaughter of bison and cattle are certainly brutal (“the blood now flowing freely across the roadway, the men tracking it every direction”) but not exploitatively so.

A compelling and empathetic story of salvation.