A man pays what he owes. What he can’t, he carries.
Dakota Territory, 1869. James McAlister survived a war that left him nothing, and he wants only a clean season’s work on the high beaver lines. The Hargrove & Pike Fur Company hands him a contract with teeth instead — and sends him into country no one has trapped in twenty years.
He comes out the lone survivor of a massacre. The company doesn’t call it that. It calls him a deserter, prints the lie on a wanted bill, and sends its men to collect.
Wounded and hunted, Jem takes shelter at a lonely valley claim held by a woman as unwilling to break as he is — and carries his danger to her door. Out here, the law is whatever the company writes down. And what it has written is his name.
The wind carries everything — the rumor, the warrant, the lie. It sets none of it down.
