Cormac McCarthy · 1994 · overland

The second book of McCarthy's Border Trilogy, and the bleakest. Billy Parham makes three journeys out of the New Mexico boot heel into Mexico between 1941 and 1945 - the first with a trapped she-wolf he means to take home, the second with his brother after stolen horses, and the third to bring that brother's bones back.

1. 1
   Cloverdale

   A ranch in the boot heel of New Mexico in 1941. Billy Parham is sixteen and traps a pregnant she-wolf come up out of Mexico killing stock - and instead of shooting her, decides to take her home to her own mountains.

2. 2
   The Sierra Madre

   The first crossing. He leads her south on a rope for weeks; she is taken from him at a fair and set to fight dogs for money - and he buys her back with his rifle, shoots her himself, and carries her up to bury.

3. 3
   Cloverdale

   He comes home to find his parents murdered in their bed and the horses gone - and the dog with its jaw shot away, and his brother Boyd, not quite fifteen, boarded out with neighbours.

4. 4
   Casas Grandes

   The second crossing, with Boyd, after the seven horses that are the family's whole patrimony - and American title papers that are worth nothing here, and a factura good only to the edge of the ranch that wrote it.

5. 5
   San Buenaventura

   They get some horses back and a Mexican girl besides, and in a scuffle a man is killed and Boyd is shot through the chest - and recovers, and becomes a corrido, and leaves with the girl without telling his brother.

6. 6
   Cloverdale

   Back north alone, turned down by the army for a heart murmur while the country goes to war - and drifting for years around a ranch country that is being fenced, sold and mechanised out from under him.

7. 7
   Chihuahua

   The third crossing, looking for Boyd, and what he finds is a grave and a name in a song - so he digs up the bones, ties them on a horse and starts north with them across country where he is robbed and beaten for it.

8. 8
   New Mexico

   He buries his brother at home and rides on, and the book ends with an old man on a road at dawn chasing off a crippled dog he cannot bear to look at - and a false sunrise in the north, which is Trinity.