In 1849, a seventeen-year-old Irish immigrant named Declan Shea stands at the Powder River and watches sixty million buffalo come over a rise. By 1883, he rides the same country and cannot find eleven.
Between those two moments lies a life. Declan learns his trade on the northern plains—the Sharps rifle, the skinning knife, the arithmetic of a hide taken clean. He takes a Cheyenne name he did not choose: Heavohe. He works beside a ruined man named Bill until the day Bill stops working. He crosses paths with a Crow woman named Ashkaale in a willow draw and keeps crossing paths with her for twenty-five years without ever finding the four words that might have mattered.
Told in the spare, unsparing prose of American literary realism, Empty Ground is the story of a man who understood exactly what he was doing on a continent that had decided to let him do it—and of the people who watched it happen from the ground they were losing.
For readers of Paulette Jiles, James Welch, Guy Vanderhaeghe, and Kent Haruf.
