Stilwater: Finding Wild Mercy in the Outback

In this “rhapsodic [and] stirring” nature memoir, an American woman recounts a season of herding cattle in the Australian Outback (Kirkus). Rafael de Grenade was thirteen years old when she began working on a rough-country mountain ranch in Arizona. But when she read about cattlemen working the far edges of the Australian outback, it sparked a dream far wilder than anything she had ever known. A little over a decade later she arrived on Stilwater Station with two shirts, two pairs of jeans, cowboy boots, and some doubt that she would ever go home. Inundated by monsoon floods in the winter, baked dry in the summer, and filled with deadly animals, Stilwater was an unlikely home for a cattle operation. But in the wilderness beyond the station roamed tens of thousands of cows, many entirely feral from long neglect. Rafael has been hired, along with a ragged crew of ringers and stockmen, to bring them in. Over a season they use helicopters, motorcycles, bullcatcher jeeps, horses, ropes, and knives to win Stilwater Station back from the wild, to say nothing of their intuition, strength, muscle, and wit.