Winter in the high mountains didn’t drift in like morning fog. It came down hard, sudden as a rifle shot, and a man either respected it or perished under its hand. Lucas Hale understood that well enough. He and Andy Mercer lay buried to the shoulders in a drift they had packed over themselves for…

Winter in the Nevada high country has a way of swallowing sound until a man begins to feel he’s the only living thing left on earth. No wind whispered across the ridges, no coyote called from the draws. The world lay still beneath a hard gray sky, quiet enough that a man could hear his…

Buddy and I went for a walk today. The weather had a mean streak in it, bitter cold, with little flurries drifting about like the sky couldn’t quite make up its mind whether to snow or not. We passed by a barn with a flock of sheep in the yard. Now, Buddy had never seen…

Nevada has a way of getting inside a man, vast, silent, and honest to the bone. Winter only sharpens it. Folks who haven’t lived out here like to picture sunburned sand and heat shimmering off the flats, but up in the high country around Christmas, the desert wears a different face. Snow lies deep across…

Most folks think of Nevada as sun-blasted rock and open desert, where heat dances above the sage. But the men who’ve wintered in the high country know different. When the mountains turn hostile, the wind comes off the ridges like a honed blade, and the cold can reach into a man and test his soul.…

When I was a boy, and it fell to me to tramp out in the evening and swing open the gates for the milk cows, I kept one eye on the herd and the other on the sky. If the moon came up red as a ripe berry, we called it a strawberry moon. It…

Out in the broad, wind-scoured stretches of eastern Nevada, most folks had heard of a pocket miner named Andy Mercer. They called him Cold-Front Mercer, though no man could say where the name started. It followed him the way a tired horse follows a trail—inevitable and without question. Truth was, Andy carried the cold the…

I’ve got to admit something, and it’s not easy to say out loud. Honestly, it’s a hard swallow, but here goes: to all my friends who’ve been loyal Democratic Party members for decades, I owe you an apology. I’ve been calling you all sorts of names, sometimes in jest, sometimes in anger, but mostly, I’ve…

Virginia City, Nevada, 1865. The Comstock was vomiting silver faster than men could spend it, and Elias Whitlock spent it fastest of all. He had arrived from Philadelphia in ’59 with a gentleman’s accent and a devil’s luck, turned a played-out claim into the Whitlock Bonanza, and then set about proving that money could buy…

I have lived long enough to learn that history is not always made by generals, presidents, or philosophers, but sometimes by youngsters with t-shirts. Forty-seven years ago, while stationed at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, where the wind has been in a foul temper since statehood, I made a pilgrimage down to the Air Force…