A Clearing in the Bighorns
Tully Davis returned from the horrors of Vietnam a broken man, both physically and mentally. Nurtured back to health by Sarah, his loving wife, the couple created a thriving family, a beautiful home in the hills of San Diego, and a highly successful business. But in the turbulent nineties, the US suffered a catastrophic collapse of the banking system, which, in turn, resulted in class warfare and the complete breakdown of law and order across the nation. Tully lost it all––his home, business, and worst of all, Sarah and their two beautiful boys.Consumed with grief and rage, he embarked on a desperate and hazardous return to an impregnable hunter's cabin he had constructed years before in the Bighorn Mountains of Wyoming. Using the survival skills he had learned in the jungles of Vietnam, Tully lived off the land and avoided all human contact. That is, until a chance encounter with a grievously wounded old man and his teenage granddaughter thrust him into a position he had studiously avoided––helping them escape from a crazed fire–and–brimstone preacher named Jonah and his cult of fanatical worshippers. These murderous thugs were hellbent on killing the old man, his granddaughter, and the man protecting them. Dragging the old man behind him on a makeshift travois had pushed Tully to the point of exhaustion. Worse yet, he had sighted equally ominous predators in the wood line––a pack of ravenous timber wolves who were stalking them in search of their next meal.
-- Edmund J. Schmidt