Long Tom Fletcher has been a trapper going on twenty-five years, and even with the heyday of the fur trade long over, he remains in the high country of the Wind River Range. Running afoul of a group of Crow warriors, Long Tom's dying prayer is for his daughter, Willow, who is now left to fend for herself in a hostile world.
Willow was raised to live on the frontier, but her inexperience with others shows, and her mixed white and Indian heritage makes her rejected and hated by both. As she struggles to escape her captors with no one to depend on but herself, she grapples with survival and revenge, but foremost of all, finding a place she can truly call home.
...& my offering for the "cover" text...
When his Absaroka wife died, trapper Long Tom Fletcher raised his daughter alone. So when Long Tom is killed by Crow Indians, 19-year-old Willow is on her own in the high country. Wise in the ways of the mountains, she is naive when it comes to men. That soon changes.
The Crow war leader Manka has long desired Willow, taking her away from her beloved mountain by force. A captive of the Crow Indians, a tribe on the brink of war with westward-bound white settlers, Willow endures one ordeal and after another -- and finds strength in her desire for revenge against the braves who took her father’s life.
(Optional) [But Manka isn’t the only man who complicates Willow’s life. There’s Jubal Crawford, the founder of Crawford’s Forge, who makes Willow suffer for his own destructive passion for Indian women. And then there’s army scout Jackson Greve, who becomes obsessed with finding the red-haired beauty he glimpsed while scouting the Wind River camp of the Crows.]
No matter how many obstacles are thrown in her path, Willow is determined to get back to her mountain, the only home she has ever known. In the process she becomes a new high country legend.
2017 by Jason Manning 1220 KB 181 pages ASIN:B06WRR86YL
With the release of about 35 of my print novels in digital form, and the great response to them, my agent and I agreed to publish a new novel straight to Kindle. I decided to push the envelope by taking an unorthodox approach to this "mountain man" novel. The protagonist is a mountain man's daughter, left to fend for herself after her father's death. Thinking outside the box is not always rewarded in this genre, but I wanted to challenge myself to create a convincing heroine.
I worked about six months on this novel. My goal was to focus on the characters and the action, and refrain from delving into the history of the era, which I had sometimes done to excess in previous books. To maintain the breakneck speed of the action in the first part, I did extensive rewrites to the second part. In the end, I was happy with the end result.