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Sol Y Sombra: Short Stories from the Sonoran Desert By Steve Brown Tiny Island Publishing, Malta, 2009 Paperback, 199 pgs., $14.95 “Whoopee ti yi ay, git along little dogies!” My dad taught me a verse of that old cowboy song when I was a kid. That was pretty much the extent of my childhood knowledge of “the West,” and as an adult I realize the themes of ridin’ and ropin’ still hover at the edges of my own private “Western” mythology. Steve Brown has come to the rescue, however, and his book, Sol Y Sombra, has provided me with an authentic view of one area – that of the Sonoran Desert. Brown grew up on a ranch in that desert, living there for 20 years before moving East to settle on Cape Cod, and his debut collection of short fiction has pleasantly widened my inner geographical landscape. This arid region of nearly 120,000 square miles includes some of southwestern Arizona, southeastern California and a smooch of Baja California and Sonora, Mexico. The author has woven his deep knowledge of the region into 14 short stories that loosely follow the lives of two ranch families as they make their living in desert country in pretty recent times – the second half of the twentieth century. Vegetarians are few: this is a meat-eating culture, where herds are raised to be sold and slaughtered, but where nature in its total aspect seems respected and lived in, and the human footprint has shrunk to a more manageable size. A land of contrasts, light and shadow. Calves are branded, animals die of thirst, mountain lions are shot when they kill a ranch owner’s heifer, coyotes are killed for, well, being coyotes. But at the same time, the human inhabitants’ hands-on lifestyle embodies a respect for the whole “working order,” something that often seems sadly lacking in a more urban culture. The stories, too, seem to heed a slower pace, yielding up a quiet focus. After all, you have time to take in the scenery in a landscape where you can ride a horse for 40 or 50 miles without seeing another human being. Predictably for a first book, the writing is somewhat uneven. Some of the longer passages of dialogue wander off the trail and sound a bit stilted and untrue to the rest of the story, which, if left to itself and to the writer’s admirable clarity of description, would have unfolded just as smoothly without some of the talk, which occasionally veers toward a lecture style. I was eager to read about the “real workings” of the way of life that I knew so little about, and I approached somewhat skeptically, thinking I might be asking for more than I was likely to get. But the tales were full of the everyday details and vistas that surround the folks who live and work there. After a couple of chapters, the individual plots and settings begin to develop a continuity and cadence of their own and, along with the author’s evocative descriptions of the desert landscape, these qualities more than make up for those less effective longer dialogues. The whimsical story “Coyote Music” sings the praises of those wily and intelligent creatures, perfectly illustrating the author’s reflection that in the desert “you almost never see it unless you know where to look.” The bulk of “Branding Fire” is given over to some of that detail I was hoping for, describing the yearly process of branding more than 600 calves, and it comes complete with cowboys and groupies, animal activists and reporters. In “Box Canyon” two small children make an illegal border crossing, and we hear about the four types of people one may encounter in the desert: rustlers, miners, birdwatchers and immigrants. “Lion Hound” is a moving tale involving King, a hunting hound, and his close encounter with a mountain lion. These are strong, intriguing tales that are well worth the read. Despite its first-book flaws, Brown has crafted a quality narrative. On this damp and foggy day on Cape Cod, I can relax and read with pleasure: “It was April and wildflowers carpeted the pasture. The California Poppies shone so orange I almost had to squint, or at least focus on the deer’s tongue and dusty purple penstamon where the soil was thin. Every few years the pasture dressed up like this. It was as though Goya shook out his paintbrush on the desert, except a hundred times brighter under a cobalt sky.” Steve Brown lives in Craigville Village. He manages a Compassion Capital Fund for the University of Massachusetts that serves youth-at-risk in Barnstable County.

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