Idaho Commission for Libraries

Winter Range, a dark and haunting novel, is set in the cattle-ranching country of north-eastern Montana. Touching on issues of class and isolation, it traces a winter that turns violent when Ike Parsons, a recent immigrant to the region and town sheriff, attempts to help Chas Stubblefield, a cattleman down on his luck and crazed with loneliness and resentment.  Ike’s own wife Pattiann, the sheriff discovers, was once a wild young woman who kept company with Chas, and she is drawn once again to reach out to Chas.  Believing that he has been betrayed by bankers, filled with angry memories of his abusive father, furious at others whose lives appear to be contented, Chas is in the process of killing his own cattle as the novel begins.  By the end, he will have killed more than livestock.

Reviews 

*Cover reprinted with permission from St. Martin's Press

Author Information

Claire Davis has told an interviewer that she was an avid reader who began writing stories as soon as she could write, continuing the lives of characters because she could not bear to see books end.  She was born and raised in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, then lived as a young married woman on a small farm outside Milwaukee. In her thirties, she returned to writing.  She earned a degree from the writing program at the University of Montana in the early 1990s and now teaches at Lewis and Clark State College in Lewiston, Idaho. 

Her work has appeared in many literary magazines, including the Southern Review and the Gettysburg Review, and her stories have appeared in Pushcart anthologies.  In addition to Winter Range, she is also the author of another novel, Skin of the Snake (2005), and a collection of short stories, Labors of the Heart (2006).

Winter Range won the Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association prize for Best First Novel in 2001.

* Photo copyright by Sean Cassidy, reprinted with permission.

Discussion Questions

1. Though Ike is well-liked and holds an important office in town, he is still an outsider.  What does “outsider” mean in a small western town like this story’s setting?  What are the disadvantages of being an outsider?  Any advantages?

2. What motives Chas to let his cattle starve, or to shoot them?  How do the roots of his actions stretch back into his childhood, in addition to the more recent developments that he cites?  Do you have any compassion for him?

3. Why was Pattiann so angry in her youth?  Why might she have married Ike?  Toward the novel’s end, she asserts that she is now happy with her life.  Do you believe her?  If so, why does she reach out to Chas?

4. Davis once agreed with an interviewer that Winter Range is “a story of community.”  What sorts of communities do you see here (human and beyond), and what conclusions does the novel suggest, if any, about how communities operate, or should operate?

5. How does the harsh winter landscape function in the novel, both practically and metaphorically?

6. In what ways is this a novel about social class?  About belonging or not belonging?

7. Winter Range ends darkly.  How do you interpret what happens?  Does it suggest anything more general about what it’s like to live in the modern rural west?  Do you agree?