Excerpt from Savage Country by Robert Olmstead, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

"Malaria?" the druggist said.

"I was very ill for several weeks," Michael said, switching his shotgun from the cradle of one elbow to the other.

"It will be here tomorrow. Your brother, he was a never-give-up man. He will be missed."

Stalls were erected in the plaza and men and women were raising money to leave by selling what little they owned to immigrants newly arrived. From one, a tatterdemalion boy was selling honey and beeswax candles. Michael paid for a mixture of nuts, candies, figs, and four oranges. He stood about, drinking gently a cored orange.

The postmaster stepped out and went down the street where he entered another building that represented itself as the Kansas Land Office. Young boys of a hard nature loitered in front, posing and strutting. They wore shiny revolvers and knives. Their neckerchiefs were as if brilliant plumage. The black runner and a big raw-boned sorrel were hitched at the rail.

"Mister," the tatterdemalion boy said, offering him an envelope of gold stars to put in the night sky. He'd cut them with scissors out of tissue paper. Michael paid for the stars as the postmaster was setting off again in the direction of the church steeple, carrying Elizabeth's letter in his hand.

Beneath a tarpaulin roof an old man with a brick-red face and deep-set eyes was selling bread drenched in sweet molasses, wolf pelts, and broken pinchbeck timepieces he displayed on a three-legged stool. The old man had a walleye and his cheeks were deeply pitted by smallpox. He carried the heavy scar of an edged weapon. The stroke was vertical and cut through his forehead, his nose, lips, and chin. The halves of his face were sewn together in a ridged seam, stitch holes scarring both sides. He wore a fur hat decorated with two stuffed blue jays. He smoked a pipe with a red clay-stone bowl and a cane-joint shank and labored with each weary breath.

From somewhere off came the slurred harmonizing of men singing. A strange languor settled in the space between Michael and the old man as they watched two little girls play marbles in the dust.

"What happened to yo'r pony?" the old man said, asking after the scars on Khyber's flanks.

"A lion," Michael said.

"A big big lion," the old man said, inclining his head as if to hear better.

"Big enough," Michael said. "Nine feet seven inches from tooth to tail and near four hundred pounds."

"Where are you from," the old man said, "they have such lions?"

"I am from away," Michael said.

The old man told him his name was Bonaire and he was a wolfer and he was also from away. His mother was Lakota and his father French. He fished inside his shirt for the medallion he wore around his neck, Agnus Dei, the lamb of God.

"What is it you are wanting?" the old man said, letting the medallion drop. "A woman or a drink?"

"I do not want neither nor."

"What man from away does not want neither nor?"

The old man dragged off his fur hat and rubbed at his forehead. He had no ears. The auricles had been cut away, and left were the receptacles of his ear holes. He then slyly lifted a cloth and invited Michael to look. Beneath was a collection of six skulls he said were Kiowa.

"Make me an offer," he said, but Michael declined.

At a street corner a man in a derby hat let down the leg in his barrel organ. His companion, a capuchin monkey with cup in hand, bounced from his shoulder to the organ to the street. The man had fixed mechanized birds to the top, and when he played, the birds bobbed their heads and flared their tail feathers. The little girls gathered their marbles and ran in his direction.

Michael asked after Whitechurch, the man he was looking for.

"He would be one of the evil kings of the earth," the old man said.

"Be that as it may, I have business with him."

"He'd eat his own gut for money," the old man said.

Excerpted from Savage Country by Robert Olmstead. Copyright © 2017 by Robert Olmstead. Excerpted by permission of Algonquin Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.