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Copyright 2021 James LaFond
A Crackpot Book
Lynn Lockhart Publisher
Written For Pulp Fiction Renaissance, Richard Barrett Audio Publisher
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Dust Cover
In 2031, as winter roars down out of Canada into the Lower 48, three hunters of “Olden Stripe,” Major Wolf, Ishmael Boone, and Punk City Coon, all join forces in one final attempt to grasp the vibrant threads of their violent youths amidst the stormy events gathering in the winter of their misbegotten lives.
Can three senior shithole citizens, a retired warfighter, a retired big game hunter and a retired ghetto assassin, fathom, let alone defeat, the savage uprising of primeval forces gathering in the backwoods of Southwestern Montana as the world turns on its human defilers?
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“I have been asleep at the wheel my entire adult life.”
-Jason
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For Bob, who is experiencing what no father would have to experience in a just world.
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To the Reader
For the past year various children of civilization, now disowned by their cruel collective parent, have reached out to me by the scores, for advice on how to deal effectively with an increasingly predatory social matrix. Answering such queries, which I now find distasteful a decade into this post-economic career as an advisor to the persecuted and hated minority that is the paleface man, I still take such queries seriously.
This morning, as I opened up this laptop to begin writing Ditcher, a 96-page short novel that will take four days to complete, I had half of my day eaten dealing with such a request for survival advice. That duty discharged, in the form of the article at the back of this weird story book, I now had only 3.5 days to start and finish a novel. Hence, I have returned in my mind to a place I was in September, 2016, with two newly met friends, one of whom lives up the road from the camper where I reside for the next few days in a place that appears very much like the scene of the story that I conceived at a glance in 2016.
Inspired by my time with the soldier and the hunter five years gone, and by the time spent these last few months leading three dogs—one of a curious magical sort, with the ability to summon the others—in such wild, mountainous places, I write Uprising, a short novel hatched over a beer and a bowl of chili, served by a Odin’s own barmaid once upon a mountain-shadowed time, as Bob and Shayne looked across the street following my gaze and asked what I was writing in my mind and I answered, “The Romanian Babe, we wouldn’t let anything happen to her, would we?”
We all agreed that old men with drawn faces are the most likely champions of hospitable dolls in raw places.
-James, LaFond, Thursday, February 18, 2021, Cascade Mountains, listening to the raw wind wail down the mountain face, through the bowed cedars, howling like penitents of old…
Contents
To the Reader 5
Locations 8
1 Bear Teeth Close 9
2 Beartooth Pass 15
3 Cooke City, Montana 21
4 Whiskey Wise Woman 26
5 Toby, Tobias, Tobbison 33
6 Howlings 41
7 Roarings 50
8 Rendings 56
Interlude of Uprising 65
9 Sendings 66
10 Fendings 72
11 Ravenings 77
Afterword 83
Appendix 84
'A Small Sacrifice' 84
The Grey God 91
‘True Science Fiction’ 94
‘A Homeless Drifter’ 101
Back to the Stone Age 105
‘Cocked in Those Days’ 113
'Creativity has its Madnesses...' 116
Winter Wheat Watch 121
Locations
