Wolves Beyond the Border is a kind of epilogue to Howard’s fantastic tale Beyond the Black River and is at the same time a prologue to the stories set later in Conan’s career. This is not a Conan story but a story set in that dread-haunted world from the point of view of a woodsman of the frontier. Just as Beyond the Black River was a thinly-veiled ‘leather-stockings’ tale on the order of Last of the Mohicans and The Deerslayer, so is Wolves Beyond the Border.

As a draft this is hard to rate. The first of the three chapters is as good as anything written from the Conan perspective. The following material would have had to have been rewritten a third time to get the reader to whatever conclusion Howard envisioned for the tale.

The title was great.

The opening scene was taut with anticipation and fraught with supernatural menace.

The second scene was adequate where the woodsman brings back news of a traitor fomenting an invasion of savage Picts from over the border.

For some reason—perhaps another project and the unlikelihood of selling a Conan tale absent Conan—Howard moved onto something else and left this like a footprint on his literary trail for those of us who would attempt to follow him. My parting impression is that Howard was trying consciously to link his visceral belief in ancestral memory—represented most vividly by the proto-Gaelic Conan character—with his desire to celebrate his American heritage. Somewhere along the line he lost touch with the ethnic demon that so informed most of his work and put the tale aside.