Nora, a sixty-two year old homesteader, is in serious trouble. Nora has left the conventional life “back East” to live free on Montana’s open plains. But maybe this time she has bitten off more than she can chew.
She is unlike the heroine in Mae Schick’s short story about Mirna, a rawboned farm girl who is fleeing an abuser. Nor is she a bright young woman like Sophie, who is sought for her good looks.* Nora is well-educated, and financially secure. But, she has traded stability, stimulating conversation, and ease of living for adventure. Instead she chooses to homestead, and teaches primary school in Fergus County, Montana, where spring flowers are bursting out of the winter hardened soil.
For some time Nora has been anxious about her difficult circumstances in Montana, her loneliness, and the growing effects of old age. She wavers between sticking it out, or selling up and moving back to Indiana to live with her beloved daughter, and a son-in-law with a soul “like cardboard”. She has been trying to convince her granddaughter to come out west to live with her. Just how far will Nora go to get her way?
As she rides alone toward Lewistown she talks to Maggie, her horse, in a “highfaluting” way to give herself some intellectual stimulation. Suddenly Maggie bucks her right into a crisis. Will it be this unforeseeable danger that determines her fate?
Nora desperately fights for her life in this suspenseful Montana woman homesteader tale.
* Mirna in Mae Schick’s Mirna-Life of Her Own, and Sophie in Sophie Writes from Montana are inspirational women homesteaders
