From the award-winning author of Down from the Mountain, a memoir of
inheritance, history, and one gun's role in the violence that shaped the
American West--and an impassioned call to forge a new way forward
Bryce Andrews was raised to do no harm. The son of a pacifist and
conscientious objector, he moved from Seattle to Montana to tend
livestock and the land as a cowboy. For a decade, he was happy. Yet,
when Andrews inherited his grandfather's Smith & Wesson revolver, he
felt the weight of the violence braided into his chosen life. Other
white men who'd come before him had turned firearms like this one
against wildlife, wilderness, and the Indigenous peoples who had lived
in these landscapes for millennia. This was how the West was "won." Now,
the losses were all around him and a weapon was in his hand.
In precise, elegiac prose, Andrews chronicles his journey to forge a new
path for himself, and to reshape one handgun into a tool for good work.
As waves of gun violence swept the country and wildfires burned across
his beloved valley, he began asking questions--of ranchers, his Native
neighbors, his family, and a blacksmith who taught him to shape
steel--in search of a new way to live with the land and with one
another. In laying down his arms, he transformed an inherited weapon,
his ranch, and the arc of his life.
Holding Fire is a deeply felt memoir of one Western heart's wild
growth, and a personal testament to how things that seem
permanent--inheritance, legacies of violence, forged steel--can change.
