Bryce Andrews > Quotes

“The endless sky was blue, and everywhere grass was rising from the dead. All of it augured a bright future.”
― Bryce Andrews, Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

“On such mornings, I came to understand how the proximity of grizzlies changes a person. I tasted fear, which burns the tongue’s tip like copper, and felt my body knot.”
― Bryce Andrews, Down From The Mountain: The Life and Death of a Grizzly Bear – Evocative Nature Writing on Wildlife Survival in Montana's Changing Landscape

“When I returned, she held out her hand to show me an elk vertebra as white as ivory. She said: “There are so many bones here. You just don’t see them until you sit still.”
― Bryce Andrews, Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

“They’re not ready to understand that the land is a palimpsest, overwritten countless times with jumbled but decipherable script. Tracks in the dust, broken barbwire, the shifting wind, and the swirl of magpies and other scavenger birds as they rise from the dark timber—all these things carry meaning. With the right sort of attention, the land tells any story a person could want to hear. But”
― Bryce Andrews, Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

“Afterward, we drove out of the high country, gassed up the truck, and headed to West Yellowstone through an awful snowstorm. The flakes were so thick in the headlights that the yellow line clocked in and out of view. In other circumstances it would have seemed like pretty nervy driving. In the rescued pickup, which we had taken as a sort of trophy, the weather was just smoother reminder of our success and competence. We ate pizza and drank beer in West Yellowstone, ands Jeremy picked up the tab on the company credit card. He called it overtime, but the meal felt more like tribute paid from the people who owned the land on paper to those who bought it daily with measures of skill and sweat”
― Bryce Andrews, Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

“Simply put, the idea was to integrate ranching into a functional, natural ecosystem.”
― Bryce Andrews, Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

“The Madison’s eastward peaks—Sphinx, Helmet, and others—are fine to behold, but the valley’s beating heart is sunlight. Late on a summer afternoon, it floods across the Gravelly Range. Clear, stark, and yellow, the light singles things out from the landscape, showing each in turn. See this lone juniper on a slope of August fescue. Pruned five feet up by browsing cattle, it is a green-black gumdrop on a pin. See, says that remarkable light, how a tree contains uncommon darkness. Look at these antelope crossing the plain, hides afire. One hundred white-flanked pronghorn, small on the expanse, stick-legged. See them run, eddying together, beading into a long thin line, disappearing into cottonwood galleries along a creek.”
― Bryce Andrews, Holding Fire: A Reckoning with the American West – A Cowboy's Memoir of Inherited Violence and Indigenous Landscapes

“The interests of cows, wolves, and elk would collide with the desires of millionaires. When they did, our stewardship of the land would suffer. I felt my job, life, and purpose on the ranch sliding into obsolescence. And so I decided to leave.”
― Bryce Andrews, Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West

“It occurred to me that I had achieved a rare thing: I was living at the center of my heart’s geography. And I knew it.”
― Bryce Andrews, Badluck Way: A Year on the Ragged Edge of the West