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      ANNIE PROULX

       Close Range:Brokeback Mountain and Other Stories

       Copyright

      Fourth Estate

      An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers 1 London Bridge Street, London SE1 9GF

       www.4thestate.co.uk

      This edition published 2010

      First published in Great Britain as Close Range: Wyoming Stories by Fourth Estate in 1999

      Copyright © Dead Line, Ltd. 1999

      ‘Brokeback Mountain’, ‘The Mud Below’, ‘The Blood Bay’ and ‘The Bunchgrass Edge of the World’ originally appeared in The New Yorker; ‘The Half-Skinned Steer’ appeared in The Atlantic; ‘People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water’ appeared in GQ.

      Annie Proulx asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

      A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

      Ebook Edition © MAY 2012 ISBN 9780007368815

      Version 2016-06-13

      HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.

       Dedication

      These stories are for my children

      Muffy

      Jon

      Gillis

      Morgan

       Epigraph

      “Reality’s never been of much use out here.”

      —Retired Wyoming rancher

       Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

       Job History

       The Blood Bay

       People in Hell Just Want a Drink of Water

       The Bunchgrass Edge of the World

       Pair a Spurs

       A Lonely Coast

       The Governors of Wyoming

       55 Miles to the Gas Pump

       Brokeback Mountain

       Acknowledgements

       About the Author

       Also by Annie Proulx

       Praise

       About the Publisher

       The Half-Skinned Steer

      IN THE LONG UNFURLING OF HIS LIFE, FROM TIGHT-wound kid hustler in a wool suit riding the train out of Cheyenne to geriatric limper in this spooled-out year, Mero had kicked down thoughts of the place where he began, a so-called ranch on strange ground at the south hinge of the Big Horns. He’d got himself out of there in 1936, had gone to a war and come back, married and married again (and again), made money in boilers and air-duct cleaning and smart investments, retired, got into local politics and out again without scandal, never circled back to see the old man and Rollo bankrupt and ruined because he knew they were.

      They called it a ranch and it had been, but one day the old man said it was impossible to run cows in such tough country where they fell off cliffs, disappeared into sinkholes, gave up large numbers of calves to marauding lions, where hay couldn’t grow but leafy spurge and Canada thistle throve, and the wind packed enough sand to scour windshields opaque. The old man wangled a job delivering mail, but looked guilty fumbling bills into his neighbors’ mailboxes.

      Mero and Rollo saw the mail route as a defection from the work of the ranch, work that fell on them. The breeding herd was down to eighty-two and a cow wasn’t worth more than fifteen dollars, but

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