These are the wild days when Gus McCrae and Woodrow Call - heroes of Lonesome Dove - first encounter the untamed frontier that will form their characters. Not yet twenty, Gus and Call enlist as Texas Rangers under the command of Caleb Cobb, a capricious outlaw determined to seize Santa Fe from the Mexicans. The two young men experience their first great adventure in the barren, empty landscape of the great plains, in which arbitrary violence is the only law - whether from nature, or from those whose territory they must cross in order to reach New Mexico. Danger, sacrifice and fear test Gus and Call to the limits of endurance, as they seek the strength and courage to survive against almost insurmountable odds in the West of early nineteenth-century America. 'McMurtry has crafted a tale of love, fear and sacrifice in the face of Wild West adversity. With his vibrant, dynamic landscapes and language that springs from the page, this book captures the heart until the last word' The Times 'McMurtry uses a simple, wry, immensely accessible storyteller's voice to ponder the same questions that Melville and Conrad did. This is a great book . . . Larry McMurtry, at his best here, is one of the finest American novelists, ever' Los Angeles Times